Chinese Science Fiction Research Articles

Chinese Science Fiction:

The relation of science to science fiction in the history of Chinese science fiction has been closely linked to both the influence of Western science and to ideals of progress, nationalism, and empire. But when we turn to China’s long history of philosophical speculation, a rather different story needs to be told. This article examines the ways in which the indigenous Chinese sciences have fed into fiction, and considers the consequences for our understandings of the genre of science fiction itself and its broader social and historical contexts, as well as relationships between modernity, progress, and science in a non-Western, but globally crucial, context.

LocatingKexue Xiangsheng(Science Crosstalk) in Relation to the Selective Tradition of Chinese Science Fiction

Abstract Kexue xiangsheng (science crosstalk) features comic dialogues aimed at popularizing knowledge in the physical and social sciences. This genre emerged in the late 1950s in the People’s Repu...

Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation

the voice notes that the couple complement each other, Artur says, “We complement each other.” When it announces, “The rhinos are outside,” Printz thinks, “It’s good that the rhinos are outside.” The voice becomes their shadow. Twentieth-century history has marked these lives. Isabella talks to her thirty-six garden gnomes, one for each family member lost to the Holocaust. Printz’s mother’s silver was confiscated from Isabella’s Jewish family . Kindhearted Printz obsesses over Bosnian war victims. Pervasive lists—Artur’s hats, “his past,” Isabella’s bonbon wrappers , Printz’s notebook of famed suicides and fateful events from his birth year—add backstory and history. Memories mingle violence and sex. As Isabella manipulates Artur, the voice lists alphabet letters, below each a Holocaustlinked noun. After “Z / Zyklon B” comes “Done . . . A one-minute wank, ten years of history, ten years of Isabella’s life.” Printz, meanwhile, frequently invokes the film The Night Porter, in which a Nazi officer and Jewish prisoner enact a doomed fusion of sex and power. These bodies have histories, too, aging and disease portrayed with graphic specificity . The old couple wear diapers; selfharming Printz cleans his mother after she defecates. Artur has epilepsy, Printz a mental condition. Alongside interior alter egos—former, repressed, or imagined selves—external doppelgängers emerge. Printz’s beloved rhinos , “tame and self-destructive,” resemble him. Spies watch citizens, commodified, tracking their compliance. Isabella asks if Artur is a spy; police report on both. Printz’s father was a spy, and Printz, to please him, reluctantly became one—he’d yearned to be a sculptor. Containers for the emptied and redundant , trash cans acquire spiritual weight. Those beneath Artur’s window signal “poverty”; landing beside them after his jump, Artur becomes waste. Expelled by his brother from their dead father’s flat, Printz subsists on rubbish- bin discards. Isabella , “a carapace,” tells Artur she’s “empty.” “Disappearing,” Printz removes his shirt in the final scene. The narrator declares his torso “fine,” but Printz comments, “Inside, my torso’s empty.” Newspapers and police report Artur’s and Isabella’s separate suicides on 1/1/2000. In 2001 Printz joins the rhinos, “an endangered species.” Imitating them, he crushes his head against an iron wall and, weeping, declares death “superfluous .” Forms drained of their content, these three enter the “dustbin of history.” Drndić’s memento mori reveals the skeleton . It warns: rhinos are our doppelgängers , too. Michele Levy North Carolina A&T State University Johannes Göransson Transgressive Circulation: Essays on Translation Blacksburg, Virginia. Noemi Press. 2018. 96 pages. If you’ve noticed that translated books are enjoying an uptick in popularity, you are not alone. Indeed, the griping about a widespread disregard for the artform has given waytotranslationsbeinglaudedasapanacea for the dark times we’re living in. Everyone is on board, it seems, from magazine editors to publishers, whose lists now include Books in Review Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation Ed. and trans. Ken Liu. New York. Tor Books. 2019. 480 pages. Broken Stars is author, translator, and editor Ken Liu’s second anthology of contemporary Chinese science fiction in English translation, and it’s been highly anticipated ever since Invisible Planets was published in late 2016. Like its predecessor, Broken Stars features some of the most accomplished Chinese authors writing in the genre today: Xia Jia, Zhang Ran, Tang Fei, Han Song, Cheng Jingbo, Baoshu, Liu Cixin (whose The Three-Body Problem won the 2015 Hugo for Best Novel), Hao Jingfang (whose Folding Beijing won the 2016 Hugo for Best Novelette), Fei Dao, Anna Wu, Ma Boyong, Gu Shi, Regina Kanyu Wang, and Chen Qiufan. Again, like Invisible Planets, Broken Stars includes essays on the growth and development of science fiction in China over the past few decades. What sets these two anthologies apart, though, is Liu’s decision to include a greater number of authors and fewer stories per author in Broken Stars, specifically so he could “expan[d] the range of voices included as well as the emotional palette and the narrative styles,” as he explains in his introduction. Despite this wider range of voices and styles, Liu emphasizes that this book and its predecessor are...

