A person stands on a large newspaper-print exhibit at the Today Art Museum. (Photo provided to China Daily)
The country's scientific achievements have helped foster what is being hailed as the start of a golden age for Chinese science fiction.
To send mooncakes from Earth to people living on an asteroid presents a lot of problems, such as how to transport them so they stay fresh during the long journey.
And people working on asteroids might not even be able to see the moon, so will they celebrate the Moon Festival as Chinese do on Earth?
Such questions came to Song Zheng as he was eating mooncakes during this year's festival in early October.
Song, 36, is a clerk at the National Energy Administration. But after work, he is a budding science fiction writer.
He developed his mooncake questions into a story about family reunions, submitted the draft to a sci-fi writing workshop, and was admitted.
"Writing stories is my favorite pastime, and science fiction interests me in particular, for it allows me to use my wildest imagination," Song says at one of the workshop's meetings near the Temple of Heaven in Beijing.
There are 19 people at the workshop, who listen to the lecturer for some time, and then disperse into small discussion groups.
They are asked to submit story ideas, hone them after receiving feedback from their peers and their group leaders, revise them, and eventually finish a science fiction novella under 20,000 words by the end of the monthlong workshop.
"Sharing ideas with a group of like-minded sci-fi amateurs is what attracted me to the workshop. I'd lose my passion just writing on my own," says Mu Lin, an office worker in a Beijing insurance company.
This is the second time Mu has attended the workshop. After attending her first workshop in July, Mu wrote a story about a person who is falling into a black hole.
"I get bored with the daily routine at work, and writing sci-fi makes my life interesting," Mu says.
Idea generator
The workshop is organized by Future Affairs Administration, a company which is trying to seize the opportunities created by the growing popularity of science fiction over the past three years, since the success of writer Liu Cixin and his book, The Three-Body Problem, the first installment of a trilogy, which won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015, after being translated into English.
The Three-Body series has so far sold around 7 million copies in Chinese, and 300,000 copies in English.
In the spotlight as the first Chinese writer to win the world's top award for science fiction writing, Liu has drawn lots of media exposure to Chinese sci-fi. The 54-year-old, used to be an engineer and wrote sci-fi only in his part time, but he has been enrolled into the China Writers Association.
Ji Shaoting, a former journalist with Xinhua News Agency and a longtime friend of Liu, founded Future Affairs Administration as a loose group of sci-fi aficionados in 2013.
She incorporated it into a company in 2016, with the aim of paving the road for Chinese science fiction to enter a "golden age".
"I think people can be a little bit more curious about the future through science fiction," says Ji at Kubrick Book Cafe in Beijing MOMA, where her company has an office.
Beijing MOMA is an office complex with a sci-fi appearance as the buildings are connected by aerial walkways.
