"The Clown Years" Author: Jiang Yitan Publisher: CITIC Press

Introduction
The collision of Chinese tradition and future vision: N futures for humans and robots
【Content Introduction】
"The Years of the Clown" is Jiang Yitan's first collection of short stories in "cross-border" science fiction writing. It includes ten works created from 2021 to the present. It writes science fiction stories with a calm and cold brushstroke, using robots as an incision, and laying out speculative colors in the "future" science fiction picture, shining the light of humanity more clearly into the science fiction field full of "hardcore" settings and magnificent imagination.
The novel has a plain style, delicate language, and profound meaning. It is realistic despite its bizarre imagination, and the theme of "humanity" is still closely linked to the sci-fi appearance. In Jiang Yitan's writing, the introduction of elements such as "Zen meditation" and "Chinese parent-child relationship" further explores the local expression of sci-fi themes. Humans and robots stand side by side, exploring the subtle human nature and examining the symptoms of the times, responding to in-depth questions about real-life issues such as parent-child relationships, personal growth, and left-behind elderly people.
【Editor's recommendation】
·The first collection of science fiction short stories by novelist and poet Jiang Yitan.
A fusion of realism and science fiction.
·Use calm literary brushstrokes to write science fiction stories, and use artificial intelligence as a medium to achieve a mirror-like observation of the profound human nature.
Pay attention to multiple realistic topics such as personal growth, parent-child relationships, and symptoms of the times, and re-describe the humanistic thinking spirit under the theme of science fiction.
【Recommendation】
Although it has a sci-fi shell, the "craftsmanship" of Jiang Yitan's novels seems to lead readers back to the era of telling stories around the fire. His writing has a realistic skeleton, but it never crawls on the ground, but flies close to the ground. When the earth and the sky, the concrete and the abstract, science and theology, daily life and meditation, the human heart and the machine core touch each other, we seem to catch a glimpse of the flickering fire from ancient times. ——Jin Li (scholar, critic)
Jiang Yitan's novels begin with "emotion" and end with "thought". Many times we think that science fiction is about the boundless sea of ​​stars, or a virtual world where time and space overlap arbitrarily, but in fact, most science fiction is still about human beings themselves, human history and reality, and their sorrow and love. - Liu Shiyu (young critic, writer)
Jiang Yitan's novels are always so rich and varied. He tries his best to explore the connotations that the subject matter itself does not have, beyond people's expectations, to show the complex charm of the novel. For example, in science fiction, in addition to expressing the desire for truth and true feelings, there is also a metaphor about "slowness" in a fast-paced era. ——Xu Gang (scholar, critic)
What Jiang Yitan hopes to explore in the form of science fiction is not the distant future, alien world or virtual world, but the "inner universe" where emotions surge in our hearts. ——Xu Chenliang (Editor-in-Chief of Contemporary Magazine)
Jiang Yitan's short stories are a manifestation of science fiction literature "crossing the line" to traditional emotional and human narratives. It uses science fiction writing to convey a "sense of reality" and subtly reveals the writer's great reflection on science and technology: no matter where science and technology can help humans leap to, the coldness and desolation of human hearts cannot leap. - Tang poet (scholar, critic)
Under the current ideology of "chasing innovation" in science and technology and science fiction, Jiang Yitan's novels express an atavistic and nostalgic "metacosmic nostalgia". ——Zhao Tiancheng (scholar, critic)