Hugo Award Research Articles

Translators’ subversion of gender-biased expressions: a study of the English translation of The Three-Body Problem trilogy

ABSTRACT The Three-Body Problem trilogy, a work by Cixin Liu, won the Hugo Award, making it the first Asian science fiction work to achieve this. The English translation of this trilogy has garnered significant attention from academics, emphasizing its literary significance. However, the androcentric and gender-biased expressions in the original text, as well as the subversive translation used to mitigate them, have received little attention. This mixed methods study, based on Theo Hermans’ concept ‘modalities of normative force’ (1996), aims to examine the translation norms in this regard and discuss how these norms define the relation between source and target texts. The findings indicate that translators Ken Liu and Joel Martinsen were required to employ subversive translation norms to eliminate gender-biased content that might cause discomfort and aversion among the target audience. This highlights the importance of translators’ subjectivity in balancing divergent social and cultural contexts during the translation process.

When Puppies start to hate: the revanchist nostalgia of the Hugo Awards’ PuppyGate controversy

ABSTRACT In 2015, two groups of right-wing authors and fans – the Sad and Rabid Puppies – flooded the Hugo Awards with literature they deemed “popular” and anti-“message fiction.” These reactionaries mobilized the affects of melancholy, anger, and hatred against the increasing diversification of speculative fiction. Through analyzing the affective economy of “PuppyGate,” this article demonstrates the key role of nostalgia in the affective economies of reactionary movements, paying particular attention to the tension between restorative nostalgia, with its aim to return to an imagined past, and revanchist nostalgia, which strives to destroy the present and punish those who made that destruction necessary.

Sad Puppies and SJWs: Symbolic Revolution and Challenges to Field Orthodoxy in the Struggle for Control of Science Fiction’s Hugo Awards

ABSTRACT In 2013 a group of science fiction authors launched a campaign to reform the Hugos, one of science fiction’s most prestigious awards. Dubbing themselves “Sad Puppies,” these activists sought to correct what they viewed as a political imbalance. Science fiction, they argued, had moved away from entertaining story telling in favor of heavy-handed message fiction meant to spread pernicious liberal values. This article draws on an analysis of internet posts by actors involved in the movement to examine the Puppies’ efforts to reform the science fiction field, reclaiming it as a space for conservative authors and fans. I argue that the leaders of the movement were able to build small fan communities into a larger social movement by framing the movement in such a way as to link their efforts to exogenous political and cultural debates occurring in proximate social fields. This analysis demonstrates the processes by which tournament rituals in popular culture can come to serve as contests of values, arenas within which larger political and cultural conflicts are waged.

Carl Schmitt in Outer Space: On Cixin Liu's “Dark Forest”

Abstract Cixin Liu's science fiction trilogy Remembrance of Earth's Past has sold more than 8 million copies and earned him the first Hugo Award to an Asian writer; it represents Chinese SF's breakout success in the anglophone fiction market. While his novels have received considerable popular acclaim, critics have yet to interrogate the troubling political vision they develop. The pivotal novum in the series—the new concept or creation, which Darko Suvin influentially identified as SF's chief mechanism for triggering “cognitive estrangement” in readers—is its “dark forest theory,” a set of governing axioms about life in outer space that make a necessary, inescapable hostility between different forms of organized life the fundamental political fact of the cosmos. This article argues that Carl Schmitt's political theory—his critique of liberalism, his investment in decisions made in a state of exception, and his core vision of politics as defined by the friend/enemy distinction—helps clarify the authoritarian currents in Liu's novels, as well as their break with several standards of characterization and narrative form conventional for realist fiction. By attempting to justify authoritarian order as the only adequate response to the existential cruelty of the cosmos, Liu's novels dramatize how Schmitt's notions about political enemies and heroic decisions in a state of emergency can serve to legitimate individual cruelty and collectively destructive warfare.

