by Ken Liu
The first anthology of contemporary Chinese SF stories, Invisible Planets, edited and translated by Ken Liu, was published in November 2016.
It is becoming easier and easier to find translated Chinese SF these days. Check them out and you won’t be disappointed!
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Special thanks to Zhang Feng, Jiang Qian, Zhao Ruhan, Zheng Jun, Xia Jia, and Dong Renwei for their writings on Chinese science fiction.
24 Originally written in English.
25 Author’s Note: Zhang Ran (张然) is not the same person as, and not related to, the science fiction author Zhang Ran (张冉), who began publishing in the 2000s and whose “The Snow of Jinyang” is in this anthology.
26 The first and third books in the series were translated by Ken Liu, and the second book was translated by Joel Martinsen.
A NEW CONTINENT FOR CHINA SCHOLARS: CHINESE SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES27
by Mingwei Song
Seven years ago, I attended a conference in Shanghai, a major event celebrating contemporary Chinese literature coorganized by Harvard and Fudan (one of the top universities in China), which featured China’s A-list novelists, poets, essayists, and literary critics. The dignitaries attending it included the Nobel Laureate-to-be Mo Yan, dozens of his peers, chief editors of major literary magazines, famous professors, as well as some younger popular authors. Almost nobody had heard of Chinese science fiction before this conference concluded with a late-afternoon roundtable discussion that gave two SF authors, Han Song and Fei Dao, ten minutes to talk about their genre. Han Song, a major author of Chinese SF’s New Wave, and Fei Dao, a promising young author, I later learned, spent a huge amount of time preparing for the ten minutes’ talk. I remember I was sitting in front of Yu Hua and Su Tong, two literary giants who kept chatting in low voices. But they suddenly became silent, and they listened attentively when Han Song began to talk about the amazing new development of SF over the past decade, and when Fei Dao strategically linked the contemporary authors’ artistic pursuits and social concerns to Lu Xun, the founding father of modern Chinese literature, who was also an early advocate for “science fiction” (kexue xiaoshuo) at the turn of the twentieth century, I could say that the entire audience, during the ten minutes, kept silent and listened with great interest to Han Song and Fei Dao.
It was a moment that changed the field.
July 13, 2010, 3:30 p.m.
Two days earlier, I introduced myself to Han Song and Fei Dao. We had a pleasant conversation. Before meeting with them, I had read all their publications I could find. Three years earlier, my friend Yan Feng (a Fudan professor) sent me a manuscript called Santi (later rendered into English as The Three-Body Problem). He highly recommended that I read it. But I was busy with something else at that time; I didn’t even read through the second chapter (the chapters were in the same order as they appeared in the English translation by Ken Liu). It was not until 2008 that I picked it up again, felt awed, and was soon obsessed with this new wave of Chinese science fiction: Liu Cixin, Han Song, Wang Jinkang, He Xi, La La, Zhao Haihong, Chen Qiufan, Xia Jia, Fei Dao, Hao Jingfang, Chi Hui, etc. I read every piece I could find written by them, and I strongly suggested to the Shanghai conference organizers that we invite Liu Cixin to the conference. However, Liu Cixin couldn’t come due to a schedule conflict. But Han Song and Fei Dao did not fail their mission; in a very humble and yet powerful way, they succeeded in making science fiction the hot topic for the conference. By the time Han Song and Fei Dao finished speaking, I felt that I had come to an epiphany: Chinese science fiction had already experienced a decade of its own golden age, 1999 to 2010. Unfortunately, it was almost unknown to people outside the circle of SF fans. The mainstream literary scholars knew nothing.
During his presentation, Fei Dao compared this new wave of Chinese science fiction to a lonely hidden army. Perhaps it would have perished without anyone paying attention to it. Indeed, if no one from the literary establishment bothered to pick up a copy of Santi, or had the patience to read the labyrinthine narrative of Han Song’s bizarre story about China’s invisible reality, the new wave of Chinese SF could perhaps only serve as self-entertainment for SF authors and fans. But in July 2010, thanks to Han Song and Fei Dao, this lonely hidden army was brought to the center stage of a convention of literary elites.
