我期待有那么一天，像那些曾经描写过信息时代的科幻小说一样，描写太空航行的科幻小说也变的平淡无奇了，那时的火星和小行星带都是乏味的地方，有无数的人在那里谋生；木星和它众多的卫星已成为旅游胜地，阻止人们去那里的唯一障碍就是昂贵的价格。

但即使在这个时候，宇宙仍是一个大的无法想象的存在，距我们最近的恒星仍然遥不可及。浩瀚的星空永远能够承载我们无穷的想象力。

谢谢大家。

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Good evening!

It’s my great honor to receive the Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society. Thank you.

This award is a reward for imagination, a capability that should have been exclusive to God but we, as human beings, luckily have. And the meaning of the existence of imagination is far beyond our imagination. A historian used to say that the main reason why human beings have been able to surpass other species on earth and build civilizations is that we are able to create something in our heads that does not exist in reality. In the future, when artificial intelligence becomes smarter than us, imagination may be the only advantage we have over AI.

Science fiction is a literary genre based on imagination. And the first sci-fi works the impressed me were those by Arthur C. Clarke. Together with Jules Verne and George Wells, Arthur Clarke was among the first Western modern sci-fi writers to enter China. In the early 1980s, the two novels 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous With Rama were published in my country. At that time, the Cultural Revolution just came to an end. While the old life and faith had collapsed, the new ones had not yet been established. Like other young people, I felt lost during that period. These two books, for the first time, however, brought my imagination to life. My mind opened up like never before. I felt like a narrow stream finally embracing the sea. At midnight when I finished reading 2001: A Space Odyssey, I walked out of the house and stared at the starry sky. I was able to see the galaxy, thanks to the unpolluted sky of China back then. That night, in my eyes, the starry sky looked nothing like before. For the first time in my life, I was awed by the magnitude and mystery of our universe. That feeling was religious. Later on, Rendezvous With Rama stunned me by showing how imagination could build a lifelike, fantastic world. It was Arthur Clarke who brought me such feelings, and that brought me here as a sci-fi writer.

Today, more than 30 years later, it gradually dawns on me that people like me, who were born in the 1960s in China, are probably the luckiest people in human history. No generation is like us, no generation has been able to witness such tremendous changes in the world around us. The world we are living in today is completely different from that of our childhood. And such changes are taking place with even greater speed. China is a highly futuristic country. It is true that the future of China may be full of challenges and risks, but never has this country been so attractive like today. This reality provides fertile soil for the growth of science fiction, which is enjoying unprecedented attention in the country. As a sci-fi author who was born in the 1960s in China, I’m the luckiest from the luckiest generation.

I started writing sci-fi because I decided to escape the dull life, and to reach out, with imagination, to the mysterious time and space that I could never truly reach. But then I realized that the world around me became more and more like science fiction, and this process is speeding up. Future is like a pouring rain. It falls right on us even before we have time to open an umbrella. Meanwhile, when sci-fi becomes reality, it won’t be hailed as magical any more, and that frustrates me. Sci-fi will soon become part of our lives. The only thing I can do, is to push my imagination further to even more distant time and space to hunt for the mysteries of sci-fi. As a sci-fi author, I think my job is to write things down before they get really boring.