Study on the Influencing Factors of Network Group Polarization Events

In the era of non-network communication, group polarization is a minority, mostly confined to one organization and one region. In the era of network communication, group polarization has a more prominent role and influence through the Internet, and its formation involves subjective factors such as herd mentality and objective factors such as social contradictions. Due to the role of new media technology and new communication context, the causes of group polarization in the network show more diversified characteristics of the times. As an IP that won Hugo Award, every step of the film and television road of "The Three-body Problem" has attracted worldwide attention. As the first derivative drama, "The Three-body Problem" animation bears great hope, but it also brings a lot of controversy and doubts. From the perspective of communication, this paper takes the cross-platform text of netizens' criticism of the animated version of "The Three-body Problem" as an example, and comprehensively uses the knowledge of journalism and communication, social psychology, sociology and psychology to study the connotation, types, causes and countermeasures of the phenomenon of network group polarization in contemporary China.

Space Cowboys and Alien Landscapes

As Star Wars women Rey, Jyn Erso, Ahsoka Tano, and others build on Leia’s legacy, it is also important to celebrate the mid-century science fiction writer who influenced Star Wars earlier on – Leigh Brackett, Queen of Space Opera. Brackett not only wrote the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back (1980) before her death, but she also influenced American film and sf in the decades before. She was an accomplished screenwriter when Lucas approached her for The Empire Strikes Back, having written Rio Bravo (1959) and co-written The Big Sleep (1946) with William Faulkner, for example. And her pulps and novels established her as an authority in the science fiction genre, as well. She was the first woman to be shortlisted for the Hugo Award for The Long Tomorrow (1955), a novel that denounces the toxic violence of militarized science and venerates resistance. Similarly, Brackett’s Shadow Over Mars (1944) condemns authoritarian exploitation and reveres rebellion. These familiar themes, of course, are also in The Empire Strikes Back. While some of her elements did not make it to the final film – the Luke-Leia-Han love triangle and Luke’s Jedi twin Nellith, for instance – her style of frontier anti-authoritarian Space Opera resistance comes through clearly. Resurrecting Brackett’s work on The Empire Strikes Back and analyzing the influence of her earlier work situates the Star Wars saga as a descendant of mid-century feminist sf as we simultaneously celebrate its more inclusive contemporary narratives.

Study on the English Translation of Tongtong’s Summer from the Perspective of Skopos Theory

President Xi Jinping has attached great importance to shaping global narratives for telling China’s stories in his speeches. Two Chinese Hugo award winners, Liu Cixin and Hao Jingfang, as well as their translator Ken Liu have made a great contribution to it and brought “Chinese Science Fiction (SF)” into a buzz topic. However, the current attention on Chinese SF is limited; more outstanding Chinese SF authors and stories deserve to be known. Thus, this paper chooses Ken Liu’s English translation of Tongtong’s Summer by Xia Jia, a Chinese SF rising star, as the main subject. This paper applies the case study approach and analyzes the translation methods from the angle of Skopos Theory. This study finds that Liu has stuck to the skopos rule with the use of addition and omission translation methods; followed the coherence rule through combination, rearrangement, and shift; abided by the fidelity rule by applying the methods of literal translation and paraphrase. By studying Liu’s translation methods, this study offers an opportunity for other translators to get the key to good translations, and obtain proper suggestions and guidance for SF or even other genres of Chinese literary works to be translated.

Research on the Transformation of Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction

Research on the Transformation of Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction

Libraries in contemporary science fiction novels: uncertain futures or embedded in the fabric of society?

