Press
Interview with Sebastian Pirling
1. What have you been busy with lately?
Well, some highlights of my schedule these days were the visit of Cory Doctorow, internet icon and author, in Berlin and his keynote at the re:publica conference as well as getting to prepare the translation of Stanley Chen Qiufan’s novel The Waste Tide for publication. And of course packing for Beijing.
2. You are an experienced editor as well as an award-winning science fiction author yourself. Can you tell us a little about your last book and your own work?
To be honest, writing one’s own book while being a full-time editor feels a little bit like having an affair. I am quite happy with the result, nonetheless. I had been working on The Planet of Forbidden Memories for almost two years. It all began with something I read in a letter by the WWII resistance fighter and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a question he kept asking himself: How would belief and memory and doubt look like in a world without any religion? That is what I wanted to explore by means of a dystopian novel.
3. Sci-fi literature has been gaining recognition and popularity, not just in China but also internationally. What do you think of this development as an editor, author and reader? Are there any specific reasons for this trend in your opinion?
I for myself welcome this whole-heartedly. Yes to tearing down genre barriers! There are two phenomena that might contribute to this. Our global pop culture stream has become richly saturated with all kinds of futuristic tropes and themes. The concepts of, let’s say, artificial intelligence, superheroes, technological apocalypse or cyberspace can be found almost anywhere on this globe – and can be understood by many. Future stories are everwhere. A second reason for the growing acceptance of science-fiction might lie in the fact that so much of the technology surrounding us has become more and more “removed” from us: We all have smart phones, but none of us can actually repair it. We do not understand our “stuff” anymore, we can only use it – and that feels almost fictitious to us.
4. You have brought Liu Cixin to publish the German language edition with Heyne and edited his work. What was it that drew you to his books and which other Chinese science fiction authors will you be watching out for in the future?
I first took notice of Liu Cixin when he won the Hugo Award, the most prestigious literary price in the genre. That his agents were on the lookout for publishers in other markets while I was trying to get a hold on this licence was a happy coincidence. I must say I find his writing, his mix of high-concept literary metaphors and unabashedly straight-forward science-fiction, absolutely intriguing. I have not read something like this in years. And seeing how Liu Cixin opened a door to Chinese science-fiction is quite exciting – getting to know and publish authors like Chen Qiufan, Hao Jingfang, Xia Jia, Baoshu and many others will bring young and fresh voices to an already long genre tradition in Germany.
5. Science fiction and fantasy have always played a strong role in cross-media, such as film for example. Are there any examples of cross-media or transmedia publishing at Heyne, do you have any other personal experience in this field?
We have had quite a few of these cross-media projects at Heyne. The youngest might be Liu Cixin’s story The Wandering Earth – its movie version is now one of the most successful Chinese films of all times and just had its worldwide Netflix release. Then there is Dmitry Glukhovsky’s dystopian Metro 2033 trilogy accompanied by three major PC game titles and a plethora of spin-off novels by other authors. We published Andy Weir’s The Martian and I enjoyed the movie quite a lot. And maybe I will even live to see the TV-series version of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation saga.
6. As we are entering a truly digital age and experience disruptions in many fields including book publishing, what is your outlook on the future of storytelling and storyselling?
We now have ebooks, and they are living happily alongside our classical print books in their divers formats. So, storytelling will live on, I am quite certain about that. How and where the publishing of these storys will happen, though, that remains to be seen. Maybe we need to move away from big publishing conglomerates and become more agile at some point in the future, with smaller teams and more direct relationships between storytellers and story publishers.
7. What do you expect from your participation in StoryDrive in Beijing?
I am quite looking forward to meeting book people from all over the world and also learn more about publishing and bookselling in Beijing and the PR China.
Sebastian Pirling will be speaking at the StoryDrive conference in Beijing (28 May - 1 June 2019).