Author: Fei Dao

Fei Dao is a Chinese science fiction writer born in 1983. He is the author of three collections of sci-fi short stories, including The Story-Telling Robot, and received his PhD in literature at Tsinghua University. He teaches comparative literature and sci-fi at Beijing Normal University.
Translation

The Storytelling Robot

Fei Dao

Fantastical sci-fi by Fei Dao – translated by Alec Ash

Once upon a time, there was a King, who loved neither the beauty of his domain nor its women, but only took pleasure in listening to stories. He kept a storyteller in his palace, but the number of tales that any one person can know is limited, and whenever a minstrel had told them all the King would exile him far, far away. After a while, no one dared tell any story.

And so the King convened the most ingenious scientists in the land, and ordered them to build a storytelling robot. At first, the stories that the robot told were lifeless, but it had the ability to learn independently, and under the supervision of the scientists it slowly perfected the quality. Its brain was installed with every story that was known of, and each night the King, tired from the affairs of state and wanting to relax, ordered the robot to spin him a yarn. If the King could not hear two or three short stories before retiring, he was not able not sleep.

Q&A

The State of Chinese Sci-fi

Fei Dao

In conversation with young author Fei Dao

When did you start writing science fiction?

When I was at middle school, 16 or 17, I started to read a lot of sci-fi. I read the magazine Science Fiction World and became more familiar with sci-fi literature. I liked it because there was a lot of imagination and novelty in it. At that time, my dream was to become an author. When I started out, I didn’t think at all about writing science fiction. Back then I felt sci-fi was very difficult to write, and needed some knowledge of science, so I could only appreciate it but not write it myself.