PurposeThis study aims to examine the imagining of libraries and the depiction of library services in contemporary science fiction novels. Analyses of libraries in contemporary science fiction may reveal expectations of libraries and the roles they play in future societies. These may, in turn, be used by the library profession to innovate and to discover opportunities to design and improve library services that meet the expectations of library users now and in the future.Design/methodology/approachThis research applied a content analysis approach to examine references to libraries in a purposeful sample of science fiction novels published between 2009 and 2019. The sample consists of 29 novels selected from the 2010–2020 winners of the Hugo Award for Best Novel, The Nebula Award for Best Novel, the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, The Philip K Dick Award and the Arthur C Clarke Award.FindingsThis research finds that libraries are a common feature within contemporary science fiction novels, primarily as part of the background setting of the narratives. Libraries are particularly common in peri-apocalyptic novels, often as “reinvented” libraries. This research identifies considerable differences in the way libraries and information access and use are depicted and documented in science fiction worlds of plenty, compared to those of scarcity. Other key themes discussed include freedom of access to information, and the supposedly common negative stereotyping of libraries.Originality/valueExisting literature indicates anxiety about the future of libraries which the findings of this research do not support. The insights gained suggested instead, the emergence of an image of libraries as being embedded in the fabric of societies. This indicates the expectation of the place and role of libraries in contemporary societies. Libraries and their services must be adeptly placed and woven into the many facets of the societies they serve.

Roger Zelazny by F. Brett Cox

Reviewed by: Roger Zelaznyby F. Brett Cox Rob Latham Aesthetic Ambition vs. Commercial Pressures. F. Brett Cox. Roger Zelazny. M odernM asters ofS cienceF iction. U of Illinois P, 2021. xii + 208 pp. $110 hc, $27.95 pbk, $14.95 ebk. In the history of modern sf, few authors have had as meteoric a debut as Roger Zelazny. His first sf story was published in 1962, and by the end of the decade he had won two Nebula Awards, for his novella "He Who Shapes" and his novelette "The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth" (both 1965), and two Hugo Awards, for his novels This Immortal(1965; aka …And Call Me Conrad) and Lord of Light(1967). Eight other stories received nominations, including "A Rose for Eccelesiastes" (1963), one of the most widely anthologized tales in modern sf. "Eccelesiastes" was voted the third best novelette of the twentieth century in a 2012 poll conducted by Locusmagazine, one of nine Zelazny stories and novels to make the overall list. As befits the author's complex generic positioning, Lord of Lightwas voted both the twenty-third best sf novel and the sixty-fifth best fantasy novel, and probably the author's most popular work was his A mberseries of quest fantasies, kicked off by Nine Princes in Amberin 1970—the fifth best fantasy novel of the twentieth century, according to Locus, out-polled by only four novels: Tolkien's The Hobbit(1937) and The Lord of the Rings(1955), Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea(1968), and George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones(1996). Zelazny won one more Nebula and three more Hugos, all for short fiction, prior to his death in 1995 at the relatively young age of 58, although his reputation in the field, especially the reception of his novels, underwent a steady decline after 1970. As F. Brett Cox observes in his new critical study of the author, this decline coincided with Zelazny's decision in 1969 to quit his day job as a claims specialist for the Social Security Administration and devote himself full-time to writing. Not long after, reviewers began complaining about "a reduction in the quality of his work" (88) as commercial considerations seemed to take precedence over aesthetic ones, with the author "more intent on writing quickly, prolifically, and profitably than on blazing new and interesting literary trails" (101). Cox quotes a number of such verdicts by the likes of Norman Spinrad and other genre luminaries, perhaps the most poignant being the lament, in a review of Zelazny's To Die in Italbar(1973) by Sidney Coleman in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction(August 1974), that sf readers "once had something unique and wonderful, and it is gone, and what we have in its place is only a superior writer of preposterous adventures" (qtd. 90). As Cox points out, Zelazny produced almost three dozen novels, several in collaboration, between 1970 and 1995, and only three were nominated for major awards, none winning. Cox also shows, in fine detail, how commercial pressures impinged on the author's production, compelling him to focus on the crowd-pleasing A mberseries and to scale back his experimental ambitions—for example, making his 1973 novel Today We Choose Facesmore of a linear narrative, since his editor was worried that readers might be baffled by its fragmented form. Cox also makes clear that [End Page 382]Zelazny himself was sometimes his own worst enemy, due to his tremendous facility at producing what he frankly called "copy," which led to usually stylish but often superficial work. Cox does such a good job reinforcing the conventional wisdom about Zelazny's aesthetic decline that he rather undermines his own stated goal of contesting its "oversimplification" of a complex career (5). Indeed, Cox's modification of the prevailing view is ultimately slight, as he himself seems to acknowledge: There is no denying the commercial impulses that steered Zelazny's career, especially in his later years. But there is also no question that, even as in those later years he hurriedly fulfilled one contract so that...

