A realist of the strangest planet

Chen Qiufan was born in 1981 in Shantou, on China's southern coast — a short drive from Guiyu, once the largest electronic-waste site on Earth. That landscape of dismantled futures became the setting of his debut novel and the enduring lens of his work: technology seen not from the launchpad, but from the salvage yard.

He published his first story, The Bait, in Science Fiction World at sixteen, and graduated from Peking University in 2004 with dual degrees in Chinese literature and in film & television arts. For over a decade he worked inside China's internet industry, including at Google and Baidu — years that gave his fiction its documentary precision about how technology is actually built, sold and lived with. In 2017 he left to write full-time.

His writing has been described as science fiction realism: near-future stories about the internal struggles of people caught in accelerated change. Waste Tide (2013, English translation by Ken Liu, 2019) was named a best science fiction book of 2019 by The Guardian, was a Locus Award finalist, and won France's Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire for best translated novel. AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future (2021), co-authored with Kai-Fu Lee, became a global bestseller and was named a best book of the year by The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and the Financial Times. His latest novel, Ocean Break 刹海 (2025), turns to climate politics and the possibility of co-existence.

His short fiction — more than a hundred stories since 1997 — has appeared in People's Literature, Harvest and Science Fiction World in Chinese, and in Clarkesworld, F&SF, Lightspeed, Interzone, MIT Technology Review and Slate in translation, collected in anthologies including Invisible Planets and Broken Stars. His work has been translated into more than ten languages.

An early experimenter at the human-machine boundary, he has trained AI models on his own prose and co-written with them; The State of Trance won a literary prize judged by an AI, ahead of Nobel laureate Mo Yan. His collaborations extend across museums, architecture schools, foresight institutions and brands — from M+ and Museum Tinguely to SCI-Arc, XPRIZE and the World Economic Forum.

He is currently Assistant Professor at Hong Kong Metropolitan University, President of the World Chinese Science Fiction Association, Deputy Director of the Science Fiction Committee of the China Writers Association, and Vice President of the China Science Writers Association. He has held fellowships at Yale University (MacMillan Center; Whitney Humanities Center) and the Berggruen Institute, and was SCI-Arc's 2022 Futurist-in-Residence.