Award-winning writer Stanley Chen Qiufan announced at Melon that he is collaborating with Infinitum Nihil, the film production company founded by Hollywood star Johnny Depp, to turn his short story, The Year of The Rat, into a movie. The English translation of his first novel, Waste Tide, was published last month and a film adaptation is already in the pipeline.

For Chinese sci-fi authors, who previously catered to only a niche group of readers in China, these opportunities signal that their work is able to reach a much wider audience – both within their home country and around the world.

“Ten years ago, I wouldn’t have even dared to think about [having my story adapted],” says Wang Yao, better known by her pen name, Xia Jia. “Now I know it’s only a matter of time.”

As one of the genre’s most notable writers among her generation in China, Xia has reason to be confident. A recent crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter for her first English-language short story collection, titled A Summer Beyond Your Reach, raised US$34,000 in a week, almost double its goal.

Neil Clarke, chief editor of US sci-fi and fantasy website Clarkesworld Magazine and co-founder of the fundraising project, sees the campaign’s success as evidence of the global interest in Chinese sci-fi.

“[The American audience] is waking up to the fact that there’s good science fiction being written around the world and not just in English,” says Clarke. “I call [English science fiction] an invasive species, because it’s exported very heavily, but we don’t import a whole lot. And that’s not a good balance.

“Now we’re beginning to see the results of what we’ve exported coming back in the form of translated works. You see the influence, but they’ve also taken it in their own direction, and that’s adding so much to the conversation.”

For one thing, works by Xia and other Chinese sci-fi writers show “what people in China are imagining about the future of China and the world”, says Regina Wang. She adds that this is very different from depictions of the country in Western media and fiction. “Some Western science fiction portrays China … but it’s from an outsider’s perspective. So sometimes it’s stereotyped,” she says.

According to Chen: “Westerners used to perceive China through the lens of kung fu films, pandas, Chinese food, the Great Wall. It’s all history.”

He adds that despite the rapid rate at which China has developed economically and culturally over the past 40 years, foreigners still don’t know what Chinese people think about the future and technology, and for some, “that’s what makes them curious about Chinese science fiction”.

Chen’s short story, Coming of the Light, which is included in the newly released Broken Stars anthology, is influenced by observations he made of the technology industry while working at Google, before it pulled out of China in 2010, and its Chinese equivalent, Baidu.

In the story, a marketing agent comes up with the idea of a Buddagram, an app blessed by Buddhist monks, which people can use to take watermarked photos that act as charms to ward off evil spirits. All goes well, except for one catch: unable to find real monks, the marketing agent hires actors instead.

The story may appeal to those aware of the Buddhist concept of “bringing light”, or of the underhand dealings that are a regular part of doing business in China. For many other stories, the young writers are tackling issues that are universal and not uniquely Chinese.

“The stories give insight into the people and culture, and allow you to realise that we share some very similar goals and hopes and aspirations,” says Clarke.

Regina Wang introduces the idea of the Brain Box in her short story (also in the Broken Stars anthology). Similar to a plane’s black box, it records memories: in this case, those of the human brain in the last moments of a person’s life. The tale explores her take on how mind-reading technology could affect human behaviour.

Some authors cast their gaze far into the future, but Xia focuses on the near future to explore the effect of technology on the human race. In Tongtong’s Summer, she tells the story of a grandfather who is cared for by a remote-controlled robot.

“From a practical perspective, what we need to think about is not things that are very far away – say whether we can build a colony on a new planet – but issues that are more current,” she says.

In Tongtong’s Summer, it is how artificial intelligence (AI) could be used in health care. “A lot of the problems humans are facing are not far away in time, and we will feel the pressure of their immensity in the next decade,” she says.

As a lecturer in Chinese literature at Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xia likes to encourage her students to think one step ahead when they come across disturbing premonitions of the future in sci-fi works, and hold them as a mirror to the present.

“From things as small as whether we want to switch to a new job, or as big as how a country makes policy, don’t we already make decisions by following the same rationale: relying on data to predict the future?” she says.

Chen is taking things a step further – by turning science fiction into reality. With the help of former colleagues in the technology industry, he has developed an AI algorithm that imitates his writing style and produces paragraphs of text. At this point, it is still an ongoing experiment.

Much to Chen’s surprise, when the Shanghai Writers’ Association used an algorithm to rate about 700 short stories published in major literature magazines last year, his story, A State of Trance, came first, beating that of the Nobel Prize-winning Chinese novelist Mo Yan.

So what’s next? Will AI steal his job? “Maybe it will replace me one day, and I can use it to make some money. Then I can retire,” says Chen.

As for Xia, she is spending the coming year as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Riverside in the US, home to one of the world’s largest collections of science fiction, and hopes to expand the scope of her research.

“I don’t want to focus only on Chinese science fiction, but also explore different issues from a global perspective, such as climate, race, immigration and gender,” she says.

Regina Wang, meanwhile, is going to spend more time on her writing. Like her contemporaries, the current wave of Chinese science fiction has led her to the conclusion that they are living in a golden age.

“I do hope that this is not the end, but just the beginning,” she says.