A Study on the English Translation of Culture-Loaded Words in The Three-Body Problem from the Perspective of Manipulation Theory

Written by Liu Cixin and published in 2006, The Three-Body Problem is one of the most popular science fiction novels in China. Its English version translated by Ken Liu won a Hugo Award for Best Novel, which has pushed Chinese science fiction to a higher status in the world. Science fiction translation is an emerging topic in the field of translation research. Current studies mainly focus on the translation strategies adopted by the English version of The Three-Body Problem, and little research explores how culture-loaded words are translated from the perspective of Manipulation Theory. Employing a case-study approach, this thesis applies Manipulation Theory to the analysis of culture-loaded words in Ken Liu’s English translation of The Three-Body Problem. The results show: (1) manipulated by ideology, the translator rewrites the culture-loaded words containing political elements and religious elements with translation strategies such as amplification, transliteration and domestication; (2) poetics manipulates the translation of Chinese idioms, old sayings and proverbs, in which domestication, idiomatic translation and literal translation strategies are adopted; (3) to meet the patronage’s expectation, the translator adds many footnotes which provide extra information about Chinese culture. These results can shed light on culture-loaded words translation of science fiction and make a positive contribution to Chinese culture going abroad.

Feminist Discussions on The Remembrance of Earth’s Past Trilogy

As the first Asian Hugo Award laureate, Liu Cixin is an illustrious science-fiction writer in China, whose chef-d’oeuvre is an award-winning trilogy entitled Remembrance of Earth’s Past, or more widely renowned by the title of its first volume, viz. The Three-Body Problem. The series not only features intercivilisational belligerence via a fecundity of imagination and richness of imagery-evoking representation, but also manifests humanity and benevolence, so it has attained a loyal readership and commercial success. Notwithstanding critical acclamation, this male-authored trilogy encounters contentiousness concerning gender discrimination. I propound that the Remembrance of Earth’s Past series does not exhibit sexism, though there are depictions with gender stereotypes.

The Chosen and the Beautiful

The Chosen and the Beautiful

In the Shadow of the Culture

Iain M. Banks’s The Algebraist (2004), a Hugo Award nominee for Best Novel in 2005, has attracted far less critical attention than his Culture novels despite being a remarkable work. Born of the author’s wish to develop his science fiction beyond the Culture’s universe, The Algebraist is a complex novel displaying in its dense pages Banks’s wondrous imagination. Here I consider the ways in which the main civilizations he depicts in it, the Mercatoria and the Dwellers, connect with key issues raised in the Culture novels: the ethics of intervention in other civilizations, the use of AIs, and the nature of utopia. The Culture, as I argue, casts a long shadow but Banks’s decision to explore another narrative universe allows him to examine these fundamental issues from a different angle. The Algebraist complements, nonetheless, his main tenets in the Culture series.

Nationalist Allegories in the Post-human Era

As China’s expansion of influence now takes up the spotlight of the world stage, Chinese science fiction, a relatively little known genre, reaches a global audience. In 2015, Liu Cixin received the Hugo Award for Best Novel for his trilogy The Three-Body Problem, as the first Asian science fiction writer to receive the Hugo Award. A year later, Hao Jingfang’s Folding Beijing was awarded the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Novelette. The recent world-wide recognition of Chinese science fiction begins with English translation, U.S. publication and promotion. The New York Times cited The Three-Body Problem as having helped popularize Chinese science fiction internationally, crediting the quality of Ken Liu’s English translation, as well as endorsements by George R. R. Martin, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and former U.S. president Barack Obama (Alter). In this review essay, I argue that recent Chinese science fiction boom represents both Chinese exceptionalism and universalist concerns for humanities now and future. In what follows, I first offer a brief outline of the two works, highlighting the alterations that occur in translations. Then I try to identify several salient features of these works by situating them within the global political and economic contexts of China rise (or threat), geopolitical conflicts, competition and rivalry in science and technology, particularly AI, 5G technology, especially the global rise of nationalism and populism. Finally, I suggest an allegorical reading of these two works (and other recent Chinese science fiction) as nationalist allegories.

