by Kali Wallace
There is, in fact, a fairly vibrant body of academic scholarship about Chinese science fiction, with insightful and interesting commentary by scholars such as Mingwei Song and Nathaniel Isaacson. Panels on Chinese science fiction are quite common at academic conferences on comparative literature and Asian studies. However, my impression is that many (most?) genre readers, writers, and critics in fandom are not familiar with this body of work. The scholarly essays generally avoid the pitfalls I warn about and are nuanced and careful in their analysis. Readers seeking an informed opinion are urged to look up these works.
So, I will state that I do not consider myself an expert on Chinese science fiction. Although I have read a sizable number of works of Chinese SF and translated some of them from Chinese into English, I know enough only to know that I don’t know much. I know enough to know that I need to study more, a lot more. And I know enough to know that there are no simple answers.
A popular way for Chinese fans to describe the contemporary Chinese science fiction scene is to say that there are three prominent, active writers who belong to an older generation, the so-called “Big Three” of Liu Cixin, Wang Jinkang, and Han Song. In addition, there is a generation of younger writers who have generally achieved fame with short fiction, though many have also started novel careers.
It’s impossible to speak of contemporary Chinese science fiction without starting with Liu Cixin, who has been sometimes described as a “neo-classical” writer whose novels and short stories are compared to the works of Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke, but with a modern, “Chinese” sensibility. Liu has won China’s most prestigious literary genre awards multiple times, and his masterpiece, the Three-Body trilogy (consisting of The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End), has been credited for single-handedly gaining Chinese science fiction respectability among the Chinese literary establishment. A massive work spanning the time from China’s Cultural Revolution to the end of the universe, the trilogy describes an alien invasion of Earth triggered by a Mao-era METI project, and the consequent scattering of humanity to the stars. Liu’s short fiction is similarly characterized by a grand imaginative scope, though he often roots his stories in the lives of China’s ordinary citizens who live far from the big cities and have little wealth.
The other two writers, Wang Jinkang and Han Song, are quite different. Wang Jinkang’s works are very much concerned with the intersection of science and ethics. His recent novel The Ant Life, for instance, features a young scientist who succeeds in creating a utopia by infecting the people of an isolated community with hormones extracted from ants to replace their selfish desires with altruistic ones directed to the good of the community as a whole. As one might imagine, this experiment backfires and unintended consequences come to dominate. Many of Wang’s stories are infused with this flavor of sociological SF.
Han Song, on the other hand, focuses his acerbic wit on the “science fictional” excesses of modern development, particularly as manifested in China’s breakneck rush toward “progress.” His High-Speed Rail, for instance, uses China’s high-speed train network as a postmodern metaphor to explore the rapid and grotesque devolution (or perhaps unmooring) of values in contemporary China through a series of surreal, dark, violent images.
In contrast to the Big Three, the younger writers of the new generation generally have done their best works so far only in short form (though this is changing). They make use of a variety of approaches and styles, and it’s very difficult to generalize about them in any useful way.
For example, this group includes the “science fiction realism” of Chen Qiufan (a.k.a. Stanley Chan), whose “The Year of the Rat” describes the plight of unemployed Chinese college grads being drafted to fight genetically engineered rats. The story can be read as a satire on the inequities and dislocations caused by China’s rapid development as well as providing a perspective on China’s low-wage manufacturing sector that may be unfamiliar to Western readers.
Chen’s debut novel, The Waste Tide, is a cyberpunk thriller set in China’s e-waste processing hub. Its detailed worldbuilding and meticulous attention to technical rigor are further enriched by trenchant observations concerning the complex linguistic landscape of China’s economically developed regions, where multiple topolects of Sinitic languages as well as English coexist and compete. This focus on linguistic topography should come as no surprise when one learns that Chen is fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese, Teochew, English, and once won Taiwan’s prestigious Dragon Fantasy Award for having written a science fiction story in Classical Chinese (a feat akin to one of us writing a science fiction story in Anglo-Saxon and then winning a Nebula or Hugo for it).
Next, encounter the “porridge SF” of Xia Jia, whose dreamlike, layered images defy easy genre classifications. In “A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight,” Xia’s rich prose sketches a fantastic world of ghosts that turn out to be a futuristic, abandoned theme park of post-human cyborgs.
