[LINK] Canada's leading science fiction export

From The Globe and Mail, James Adams' article "Why a Canadian sci-fi author is loved in China" explaining how Robert Sawyer

The man called "the dean of Canadian science fiction" has been named "the most popular foreign author of the year" at the Chengdu International Science Fiction and Fantasy Festival, the largest such event ever held in China.

Mississauga's Robert J. Sawyer, 47, attended the festival on Sunday in Chengdu to receive the non-monetary, fan-voted Galaxy Prize, which recognizes a body of work rather than a specific novel or collection of short stories.

[. . .]

Chinese translations of six of Sawyer's 17 novels have been published by Science Fiction World publishers, headquartered in Chengdu, while several of his short stories have appeared in Science Fiction World Magazine, which, with an estimated readership of more than one million, has become the world's most popular sci-fi periodical. An estimated 4,000 Chinese fans attended the four-day fest, organized, in part, by Yang Xiao, editor of Science Fiction World and the daughter of a major Communist official.

[. . .]

China is infamous for not being a signatory to international copyright accords, with the country being flooded with pirated translations of books by Western authors, including writers of science-fiction. However, in a brief interview yesterday from China, Sawyer said his "intellectual property rights have absolutely been respected" by SF World. "My books are available here in fully legal, licensed editions for which I am being well paid." The magazine-publisher also covered all his expenses and those of his wife, poet Carolyn Clink, "to come to China.... We're being treated like royalty." In fact, said Sawyer, of the 14 or 15 translations of his works worldwide, "the Chinese editions are easily the most beautiful, with the nicest covers, best graphic design and most appealing interior layout."

According to London-based science-fiction scholar Lavie Tidhar, China has experienced a rise in the production of, and interest in, science fiction since the late 1980s. Mao Zedong and his supporters encouraged science fiction as a "literature of development" in the 1950s as China embarked on a program of industrialization. However, the idiom went into decline during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), only to undergo a revival with the rise of Chairman Deng Xiaoping. Before his death in 1997, Deng proclaimed "science and technology is the number one productive force" and science fiction as a way to spark the scientific imagination.

This practical aesthetic continues to this day, according to Sawyer. "Chinese readers prefer hard science-fiction, with real science rigorously extrapolated," he observed, and "and they're partial to optimistic views of the future." In fact, "the domestic science-fiction is very much at the stage science-fiction was in the 1950s in the United States - lots of spaceships, robots and aliens." Moreover, when it comes to foreign authors, whatever courses taught on science-fiction in Chinese universities tend to focus on "old-guard" authors such as Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, instead of Philip K. Dick, Roger Zelazny and Harlan Ellison. Perhaps unsurprisingly, homosexuality, AIDS, drugs, religious practices and positive references to Taiwan are avoided as topics or, if addressed at all, are presented as "a foreign problem," according to Tidhar.

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] Belgian divorces and remarriages

Though Brussels Journal seems to be a far-right wing site devoted equally to particularly reactionary brands of Flemish nationalism and the fight against Eurabia, on its front page is a link to an interesting article in Le Figaro, Alexandre Adler's "La Belgique va-t-elle demander le divorce ?" ("Will Belgium ask for a divorce?"). In this article, Adler argues that Belgium is doomed to split up and thaqt it would be to France's benefit to support the split.

La réalité, c'est que la société flamande, cette petite Bavière maritime, est en proie à un dynamisme économique et social remarquable, ayant réussi sa mutation linguistique, et dispose d'une population exactement équivalente à celles du Danemark ou de la Norvège. Méfiante à l'égard de la Hollande voisine, la Flandre indépendante serait en fait, assez vite, le plus francophile et le plus latin des États germaniques de l'Europe du Nord. Le dogme de la diplomatie française consistant à tout faire pour maintenir la Flandre en Belgique doit donc être révisé d'autant plus vite et radicalement qu'en prenant en main la revendication nationale, les chrétiens sociaux et leurs alliés libéraux et socialistes ont fait reculer l'extrême droite locale aussi efficacement que Sarkozy, en France.

