天官赐福 [Tiān Guān Cì Fú] by Mò Xiāng Tóng Xiù

“The New York Times list is…curated, and queer books are often curated off the New York Times list,” said Mandelo, who picked the three novels for his Queering SFF reading series and wrote glowing reviews for two of them on Tor.com. In recent years, with the growth of online literature publishing, now a 25 billion yuan ($4 billion) business with around 460 million readers in China, danmei has inspired an explosion of adaptations into graphic novels, animation, live-action dramas, and audio dramas, and made its way into mainstream culture despite China’s ever-tightening state censorship.Īnd now it’s making its way beyond China’s borders. It started as a niche genre in the 1990s. Inspired by Japanese yaoi, translated as “boys’ love” (BL), danmei is a genre of fiction produced in China that centers around male-male romantic and sexual relationships. The subject line: “New bible just dropped.”Īt the turn of the new year, the titles - all three of them - were on the New York Times’s Paperback Trade Fiction Bestsellers list.

When the first volumes came out in December, English-speaking fans, many of whom had read the novels’ fan translations online and/or watched their animated or live-action TV adaptations, raved about getting their pre-ordered copies of the licensed translation in the mail. “I waited from August and now it’s mine,” a reader wrote in their review of Heaven Official’s Blessing on Amazon. The big news was the books’ acquisition by Seven Seas Entertainment, a leading independent publisher of manga and light novels in North America these novels - Heaven Official’s Blessing (天官赐福 tiān guān cì fú), Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (魔道祖师 módào zǔshī), and The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System (人渣反派之自救行动 rén zhā fǎnpài zhī zìjiù xíngdòng) - were going to get an authorized English-language release. “This thing” was danmei fiction, in particular three fantasy novels by one of the most popular authors of the genre, Mò Xiāng Tóng Xiù 墨香铜臭, known by her fans as MXTX.

“Generally, you can get the sense sometimes when some big piece of news or announcement hits because it reveals who in your community is also a fan of this thing,” he told me as he revisited the excitement among his online and real-life friends, authors, and those in the mainstream publishing world of science fiction and fantasy.

天官赐福 [Tiān Guān Cì Fú] by Mò Xiāng Tóng Xiù