Liu Cixin's Three-Body Trilogy and the Status of Science Fiction in Contemporary China

The recent success of Liu Cixin's hard sf trilogy Santi [The Three-Body Trilogy, 2006-2008] is symbolic of the important rise of Chinese science fiction both in China and in the rest of the world. This trilogy tells the story of the future invasion of Earth by a belligerent extraterrestrial civilization with advanced technology and the ways in which humans try to defend themselves. It begins with the Chinese Cultural Revolution and ends with the heat death of the universe. A huge bestseller and great critical success, it is also being adapted to film. The English translation of the first volume also won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015. With the considerable success he achieved with this trilogy, Liu Cixin has become for the readers, critics, and supporters of Chinese soft power the standard-bearer of a new “era” of Chinese science fiction, called upon to promote the “Chinese dream” to the international community. In light of the history of science fiction in China since 1949 and its political reappropriation, this present contribution offers an examination of the conditions of production and reception of The Three-Body Trilogy in China and abroad and details the reasons for the critical, academic, and even political passion that it arouses today.

The environment, humankind, and slow violence in Chinese science fiction

This essay takes an analytical approach to examine some Chinese science fiction narratives with the themes of climate change, terraforming, and environment degradation—written from the mid-20th century to the early years of the 21st century. My broad reading of the texts treats these narratives as archive—textual sources that document a historical development of the impact of human activities on nature. On one hand, these narratives are all closely related to the country’s modernization, its economic takeoff, and the rhetoric of building a powerful China. On the other hand, they form one set of what can be understood as an emerging body of Chinese fiction located firmly within the strata and sediment of the Anthropocene. This body of literature offers a venue for explaining and exploring how economics, technological developments, and government policies have transformed the ecology, environment, and climate in the Anthropocene. These narratives also echo the concept of slow violence dubbed by Rob Nixon in 2011. These terraforming and climate narratives reveal an attritional violence of environmental degradation, climate change, and the consequential social and political problems that permeate so many of our lives. My close reading of Chen Qiufan’s novel The Waste Tide ( Huangchao, 2013) specifically portrays a slow and attritional violence—namely, the ways in which the electronics recycling industry have caused severe environmental and occupational impacts on nature and humans—through exploration of the complex relationships among technology, the economy, and the environment.

Chinese People Not Only Live in the World but Grow in the Universe: Liu Cixin and Chinese Science Fiction

The spiritual intent of Liu Cixin’s works can be dated back to the late Qing dynasty when science fiction arose. This article explores the continual interest and underlying appeal of cultural innovation from the perspective of an “evolutionary” theme and narration of the universe in century-old Chinese science fiction. This article was originally published in Southern Metropolis Daily on December 21, 2014. This version contains slight changes.

A Very Brief History of Chinese Science Fiction

After laying the groundwork by suggesting that ancient texts that offered supernatural explanations for natural phenomena demonstrated curiosity about the natural world as well as scientific imagination, authors Yao Jianbin and Wu Yan give an overview of major Chinese science fiction authors and trends since the late nineteenth century, when science fiction per se was introduced into China. Tying the development of science fiction in China to the nineteenth-century importation of Western science and science fiction, Yao and Wu trace the fortunes of this kind of literature through the turbulent decades of the twentieth century. They further connect the resurgence and international success of science fiction from China to China’s rise as a technological innovator and world power.

Eerie Parables and Prophecies: An Analysis of Han Song’s Science Fiction

Han Song’s works are unique in the history of Chinese science fiction. This essay examines eeriness as a stylistic feature, and parable/prophecy as its form, noting that the open-ended nature of Han Song’s fiction is the result of a permeation of the worldview of particle physics, the valorization of pluralism, and a mystic bent. Han Song’s works oscillate between satirical parables of contemporary reality and extrapolative prophecies of the future, and both writing and thematic content aestheticize the eerie.

