Alongside the announcement is an interview with Taiwan SF author Chang Hsi-Kuo, and reflections by mainland SF writers Liu Cixin, Yang Ping, and Ling Chen.

Perhaps the biggest coup is obtaining an interview with the man himself:

Isaac Asimov passed away on 6 April 1992, so to be able to conduct this interview we must thank a scientist named Vikkor Mallansohn - according to Asimov's novel [The End of Eternity] he invents something in the 24th century that makes a "time kettle" possible.

Yup, the Beijing News has scored a fictional interview with "I, Asimov". They've been taking similar liberties recently in their entertainment sections, captioning photographs of celebrities with made-up quotes. But this is definitely something else. Asimov addresses the royalties he wasn't paid in 1973 for a Chinese translation of his 1958 science text The World of Carbon, the Will Smith adaptation of I, Robot, and, um, Al Qaeda, which shares a name in Chinese with the Foundation series.

A translation of the interview is available here, while the original is here.

UPDATE: Roy Berman writes: "The Arabic phrase Al Qaeda actually means 'the base' or 'the foundation,' and I have heard was in fact the title of the Arabic translation of Isaac Asimov's novel. I even remember reading speculation several years ago that Bin Laden was a fan of Asimov's work and had been inspired by some of the concepts in the novel (although certainly not in a way that Asimov would have appreciated.)"