In “Spring Festival: Happiness, Anger, Love, Sorrow, Joy,” Xia’s near-future vignettes of Chinese traditions transformed by technology are punctuated by supernatural acts of resistance and rebellion. Besides a career as one of China’s most popular science fiction authors, Xia is also an accomplished scholar (she holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature) and translator (she has translated works by Ray Bradbury, among others).
You’ll also find the overt, wry political metaphors of Ma Boyong, whose “City of Silence” pays homage to 1984 by upgrading the machinery of state surveillance with network technology and counters it with acts of resistance drawn from the experience of Chinese netizens.
Incisive, funny, and erudite, Ma’s works are deeply allusive, featuring surprising and entertaining juxtapositions of traditional elements from Chinese culture and history against contemporary references. The ease with which Ma marshals his encyclopedic knowledge of Chinese history and traditions also makes it a challenge to translate his most interesting works.
For example, he has written an imaginative history of coffee in China that applies the conventions of China’s rich millennia-long tea culture to coffee, as well as a wuxia (martial arts fantasy) novella featuring Joan of Arc, in which the tropes and expectations of wuxia are mapped to Medieval Europe. These stories are extremely entertaining for the reader with the right cultural context and shed light on the genres and sources Ma plays with, but would be neigh-impenetrable for a reader in translation without extensive footnotes.
Then there’s also Bao Shu, a celebrated new writer whose meteoric rise onto the scene during the last few years has been propelled by a series of inventive, funny, and moving short stories. Last year, Bao Shu published his debut novel, The Ruins of Time, which tells a tale of heroism and faith in a world trapped in a time loop, and which has just won the Xingyun (Nebula) Award for Chinese SF. Bao Shu’s true “first” novel was a fanfiction sequel set in the world of Liu Cixin’s Three-Body series, and the playful, pastiche-laden style he first demonstrated there remains a key part of his appeal—and gives his translators plenty of headaches.
This is but a cursory and shallow glance at the scene of contemporary Chinese science fiction. Time and space limitations prevent me from going into depth about the surreal imagery and metaphor-driven logic of Tang Fei, the dense, rich language-pictures painted by Cheng Jingbo, the fabulism and sociological speculation of Hao Jingfang, the gentle meditations on art and science by Wu Shuang (a.k.a. Anna Wu), or the rigorous historical imagination of Qian Lifang, whose Will of Heaven, a science fictional retelling of the founding of the Han Dynasty, was perhaps the most popular work of long-form science fiction in the pre-Three Body era.
I also haven’t read enough to comment on other prominent writers such as Fei Dao, Jiang Bo, He Xi, and many others. And of course, I’ve said nothing here concerning the large number of chuanyue (“time travel”) works, many of which also contain science fictional elements and deserve an essay on their own . . .
But this brief survey should give a
hint of the broad range in the science fiction written in China. Faced with such variety, I think it is far more useful and interesting to study the authors as individuals and to treat their works on their own terms rather than trying to impose a pre-conceived set of expectations on them because they happen to be “Chinese science fiction.”
Given the realities of China’s politics and its uneasy relationship with the West, it is natural for Western readers encountering Chinese science fiction to see it through the lens of Western dreams and hopes and fairytales about Chinese politics. “Subversion” in the pro-West sense may become an interpretive crutch.
It is tempting, for example, to view Ma Boyong’s “The City of Silence” as a simple attack on China’s censorship apparatus, or to read Chen Qiufan’s “The Year of the Rat” as just a criticism of China’s education system and labor market, or even to reduce Xia Jia’s “A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight” to a veiled metaphor for China’s eminent domain policies in the service of state-driven development.
I would urge the reader to resist such temptation. Imagining that the political concerns of Chinese writers are the same as what the Western reader would like them to be is at best arrogant and at worst dangerous. Chinese writers are saying something about the globe, about all of humanity, not just China, and trying to understand their works through this perspective is, I think, the far more rewarding approach.