Evolution or Samsara? Spatio-Temporal Myth in Han Song's Science Fiction

Since the late Qing, the question of whether history is evolutionary or cyclical has been inextricably intertwined with the narrative of China’s establishment of a nation-state, and the attendant host of questions regarding political ethics and cultural value. In post-1990s Chinese science fiction, particularly the discourse of “evolution/competition/selection,” has constituted a dominant narrative mode. In comparison to this, the most singular aspect of Han Song’s work is the lack of such a distinct vision of time and the absence of a historical teleology constructed from an evolutionary perspective. This essay takes cyclical time in Han Song’s work as a point of departure in analyzing “Free and Easy Youth” (“Qingchun de diedang”), “Control Cycle” (“Shoukong huan”), “The Fundamental Nature of the Universe” (“Yuzhou de benxing”), “Earth Is Flat” (“Diqiu shi ping de”), “Great Wall” (“Changcheng”), and other representative works. By revealing the absurdity and incertitude underlying the modern myths of “civilizational progress” and “scientific ideals,” these works present the author’s own paradoxical musings about modernity.

Ball Lightning by Cixin Liu

FEATURED REVIEW Cixin Liu Ball Lightning Trans. Joel Martinsen. New York. Tor. 2018. 384 pages. Multiple-award-winning Chinese sciencefiction author Cixin Liu is having a moment in the anglophone world. Because of the 2014 English translation of his novel The Three-Body Problem, Chinese science fiction has been in high demand in the American market. Ball Lightning is Liu’s fourth book in English, the first three having comprised a hard science-fiction trilogy about alien contact and human political struggles among themselves and with the aliens. In addition to its Chinese awards, The ThreeBody Problem nabbed the Hugo Award for Best Novel and nominations for nearly every major genre award, not to mention a plug by then-President Obama in the New York Times (see WLT, Sept. 2015, 63). Ball Lightning, then, has a lot of hype behind it, and while it may not be as sweeping a study of (inter)national politics, humanity , and the alien as the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, it is an important—and timely—meditation on science, weapons development, and the ways in which people confront trauma. Ball Lightning tells the story of two Chinese nationals driven to science by loss. Chen wants to understand ball lightning, a real-world phenomenon that as yet has no scientific explanation, after his parents are killed by an instance of it on his fourteenth birthday. Lin Yun researches “newconcept weapons” for the Chinese military, a response to her mother’s death by genetically engineered attack bees during the 1980s border war with Vietnam. The novel is written in Chen’s first person and tracks in close detail his developing theory of ball lightning, his collaboration with Yun World Literature in Review Ruth Behar’s poetic saudade Verse, page 84 Jérôme Ruillier’s universal immigrant narrative Fiction, page 74 Porochista Khakpour is sick & tired of being sick & tired Miscellaneous, page 91 66 WLT SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2018 on its military application, and eventually their discovery that ball lightning is in fact macro-electrons forming the building blocks of a macro-universe. This discovery leads to another: macro-nuclei of macroatoms , which can produce enormous cold fusion explosions. While Yun becomes a key character early on, it is not until toward the end, when Chen decides to leave the macroelectron project after it proves destructively weaponizable, that she occupies equal characterological footing with Chen. Still, her story is relayed second- and third-hand by Chen and other men, who are both fascinated by and afraid of her emotional, trauma-driven pursuit of a weapon capable of destroying all electronics in the world or, worse, all human life. Ball Lightning cuts into tough questions about the ethics of science and its application to weapons. There is a tension throughout the novel regarding funding for scientific research being proportional to its use in business and war. Liu also writes with concern about the ways in which political ideology shapes how scientific research is carried out. The problem, as Liu writes it, is that scientific research is too rigid, too stuck in its own self-made laws, or bent, say, by political concerns of the state, to discover what should be rather obvious. Mentors regularly chide Chen and Yun that simplicity, not complexity, is the way to understand the world. Liu also critiques the culture of work and labor that would have people ignore the pleasure of life in favor of single-mindedly pursuing money, knowledge, fame, or glory. In fact, given that objections are regularly raised about the ethics of the militarization of science but dismissed moments later by the same characters, all because war with “the enemy” is looming (and later breaks out), it seems that the one clear philosophical position of Liu’s novel is that readers living in these neoliberal times not take the paths of Chen and Yun. Liu’s point is that it should not take technological collapse to teach us to live simpler, happier lives. But, of course, even this fetishizes the premodern and merely warns of the well-known dangers of a technologically mediated life. On the whole, Ball Lightning is a worthwhile novel. Its best-seller status is virtually guaranteed by...

