ANCIENT MOSQUE by Xiao Shui trans. Judith Huang
Slightly tipsy, walking out of Hongbin Tower. Two hearses appear
on the bike lane. The invisible corpse, shut in a hand-pushed metal box covered
with black brocade, jingles, bangs and clatters, squeezing through the onrush of head-spinning traffic.
Tightly-packed pedestrians scatter loosely in the smog, all eyeing him, intent on helping him find an opening.
Judith Huang (錫影) is an Australian-based Singaporean author, Rosetta Award-winning translator, musician, serial-arts-collective-founder, Web 1.0 entrepreneur and VR creator. Her first novel, Sofia and the Utopia Machine, shortlisted for the EBFP 2017 and Singapore Book Awards 2019, is the story of a young girl who turns to VR to create her own universe, but when this leads to an actual big bang in the Utopia Machine in a secret government lab, opening portals to the multiverse, she loses everything – and must go on the run with only her wits and her mysterious online friend, “Isaac,” to help her. Can she save her worlds and herself? You can see more of Judith’s work at www.judithhuang.com
