Short stories by Xia Jia
Wang Yao (Chinese: 王瑶; pinyin: Wáng Yáo; born 4 June 1984), known by the pen nameXia Jia (Chinese: 夏笳; pinyin: Xià Jiā), is a Chinese science-fiction and fantasy writer. After receiving her Ph.D. in comparative literature and world literature at Department of Chinese, Peking University in 2014, she is currently a lecturer of Chinese literature at Xi'an Jiaotong University. Xia Jia's short fiction works have won five Galaxy Awards for Chinese Science Fiction, six Nebula Awards for Science Fiction and Fantasy in Chinese. One of her short stories received honorable mention for 2013 Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Awards.[1] Her stories have been published in Nature, Clarkesworld, Year's Best SF, SF Magazine as well as influential Chinese Sci-Fi magazine Science Fiction World. Besides those written in Chinese and English, her works have been translated into Czech, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Polish.
Listing 9 stories.
On a futuristic street haunted by denizens of the past, the ghosts discover a baby among them. As he grows, the child begins to understand his complicated existence.
A depressed academic uses a robot endowed with AI to help recover from her illness while simultaneously remembering the story of Alan Turing.
When a librarian finds a moving book of poetry among a donation, she is introduced to fellow lovers of the author's work who strive to preserve the poet's desire for privacy while commemorating her work.
A linguist is called to investigate robots that seem to have created their own language.
A mechanical creature is abandoned in a dystopian China, where he decides to take a journey to find a place of belonging for himself, with the help of a friendly bat.
Told in 5 parts, the Spring Festival takes us to Jiangnan, Chin. We meet a newly turned 1-year-old, a drone privacy invasion, matchmaking clones, a holographic classmate, and a runaway visit to see the moon.
A new TV show displays masked interactions between therapists and clients with a twist: the client's therapist can either be AI or human and neither the client nor the audience will know which.
This sci-fi tale explores the question of what do our dreams mean. The answer: dreams are sent to us by workers in a dream factory, actors to entertain our subconscious.
As a young girl's grandfather ages, her family decides to purchase a robot care-taker to watch over him. Technology advances as her grandfather controls the robot to care for his friend; however, as severe illness demonstrates, this system is not a perfect solution to elderly care.