The reality is that the society of Flanders, this small maritime Bavaria, enjoys a remarkable economic and social dynamism, having succeeded with its language issue, and has a population just as large as those of Denmark or Norway. Being wary with regard to neighbouring Holland, the independent Flanders would in fact rather quickly become the most francophile and Latin of the Germanic states of northern Europe. The dogma of French diplomacy that Flanders must be kept in Belgium thus should be revised, all the more quickly and radically since by creating an independent Flanders, the by taking in hand the national claim, the Christian Democrats and their liberal and socialist allies would push back the extreme right just as effectively as Sarkozy in France.

More, Adler--described on his Wikipedia as someone quite close to American neoconservatives, for whatever it's worth--argues that France should take advantage of Belgium's dissolution to embrace the ideology of rattachisme and to annex Wallonia, making that province France's 23rd region and adding presumably another four or five departments to the republic. Again, my translation follows Adler's original French.

Mais voilà, les Wallons et les Bruxellois n'auront aucune envie de former un État croupion symétrique. Comme chacun devrait le savoir, c'est le 14 Juillet que l'on fête à Liège, c'est à Paris que l'on a sacré Michaux, Marguerite Yourcenar, Simenon et même le prix Nobel de littérature belge, Maurice Maeterlinck, qui jugeait sa langue natale flamande impropre à la littérature. En se choisissant une non-capitale à Namur, en intitulant sa représentation à Paris « communauté française » et non « communauté francophone », nos compatriotes d'outre-Quiévrain nous ont déjà tout dit. Comme Helmut Kohl en 1990, Nicolas Sarkozy a donc toutes les chances de devoir gouverner une France plus grande, un peu appauvrie par la crise industrielle chronique de ses nouvelles régions irrédentistes, et un Parti socialiste certes écrêté de ses élites les plus parisiennes, mais recentré sur la vieille base populaire du Borinage et de la vallée de la Meuse, pour ne pas parler des bobos bruxellois qui valent bien les nôtres.

But the Walloons and the Bruxellois will not want to form a symmetrical rump state tail. As everyone should know, July 14th is the holiday of Liège, and it is in Paris that literature crowned Michaux, Marguerite Yourcenar, Simenon and even the Nobel Prize-winner of Belgian literature, Maurice Maeterlinck, who considered his native Flemish language unsuitable for literature. By choosing a not-capital with Namur, by entitling its representation in Paris "French community" and not "French-speaking community", our compatriots on the other side of the Quiévrain said it all. Like Helmut Kohl in 1990, Nicolas Sarkozy has every chance to control a larger France, a bit impoverished by the chronic industrial crisis of his new redeemed areas, while a Socialist Party that has recently chopped off its Parisian elites could recenter on the old popular base of coal-mining and the valley of the Meuse, not to mention the sores of Brussels which are ours as well.

Now, it's quite true that Wallonia is a region heavily influenced by France--I wrote back in September 2005 about the grim fate of Walloon, the local speech marginalized by a decidedly Francophone state--and that an annexation of Wallonia might seem plausible, and might even be welcomed by the French public at large--certainly De Gaulle favoured Wallonia's annexation, the comments by French readers of this blog seem generally supportive, and I know that at least some people have imagined Wallonia's annexation to be partial compensation for German reunification. Similarly, it's worth noting the results of a recent poll which suggest that two-thirds of the Dutch support would support unification with Flanders, creating a sort of Greater Netherlands.

That said, these plans for expansion all require the consent of the populations of Flanders and Wallonia and Brussels. In Wallonia, the pro-annexation Rassemblement Wallonie France received barely more than 1% of the votes in the just-completed 2007 elections, even though the RWF is a direct descendant of a major Walloon regionalist party. In Flanders, the nationalist Vlaams Belang that might yet break up Flanders favours "cooperat[ing] as closely as possible with the Netherlands and with Southern Flanders (the Dutch-speaking municipalities in the North of France)", not annexation into the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and I'm not aware of any Flemish political party that favours Flanders' annexation. Belgium might not survive, I don't know, but I think it's best for France and Netherlands might just have to accept that they aren't at all likely to have a common frontier in Brabant. It's not that France and the Netherlands aren't nice countries, it's just that the Flemish and Walloons and Bruxellois don't want to become French or Dutch.

[DM] "The Alberta advantage, continued"

I've a post up at Demography Matters that takes a look at the ongoing shift of Canada's workforce to western Canada and especially Alberta, especially in the context of the relative decline of non-Albertan economies.