Right after the roundtable, Theodore Huters (UCLA), a professor I respect tremendously, began to think about doing an anthology to introduce these new Chinese SF authors. He commissioned me to edit a special double issue for Renditions, a literary magazine that introduced some of China’s most famous authors to the world. It took me two years, with the support of dozens of writers and translators, to complete this job. In 2012, the Renditions special issue was published, featuring ten stories by contemporary Chinese SF authors. It’s about the same time that Ken Liu, the most devoted translator of Chinese science fiction, began to enter the field. Other publications, such as Pathlight, also ran special issues featuring translations of Chinese science fiction. In other countries, such as Italy and Japan, Chinese science fiction has also gained new life in new languages.
When Ken Liu’s translation of The Three-Body Problem appeared in 2014 and won the Hugo Award in 2015, this new wave of Chinese science fiction became an international sensation. What happened later is perhaps familiar to most of the readers: Obama and Mark Zuckerberg both praised the novel; its sequel, Death’s End, was on the bestseller list of the New York Times.
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Scholars are usually a little late to trends. But this time, the tremendous popularity of Chinese science fiction is impossible to ignore. Within only three to four years, Chinese science fiction has quickly become one of the most prosperous subfields for China scholars. Major academic conferences such as MLA, AAS, ACLA, ACCL, and the like all feature panels, roundtables, workshops devoted to Chinese science fiction. As one of the first Chinese American scholars paying attention to this new development of the genre, I was frequently commissioned to contribute to academic journals/volumes in both the US and China (and France and Germany as well), edit special issues, and even organize conferences and workshops. I am not alone in this campaign. I have such comrades-in-arms as Hua Li, who wrote several articles on contemporary SF, and Nathaniel Isaacson, who recently published Celestial Empire: Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction, the first monograph completely devoted to the study of early Chinese science fiction. More importantly, an entire new generation of younger scholars engaged the topic seriously, producing more systematic research and presenting more provocative arguments. It was almost like a miracle: a new continent for scholarly adventure emerged in front of our eyes.
Still, I need to emphasize that the field has its own history. Its current momentum is new, but it still has a heritage that set up some framework for the contemporary research, just like this new wave that also has its precedents—at least a few short-lived booms that took place in the first decade of the twentieth century: the 1950s to 1960s as children’s literature in China, 1970s to 1980s in Taiwan, and a major revival on the mainland during the early Reform Era. However, the history of Chinese science fiction has never been a continuous one. It is full of gaps and interruptions caused by politics or the change of cultural paradigms. Each generation of new authors had to reestablish the paradigm. Only on a few occasions could they get access to earlier authors’ work, but they rarely received obvious, substantial influences from them.
But for literary scholars, the task is not just to test how earlier generations influenced later ones, or to try to create a literary history that pretends to be coherent and consistent. Literary scholars put more emphasis on texts and contexts. I need to pay homage to three scholars who made major research on the genre before its recent revival. In the early 1980s, German sinologist Rudolf Wagner published a lengthy article “Lobby Literature: Archeology and Present Functions of Science Fiction in China.” It mainly discusses science fiction of the early Reform Era. Wagner defined it as lobby liter
ature without labeling it as propaganda, but gave a subtle and sympathetic analysis of the genre’s rich meanings at the turning point of China’s political situation. His article is an inspiring piece that connects the future-oriented SF to past history and present challenges.
By the end of the 1980s, Wu Dingbo collaborated with Patrick Murphy to publish the first translated anthology of Chinese science fiction from the 1980s, titled Science Fiction from China (New York: Praeger, 1989). Wu wrote an introduction that serves as a concise history of Chinese science fiction, presenting most of the important authors and advocates for the genre from the early twentieth century to the early 1980s. He spent more time introducing the rise and decline of Chinese SF during the early Reform Era. Wu’s introduction was the most complete discussion on the genre published in English by that time.