The Identity Vacillation of a Technological Elite: The Tension between Poetry and Technology in Liu Cixin’s “The Poetry Cloud” ( Shi yun )

This article explores Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin’s 刘慈欣 novelette “The Poetry Cloud” ( Shi yun , 1997) by contextualizing it within the debate between scientism and humanism in 1990s China, an event that has been downplayed in its significance in shaping Liu’s ideas. The first section of this article will investigate how the narrative framework of science fiction represents and refreshes the symbolic meaning of poetry in the abovementioned context. Secondly, by analyzing the three main characters, Yiyi, Big-tooth, and Li Bai, with a focus on their perceptions of poetry, the next section will discuss the different opinions they represent with regard to the debate. Finally, by studying Liu’s work in the context of Martin Heidegger’s reflections upon technology, the last section examines his solution to the tension between scientism and humanism in the programming of a poetry cloud that marries poetic imagination with technological means. This article argues that the story demonstrates how Liu, a technological elite, vacillates between technological determinism and humanism, and tries to provide a possible solution to their inherent contradictions.

After 1989: The New Wave of Chinese Science Fiction

This paper examines the new wave of Chinese science fiction as both a subversion and variation of the genre’s utopianism of the earlier age. Wang Jinkang’s Ant Life (2007), Liu Cixin’s China 2185 (1989), the Three-Body Trilogy (2006-2010), and the short story “The Micro-Era” (1999) are the main texts this paper studies. Their reflections on utopianism speak to the post-1989 changing intellectual culture and political economy. This paper argues that the new wave of Chinese science fiction contains a self-conscious effort to energise the utopian/dystopian variations rather than a simple denial of utopianism or a total embrace of dystopian disillusionment, and this is particularly represented in Liu Cixin’s novels. The paper also provides some preliminary thoughts on the vision of a post-human future depicted in Liu Cixin’s science fiction.

Chinese Science Fiction: A Response to Modernization

Chinese Science Fiction: A Response to Modernization

From the Technique for Creating Humans to the Art of Reprogramming Hearts: Scientists, Writers, and the Genesis of China’s Modern Literary Vision

From the Technique for Creating Humans to the Art of Reprogramming HeartsScientists, Writers, and the Genesis of China’s Modern Literary Vision Jing Jiang (bio) In an essay published in 1972, Susan Sontag described China as “the country of science fiction, where everyone speaks with the same voice. Maotsetungized” (270). By the use of this term, she was referring to the way Mao Tse-tung had held captive the minds of so many Chinese people with his political vision, inciting them into a unified uproar. At the time, China was in the middle of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), a movement that seems to be forever frozen in an image of revolutionary fervor, mass subjectivity, and the cult of Mao: a green sea of Red Guards, all wearing military-style uniforms, and all waving their pocketsize “red book” and collectively shouting out political slogans. In the eyes of an American writer watching from outside in, this was not an image of freedom, but, rather, this new form of mass subjectivity had an eerily mechanized feel to it. Hence the naming of China as the country of science fiction, a genre where the mechanized and human often merge. While Sontag uses science fiction only as a metaphor for Maoist China, in this essay I will turn literally to early Chinese science fiction. The body of science-fiction texts constitutes an important, though understudied, discursive site where notions of “Chineseness,” modernity, and human nature were first articulated, expanded, and subsequently consolidated into a vision of modern China. This vision is at once literary and sociopolitical, sentimental and scientistic, universal and national. Despite the exclusion of science fiction from the canon of modern Chinese literature and the sporadic scholarly attention it has received, science fiction enjoyed a privileged role in the project of mass [End Page 131] enlightenment at the behest of modern Chinese intellectuals in the late Qing and early Republican years. The translation into Chinese of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days in 1900 introduced science fiction to China on a large scale, catapulting the reading, translating, and writing of science fiction stories and novels. The cultural luminaries who earnestly promoted or practiced the genre include Liang Qichao (1873–1929), the foremost intellectual leader of China in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and Lu Xun (1881–1936), the most celebrated writer of the modern period.1 Following his predecessors’ footsteps, Lu Xun in 1903 translated two more of Verne’s works, From the Earth to the Moon and A Journey to the Center of the Earth, from the Japanese translations. In the preface to the first work, Lu Xun gives what would in retrospect amount to a Chinese science-fiction manifesto, in which he attributes the ignorance of the masses to the paucity of science fiction in the Chinese literary tradition. He claims that the development of science fiction will guide the Chinese people out of their dark ignorance, and even goes so far as to link the rise of science fiction directly with the renaissance of the yellow race in the near future (Lu 1981, 151–52). In this preface, Lu Xun uses the term kexue xiaoshuo (science fiction) to name the new literary genre now imagined to be a potent tool for mass enlightenment, national strengthening, and racial rejuvenation. It is important to distinguish between this term and a later term, kexue huanxiang xiaoshuo (science-fantasy fiction), commonly abbreviated as kehuan xiaoshuo, which is the standard Chinese translation today for “sciencefiction.”2 This term did not appear until the 1950s, when science fiction texts from the Soviet Union were translated and introduced to Chinese readers on a massive scale, and it did not become widely used until after the end of the Cultural Revolution (Xiao, 20). For the first half of the twentieth century at least, the default Chinese term for “science fiction” had been kexue xiaoshuo, though kexue huanxiang xiaoshuo was also used sporadically. Aside from the occasional use of these other terms, between the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, the understanding of the mission and function...

