After graduating from Peking University, Baoshu (a pen name that should be treated as an indivisible unit) obtained a master’s degree in philosophy from KU Leuven, Belgium. He has lived in the US and Europe. Working as a freelance writer in China, he has published four novels and over thirty novellas, novelettes, and short stories since 2010.
His best-known works include The Redemption of Time (a sequel of sorts to Liu Cixin’s “Three-Body” books) and Ruins of Time (winner of the 2014 Xingyun Award for Best Novel). Perhaps as a result of his background in philosophy, many of his stories play with time in various ways: compressing it, stretching it, slicing it into thin slices and piecing them back together in a different order, questioning its nature, altering its essence, transforming it into something alien but still recognizable.
In translation, his fiction may be found in F&SF and Clarkesworld, among other places.
“What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear” is also a story about time. Although its first formal publication was through an English translation, it is, in some ways, the most Chinese story in this entire volume: the more one knows about the history of the People’s Republic, the more the story’s meaning comes into focus.
A special note of thanks goes to my friend Anatoly Belilovsky, who provided the translation of Pushkin’s poem quoted in this story.