Authors delve deep into their personal experiences and scour the world around them for unusual and offbeat incidents and individuals, the real and the surreal, anything that might offer fertile ground for their stories to grow. In this discussion Hugo-award winning science-fiction writer and macro-econonmist Hao Jingfang; Stanley Chen, a leading representative of China’s speculatative fiction writers; Slovakian newspaper columnist and author Zuzana Kepplova, and Austrian novelist Richard Obermayr will share some of their work and discuss how they perceive the world around them, what they read, and how it all feeds into their own literary initiatives.