Call for Contributions: Special Issue of <em>SFS</em> on Chinese Science Fiction

Call for Contributions: Special Issue of <em>SFS</em> on Chinese Science Fiction

Futures dreaming outside and on the margins of the western world

In this article, we challenge the hegemony of western science fiction, arguing that western science fiction is particular even as it claims universality. Its view remains based on ideas of the future as forward time. In contrast, in non-western science fiction the future is seen outside linear terms: as cyclical or spiral, or in terms of ancestors. In addition, western science fiction has focused on the good society as created by technological progress, while non-western science fiction and futures thinking has focused on the fantastic, on the spiritual, on the realization of eupsychia—the perfect self. However, most theorists assert that the non-west has no science fiction, ignoring Asian and Chinese science fiction history, and western science fiction continues to ‘other’ the non-west as well as those on the margins of the west (African–American woman, for example). Nonetheless, while most western science fiction remains trapped in binary opposites—alien/non-alien; masculine/feminine; insider/outsider—writers from the west’s margins are creating texts that contradict tradition and modernity, seeking new ways to transcend difference. Given that the imagination of the future creates the reality of tomorrow, creating new science fictions is not just an issue of textual critique but of opening up possibilities for all our futures. (Butler as quoted in Ref. [1]). Is all science fiction western? Is there non-western science fiction? If so, what is its nature? Does it follow the form and content of western science fiction, or is it rendered different by its own local civilizational historical processes and considerations? Has western science fiction moulded the development of the science fiction of the ‘other’, including feminist science fiction, in such a way that anything coming from outside the west is a mere imitation of the real thing? Perhaps non-western science fiction is a contradiction in terms. Or is there authentic non-western fiction which offers alternative visions of the future, of the ‘other’?

China in a Polycentric World: Essays in Chinese Comparative Literature. Edited by Yingjin Zhang. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. xii, 307 pp. $55.00 (cloth); $19–95 (paper).

Introduction: engaging Chinese comparative literature and cultural studies Yingjin Zhang Part I. Discipline, Discourse, Canon: 1. The challenge of East-West comparative literature Zhang Longxi 2. The utopias of discourse: on the impossibility of Chinese comparative literature David Palumbo-Liu 3. Canon formation in traditional Chinese poetry: Chinese canons, sacred and profane Mark E. Francis Part II. Gender, Sexuality, Body: 4. A feminist re-vision of Xu Wei's Ci Mulan and N&#252 zhuangyuan Ann-Marie Hsiung 5. Gender, subjectivity, sexuality: defining a subversive discourse in Wang Anyi's four tales of sexual transgression Helen H. Chen 6. Consuming Asian women: the fluid body of Josie Packard in Twin Peaks Greta Ai-Yu Niu Part III. Science, Modernity, Aesthetics: 7. Travel and translation: an aspect of china's cultural modernity, 1862-1926 John Yu Zou 8. Baoyu in Wonderland: technological Utopia in the early modern Chinese science fiction novel Feng-Ying Ming 9. The texture of the metropolis: modernist inscriptions of Shanghai in the 1930s Yingjin Zhang 10. The cult of poetry in contemporary China Michelle Yeh 11. Tianya, the ends of the world or the edge of heaven: comparative literature at the fin de siecle Eugene Chen Eoyang.