Ma Boyong (born 14 November 1980) is a Chinese novelist, columnist, and playwright. In the year of 2010, he won People's Literature Prize, one of China's most prestigious honors.
Contents
Works
The City of Silence
His short story The City of Silence depicts a state in which surveillance is some omnipresent that most people live in silence and solitude in acquiescence to the control of state-managed listening systems and computers.
It was translated into English by science fiction writer Ken Liu and appeared in the anthology Invisible Planets published by Head of Zeus in November 2016. That translation is truer to the original author's intent than the Chinese version, which was self-censored. Ironically, the theme of that story is censorship; the setting of the Chinese version is a fictional version of New York City, while the English version takes place in a more neutral "Capital of the State", more easily invoking the comparison with China than the author intended.