Susanna ClarkePiranesi

Gyasi’s lyrical language is an achievement . At every stage of Gifty’s development , her narration is appropriate: at times naïve and in others scientific. Of her mother ’s depression, Gifty writes, she “colonized that bed like a virus.” Of her brother’s adolescent demeanor in the face of racism, she describes the lie of masculinity, the “faux tough looks of young boys.” And of wearing Ghanaian traditional dress, she writes: “I thought it would seem a lie. I felt about as Ghanaian as apple pie.” Gyasi echoes many African writers as she reflects on her mother’s deportment while speaking Fante (she’s girlish), Twi (she’s authoritative ), and English (she’s meek). The genius of the work rests with the use of language to develop characters. The novel establishes Gyasi as a masterful storyteller. Her narrative style weaves seamlessly in and out of time and space. Her characters are memorable. Her ability to communicate science in lay terms and her observations on institutional racism make this work worth the read. In short, it is a gripping story. Adele Newson-Horst Morgan State University Susanna Clarke Piranesi New York. Bloomsbury. 2020. 272 pages. HALL AFTER ENDLESS marble hall. In some, bones of the dead are devotedly cared for; in others, waves arch and albatrosses rear their young among enormous statues of a Minotaur, a woman carrying a beehive, a faun. This is Piranesi’s home. He has always lived there—he thinks. Sixteenyearsafterthemammothsuccess of her historical fantasy, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke’s newest novel, Piranesi, centers on its eponymous narrator. A voracious note-taker, Piranesi details his life in the labyrinthine House, from his calculated avoidance of floods to speculations about who else might exist in the world beyond himself and the Other, a manicured but aloof man with whom Piranesi shares his world. In such a world of only two—or could there be more?—humans, the novel’s epistolary format and dependence on Piranesi to carry the narrative has potential to render the book monotonous. Clarke’s splendid characterization of Piranesi as an enthusiastic and sweet man, however, completely overcomes this structural barrier . A joy to follow through his world, Piranesi’s psychological struggle competes with his genuine, childlike admiration for the House. The stylized language in which he writes, furthermore, offers opportunities for wry humor when Piranesi slips into moments of modern candidness. Readers of Clarke’s debut novel, which garnered her a Hugo Award and a Man Booker Prize nomination as well as a BBC adaptation in 2015, will find much to love in Piranesi. Decidedly shorter than Strange & Norrell, which clocks in at around one thousand pages, Piranesi is a quick 250page affair that leaves readers eager to revel at length in Clarke’s world. Its preoccupation with magical pasts and scholars behaving badly is reminiscent of her debut, but Clarke’s triumphant stroke in Piranesi is its distinction. At first bewildering, the novel steadily unravels the puzzle at its core to satisfying ends. Its dramatic irony, which sets in about halfway through, establishes an unsettling but riveting tone and aids the reader in understanding the world in which Piranesi is enmeshed. Further ruminations on the ethics of knowledge, and the cosmos and our small place within it, develop the novel to a degree of profundity that refrains from didacticism. A thoroughly charming novel, Piranesi offers a world of escape haunted by the darkness of reality. Its analysis of “the mingled glory and horror of existence” is an admirable successor in Clarke’s oeuvre of thought-provoking and utterly creative fantasy. Marisa Mercurio Michigan State University Roberto Calasso The Celestial Hunter Trans. Richard Dixon. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2020. 450 pages. AS IN HIS STUDY of the ancient Vedics, Ardor, in The Celestial Hunter the Italian philologist and publisher Roberto Calasso takes his discipline to an extreme point. In a way, a prehistorical philology is a contradiction in terms. And indeed, The Celestial Hunter goes into the question of the genesis of history itself: what part of humanity was necessarily left behind, what remainder, before the human being could acquire the appropriate distance to assume the task of writing as well...

