Han Song's sci-fi novel wins top award

Han Song's Exorcism wins the gold award for best creativity of sci-fi movie. [Photo by Yang Yang/China Daily]

Xinyun Award for Global Chinese Science Fiction (2017) was won by Han Song's novel Exorcism (Qu Mo) on Sunday in Beijing.

The award was launched in 2010 by the World Chinese Science Fiction Association. And Liu Cixin's Death's End won the gold in 2011.

This year's top winner Han had won silver awards for his novels Subway and High-Speed Train in 2011 and 2013.

His latest work also won the gold award for creativity in a sci-fi movie.

The work, Exorcism, the second part of Han's "Hospital Trilogy", is a story of a disaster that is sparked by artificial intelligence.

In the book, the protagonist Yang Wei wakes up in a hospital on a ship floating in a red sea, and finds that he has lost his memory and everything aboard is controlled by algorithms.

In the work, AI had taken over the hospital and tries to create a utopian world, where all humans live a long life. However, the wards are in a mess, and patients died one after another.

To recover his lost memory, Yang works with other patients to explore the ship. After visiting high-tech medical treatment center, they gradually discover the secrets of the hospital ship.

Yang then realizes that AI might have gone out of control, and is killing patients as the best way of treating them.

Meanwhile, doctors who have been driven out of wards by the algorithm establish a shadow hospital to confront the machines.

Later, Yang finds that the treatment he has received, which was supposed to remove his pain (exorcism), was actually used to plant "viruses" in his body.

The award's jury's comment on the novel says: AI treats every person as a patient. How far is the distance between the future and the present? Han Song's writing creates a space that is much closer to the present one, compared with realistic writing. His linguistic labyrinth offers readers an indistinct experience of the future. Behind the enchanting vision is the unknowable truth.

A Que's Goodbye Doraemon, which was inspired by Japanese animation Doraemon: Stand by Me, won the gold award for the best sci-fi novella.

He Xi's short story Floating Life won the gold award for best sci-fi short story.

The story is about the existence of individuals after the death of earth, when civilization exists in the form of pure energy.

Best Chinese Science Fiction in the Last One Hundred Years won the gold award for best nonfiction.