On Chinese author Hai Ya's Hugo Award-winning novelette "The Space-Time Painter" (Part 1 of 3)
"It's the tale, not he who tells it." - Stephen King
Introduction
Nearly six months after Chinese author Hai Ya was awarded the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Novelette for his story “The Space-Time Painter”, online debates and discussions continue to centre around the controversial circumstances in which the story was judged and merited.
Observers in the West invariably cited Chinese media reports and individual criticism that the story “had the quality of a decent topical essay by a high school student“. Yet, as of the writing of this review, there is no evidence that an English translation of the story has been produced and widely available for anglophone readers to conduct their own assessment of the story’s quality.
While this reviewer has produced an unofficial English translation of the story, it cannot be published here without permission from the author, for obvious reasons. Hence this review, as a series of three posts, begins with a summary of “The Space-Time Painter”. Part 2 discusses the “stories behind the story” and analyses the story’s historical and cultural significance. Finally, Part 3 provides an assessment of the quality of writing, while touching on the present and future of reading Chinese science fiction.
Summary of “The Space-Time Painter”
Police officer Zhou Ning (“Zhou” being the surname) is assigned a case about the alleged appearance of a ghostly shadow at the Palace Museum in Beijing. The first apparent witness is a night keeper who saw it in a remote palace in the building complex. The other apparent witness is a cultural relics conservator who saw it on the back of an ancient painting in a nearby compound.
Based on witness reports, Zhou focuses his investigation on a clearing near the palace where an underground warehouse is used as a storage facility for painting and calligraphy pieces from the Northern and Southern periods of the Song Dynasty. As he stations himself there to monitor potentially suspicious activities, Zhou sees the ghostly shadow and its actions and becomes convinced of its existence.
After a close encounter with the ghostly shadow, Zhou finds himself “possessed” by it and starts seeing people and objects as being two-dimensional, colourless and transparent. Overwhelmed by his terrifying vision, he is struck by a car and suffers severe injuries. In an effort to help Zhou recover from his coma, a digital video featuring a national treasure from the underground warehouse is produced and converted to electronic signals which are then “uploaded” to his brain.
In the process of regaining his consciousness, Zhou is contacted by the ghostly shadow who reveals itself to be Zhao Ximeng, creator of the national treasure – a majestic landscape painting. A talented teenage painter, Zhao was a pawn in the power struggle between the emperor and the prime minister of his time. He was ordered to create a painting featuring the peaceful and prosperous kingdom under the emperor's rule.
It turns out that Zhao was able to produce the grand painting thanks to his secret ability to travel through space and time via a higher dimension. Furthermore, he was able to foresee, and to fully capture in his next painting, the shocking consequences of the kingdom's destruction in less than a decade's time. Trying to prevent the emperor from forming a military alliance with the wrong enemy that later destroyed the kingdom, but to no avail, Zhao was executed.
Having explained his past, Zhao invites Zhou to stay in the higher dimension, but Zhou refuses. Zhou further learns of another painter who was contacted by Zhao and who subsequently created a painting to explore matters of life and death. After awakening from his coma, Zhou leaves the police force to join another government agency called AIB.
To be continued…
In the next post, the second in a series of three, this review will discuss the stories behind “The Space-Time Painter” in order to analyse the story’s historical and cultural significance.