In 1997, David Der-wei Wang’s paradigm-making book Fin-de-siecle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1848–1911 (Stanford, 1997) was published. One of his chapters, “Confused Horizons: Science Fantasy,” is the defining study of late Qing science fiction, which was first promoted by Liang Qichao and later prospered for nearly a decade (1902 to 1911). Wang’s approach is to combine textual analysis and cultural history, looking into the imaginative and epistemological levels of the narrative. Wang’s study has had a deep impact on later scholars’ work on late Qing science fiction. It is no exaggeration to say that after Wang’s book was published there was a revival of scholarly interest in late Qing literature, including science fiction.
In China, the pioneer in Chinese science fiction studies is no doubt Wu Yan. He was almost the sole serious scholar working on the genre for decades before it received recognition from more scholars. In addition to a series of academic articles, Wu published in 2011 a monograph titled “Kehuan wenxue lungang” (Outline of Science Fiction Studies). Unlike Rudolf Wagner, Wu Dingbo, or David Der-wei Wang, Wu Yan focuses his study on contemporary Chinese science fiction writers, comparing them to Western authors and applying a number of theories (including cyborg, feminism, and globalization) to analyzing these writers. In China today, Wu Yan, as the only advisor qualified to advise Ph.D. students to do projects on SF, is definitely the leader of the community of Chinese science fiction researchers.
By the time Chinese science fiction began to gain international recognition, Wu Yan edited a special issue for Science Fiction Studies, a collection of about ten research articles covering the entire history of the genre in China, from late Qing science fantasy to Lao She’s Cat Country, from the 1980s to the very recent boom of the genre after 2000. Both Liu Cixin and Han Song also contributed to this special issue, which is a landmark in the development of the field.
My own research on Chinese science fiction is rather limited to contemporary works, particularly the New Wave, a term I borrowed from British SF history to baptize this new trend of the genre that shows both social concern and artistic innovations. It is a controversial definition, I know. I have published four articles in English (two translated into French and German), and numerous articles and essays in Chinese. In one recent article, “Representations of the Invisible: Poetics and Politics of Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction,” I argued that the trend called the New Wave grew out of the post-1989 political culture, and it has not only resurrected the genre but has also subverted its own conventions, which used to be dominated by political utopianism and technological optimism throughout nearly the entire twentieth century in mainland China. Contemporary science fiction reenergizes the genre by consolidating and reinventing a variety of generic conventions, cultural elements, and political visions—ranging from space opera to cyberpunk fiction, from utopianism to posthumanism, and from parodied visions of China’s rise to deconstructions of the myth of national development. In a peculiar way, Chinese science fiction has entered its Golden Age at the same time that it generates a new wave subversion of the genre. The new wave has a dark and subversive side that speaks either to the “invisible” dimensions of the reality, or simply the impossibility of representing a certain “reality” dictated by the discourse of mainstream realism. On its most radical side, the new wave of Chinese SF has been thriving on an avant-garde cultural spirit that encourages one to think beyond the conventional ways of perceiving reality and to challenge the commonly accepted ideas about progress, development, economic miracle, and nation and people.
I should also mention that in addition to mainland writers, a number of authors in Taiwan and Hong Kong have also made important contributions to the field, particularly those authors of experimental fiction, like Lo Yi-chin, Dung Kai-cheung, and Ng Kim-chew, who all appropriate elements of science fiction to achieve a more sophisticated level of literary experimentation with motifs of heterotopia, the posthuman, and metaphors of identity. Sinophone science fiction could be the next goldmine to be discovered, explored, and brought to attention for a world audience.
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Through editing a few special journal issues and organizing conferences, I got to know a number of scholars working on interesting topics. For example, Adrian Thieret writes about Liu Cixin’s version of cosmopolitanism; Cara Healey studies genre transgression and transnationalism in science fiction; Hua Li explores a variety of topics in the political, environmental, and metaphorical in Chinese SF; Jiang Jing studies both late Qing science fiction as the origin of modern Chinese literature and the socialist science fiction from the 1950s to 1980s; Nathaniel Isaacson, after his book on late Qing SF was published, is working on variations of science fiction in other genres during the Republic Era and early PRC; I myself prepare to write about heterotopia in the variations of science fiction by Taiwanese and Hong Kong authors. Scholars like Li Guangyi, Ren Dongmei, Liang Qingsan, and Zhang Feng (Sanfeng) have unearthed important materials for further research in the genre. Some more comprehensive bibliography and collection of materials will hopefully be made accessible to researchers soon.
