Stories of tomorrow

A person stands on a large newspaper-print exhibit at the Today Art Museum. [Photo provided to China Daily]

The country's scientific achievements have helped foster what is being hailed as the start of a golden age for Chinese science fiction. Xing Yi reports.

To send mooncakes from Earth to people living on an asteroid presents a lot of problems, such as how to transport them so they stay fresh during the long journey.

And people working on asteroids might not even be able to see the moon, so will they celebrate the Moon Festival as Chinese do on Earth?

Such questions came to Song Zheng as he was eating mooncakes during this year's festival in early October.

Song, 36, is a clerk at the National Energy Administration. But after work, he is a budding science fiction writer.

He developed his mooncake questions into a story about family reunions, submitted the draft to a sci-fi writing workshop, and was admitted.

"Writing stories is my favorite pastime, and science fiction interests me in particular, for it allows me to use my wildest imagination," Song says at one of the workshop's meetings near the Temple of Heaven in Beijing.

There are 19 people at the workshop, who listen to the lecturer for some time, and then disperse into small discussion groups.

They are asked to submit story ideas, hone them after receiving feedback from their peers and their group leaders, revise them, and eventually finish a science fiction novella under 20,000 words by the end of the monthlong workshop.

"Sharing ideas with a group of like-minded sci-fi amateurs is what attracted me to the workshop. I'd lose my passion just writing on my own," says Mu Lin, an office worker in a Beijing insurance company.

This is the second time Mu has attended the workshop. After attending her first workshop in July, Mu wrote a story about a person who is falling into a black hole.

"I get bored with the daily routine at work, and writing sci-fi makes my life interesting," Mu says.