Literature Review on Folding Beijing

s one of the contemporary writers in China, Hao Jingfang gains her reputation with her science fiction Folding Beijing. Translated by the Chinese American writer and translator Ken Liu，this novel was first published in American in an electronic magazine Uncanny and was awarded the Hugo Award for Best Novella in 2016. Since then, this novel has attracted great attention and interest of readers both at home and abroad, and the value of its source text as well as the motivation behind the successful dissemination of its English version has been gradually unearthed. Owing to that, various researches have been made on it, especially in China, involving the source text, translation strategies, introduction and reception overseas as well as the translator. This paper intends to make a systematic review of these studies according to the type, and to reveal the deficiencies of these previous studies, with an aim of finding out some rules and giving some implications for the “going out” of Chinese literary works

Globalization, Science Fiction and the China Story: Translation, Dissemination and Reception of Liu Cixin’s Works across the Globe

ABSTRACT Science Fiction (SF) as a literary genre is intrinsically world-oriented and closely linked to the notion of “global village” with visions of the future. If the starting stage of Chinese SF has benefited from the global exchange for the introduction of new ideas and science to modern China, the contemporary development contributes to the globalizing process by making the China story an indispensable part of world literature. As the Hugo Award laureate Liu Cixin has gained considerable popularity internationally, this paper analyses the translation, dissemination and reception of Liu’s SF across the globe, and argues that the collective efforts made by the translator and mediator as well as the techno-optimist digital context push the Chinese SF to become increasingly a global proposition. Thus, Chinese SF’s active integration into the world literature system is both an important facet of East–West cultural exchanges and an imperative representation of the era of globalization.

A Rewriting Theoretic Approach to Ken Liu’s Translation of Folding Beijing

Given Folding Beijing’s great importance to Chinese science fictions after winning the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Novelette and Ken Liu’s active engagement in promoting modern Chinese literary works to go global, this paper endeavors to explain how the influences of ideology, poetics and patronage are displayed in Folding Beijing’s English translation from the perspective of Lefevere’s Rewriting Theory. Instead of focusing on the linguistic elements of the translation, the current study attempts to reveal the cultural, social, ideological, and poetical effects on the translator’s decision-making process and tries to explore the reasons for the novelette’s success. It is believed that this paper can, to a certain extent, not only provide beneficial guidance for future practitioners in this translation field, but also offer some reference for the study of translation of Chinese contemporary science fictions.

When We Were Magic by Sarah Gailey

Reviewed by: When We Were Magic by Sarah Gailey Kiri Palm Gailey, Sarah When We Were Magic. Simon Pulse, 2020 [352p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-5344-3287-1 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-5344-3289-5 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 9-12 High school senior Alexis didn’t mean to kill fellow classmate Josh Harper, but that’s what happens on prom night when her first attempt at sex ends in dangerous, explosive magic. Her crew of five friends, girls who have bonded over their magical gifts, are quick to try to help her dispose of the evidence and repair the damage, but nothing is working according to plan. As the girls burn, bury, and obliterate Josh’s remains, they begin to pay a high price, and Alexis is terrified that she’ll lose [End Page 303] her beloved friends in the process. Hugo Award–winner Gailey doesn’t pull any punches in Alexis’ narration, spinning a tale of consequences, flawed characters, and detailed accounts of gore. Many of the acts the girls commit should be unforgivable (and are often stomach-turning), but the strong bond they share make the characters impossible to hate. Alexis is both naïve and jaded, certain she’ll be abandoned while determined to fix everything alone by leaving her friends, a selfish plan that never succeeds. Her romantic pining for bestie Roya is sure to make readers remember their own first loves, and the constant will-she-won’t-she back and forth is as believable as it is frustrating. Thankfully, everything doesn’t work out in the end, but Alexis and her crew learn how to live with what remains and support each other in the aftermath, a lesson every reader is sure to appreciate. Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois