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La La

Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.

Pen-name of Zhong Xin (1977-    ), a technician in a broadband internet company who won a Best Newcomer prize at the 2003 Yinhe Awards for his short story "Chun Ri Ze: Yun Meng Shan: Zhong Kun" ["Spring Sun Spring: Yun Meng Mountain: Elder Brother"] (2002 venue unknown).

His Yinhe-winning "Yongbu Xiaoshi de Dianbo" ["The Perpetual Electric Wave"] (December 2007 Kehuan Shijie; trans Petula Parris-Huang as "The Radio Waves That Never Die" November 2012 Renditions) has a post-human "Lathmu" being in the Far Future, listening to ancient radio messages (see Communications) and reconstructing a forgotten disaster through such limited "found footage". A garbled transmission across the Time Abyss is revealed as the distress signal from a handful of people who have survived the destruction of Earth (see End of the World). The title evokes that of the non-genre Chinese film "Yongbu Xiaoshi de Dianbo" ["The Eternal Wave"] (1958), which dramatized the life of Li Bai (1910-1949), a clandestine radio operator who died on the eve of the liberation of Shanghai, unaware of the victory of the Communists, much as the story's Adam and Eve shipwreck victims cannot know that their genes will survive to populate the galaxy. Despite being strongly couched in the mode of American sf, particularly the television remake of Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009), the title's intertextual allusion places the story deftly within the discourse and traditions of Party-approved sf in China, valorizing the brave Scientists as martyrs who elect to save the women and children, and hence the entire human race, at the cost of their own lives. [JonC]

Zhong Xin

born Chongqing: 1977

works

  • Luye: La La Kehuan Xiaoshuo Xuan ["Green Fields: The Collected Science Fiction of La La"] (Chengdu: Sichuan Kexue Jishu Chubanshe, 2006) [coll: binding unknown/]

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