The field keeps growing, and the new continent is full of wonders. I hold a firm belief that Chinese science fiction is going to be, or has already become, the most rapidly growing subfield of modern Chinese literary studies. It is changing the field. It reshapes our understanding of Chinese literary modernity as well as its potentials for future development.
27 Originally written in English.
SCIENCE FICTION: EMBARRASSING NO MORE
by Fei Dao
Some years ago, I attended a speech by an arthouse director I admired. He was known for unflinching realism in his work, and the small Chinese towns buffeted by the tsunami of modernization portrayed in his films always reminded me of my hometown.
In his speech, he opined that contemporary Chinese society was obsessed by the present, and was without a clear vision of either the past or the future. Therefore, for his next film, he wanted to return to the past, to reexamine and reevaluate Chinese history. So, during the audience Q&A, I asked him whether he would eventually make a film about the future, or, in other words, a sci-fi film.
The audience roared with laughter.
For most in attendance, the appearance of the word “sci-fi” in the cultured and sophisticated setting of this speech was utterly incongruous. My question shocked them in the same way the audience at an opera would be stunned if someone had asked whether Pavarotti was considering taking up beatboxing.
To be honest, I was terribly embarrassed. No one wanted to be that guy who asked odd questions that made everyone feel awkward. Of China’s 1.4 billion people, the number of science fiction fans was a vanishingly small minority. For most Chinese, “sci-fi” conjured up images of young, gawky teenagers obsessed with anime, wuxia novels, outrageous clothing, and ridiculous hairstyles. Like those other juvenile pursuits, sci-fi was to be abandoned when one reached maturity. Science fiction was neither practical nor useful and had nothing to do with real life. In most people’s minds, it was no more real than distant countries whose capitals they couldn’t even recall. Once in a while, they might hear the genre mentioned,
but they knew nothing about it and had no desire to find out more. Indeed, if “sci-fi” happened to pop up in conversation, their faces would twist into expressions of bewilderment, and they would ask, “Are you talking about Harry Potter? That’s sci-fi, isn’t it?”
In any event, I was younger back then, and my courage had not yet been dulled by experience. Thus, when I attended an international academic conference meant to discuss Important And Intellectual Subjects, the inexplicable urge to bring up science fiction once again gripped me. Taking advantage of a coffee break, I walked up to a renowned German sinologist and asked him if he had ever read any Chinese science fiction.
This aged and respected scholar had once declared that after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Chinese authors had produced no work that would be considered great by the rest of the world. I did not agree with him.
At that time, Mo Yan hadn’t yet won the Nobel, but I wasn’t thinking of him anyway. The second book in Liu Cixin’s “Three-Body” series, The Dark Forest, had just been published, and every Chinese sci-fi fan was thrumming with excitement. I was certain that at least in the realm of science fiction, a contemporary Chinese author had indeed written something the equal of any of the great Western classics.
But the renowned sinologist interrupted my disquisition politely, “I don’t even read German sci-fi!”
There was nothing I could say in response to that. Heck, even Chinese readers for Chinese sci-fi were few and far between.
I wasn’t some rabid superfan who believed that my beloved genre was the best thing ever to happen to literature and anyone who couldn’t appreciate sci-fi was a philistine. In fact, I didn’t even like to argue with people. My questions were a kind of performance art: out of a desire for security or mental peace, everyone built around themselves a mental firewall that filtered the torrents of information in which modern life inundated all of us. “Sci-fi” was one of the keywords tagged by most people’s firewalls as useless information, and I simply wanted to toss it over the firewall so that they had to evaluate it anew instead of automatically ignoring it. I suppose many would think what I did was foolish and pointless, but at least I didn’t harm anyone with my questions.