It is true that there is a long tradition in China of voicing dissent and criticism through the use of literary metaphor; however, this is but one of the purposes with which writers write and for which readers read. Like writers everywhere today, Chinese writers are concerned with humanism, with globalization, with technological advancement, with tradition and modernity, with disparities in wealth and privilege, with development and environmental preservation, with history, rights, freedom, and justice, with family and love, with the beauty of expressing sentiment through words, with language play, with the grandeur of science, with the thrill of discovery, with the ultimate meaning of life. We do the works a disservice when we neglect these things and focus on geopolitics alone.
Despite the diversity of approaches and subjects and styles, the authors and stories I have discussed (and especially those works that have made it into English translation) represent but a narrow slice of the contemporary Chinese science fiction landscape. As Xia Jia has said, “Contemporary Chinese science fiction writers form a community full of internal differences. These differences manifest themselves in age, region of origin, professional background, social class, ideology, cultural identity, aesthetics, and other areas.”4
The stories that are translated tend to be written by authors who are graduates of China’s most elite colleges and work in highly regarded professions. They tend to be award-winning stories rather than popular fiction published on the Web. And as I’ve already hinted at earlier, works that are translated tend to be more accessible than works requiring a deeper understanding of Chinese culture and history. These are unfortunate biases and omissions, and the reader should thus be cautious about any conclusions they may draw from the stories in translation being “representative.”
China is dreaming, and its dreams contain multitudes.
* * *
Selected Bibliography of Contemporary Chinese SF Works in Translation
Individual Stories in Magazines or General Anthologies
Chen Qiufan, “The Endless Farewell,” Pathlight, Spring 2013, translated by Ken Liu.
Chen Qiufan, “The Fish of Lijiang,” Clarkesworld, August 2011, translated by Ken Liu.
Chen Qiufan, “The Flower of Shazui,” Interzone, October 2012, translated by Ken Liu.
Chen Qiufan, “The Mao Ghost,” Lightspeed, March 2014, translated by Ken Liu.
Chen Qiufan, “Oil of Angels,” Upgraded, edited by Neil Clarke, translated by Ken Liu.
Chen Qiufan, “The Year of the Rat,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July/August 2013, translated by Ken Liu.
Chen Qiufan, The Waste Tide. English translation by Ken Liu, forthcoming.
Cheng Jingbo, “Grave of the Fireflies,” Clarkesworld, January 2014, translated by Ken Liu.
Hao Jingfang, “Invisible Planets,” Lightspeed, December 2013, translated by Ken Liu.
Hao Jingfang, “Folding Beijing,” Uncanny, 2014, translated by Ken Liu.
Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem, Tor Books, 2014, translated by Ken Liu.
Liu Cixin, “Taking Care of God,” Pathlight, April 2012.
Ma Boyong, “The City of Silence,” World SF Blog, November 2011, translated by Ken Liu.
Ma Boyong, “Mark Twain Robots,” TRSF (September 2011), a special publication of MIT’s Technology Review, translated by Ken Liu.
Qian Lifang, Will of Heaven, translated by “WoH Translator.”
Tang Fei, “Call Girl,” Apex, June 2013, translated by Ken Liu.
Tang Fei, “Pepe,” Clarkesworld, June 2014, translated by John Chu.
Xia Jia, “A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight,” Clarkesworld, February 2012, translated by Ken Liu.
Xia Jia, “Spring Festival: Happiness, Anger, Love, Sorrow, Joy,” Clarkesworld, September 2012, translated by Ken Liu.
Xia Jia, “Tongtong’s Summer,” Upgraded, ed. Neil Clarke, 2014, translated by Ken Liu.
Xia Jia, “What Makes Chinese Science Fiction Chinese?,” Tor.com, July 22, 2014.
Zhao Haihong, “Exuviation,” Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, 2010 (reprinted by Lightspeed, January 2014.
Journals or Anthologies Specializing in Works in Translation
The Apex Book of World SF, edited by Lavie Tidhar, 2009. Includes
Han Song, “The Wheel of Samsara”
Yang Ping, “Wizard World”
The Apex Book of World SF, Volume 2, edited by Lavie Tidhar, 2012. Includes
Chen Qiufan, “The Tomb”
Yang Ping, “Wizard World”
RENDITIONS A Chinese-English Translation Magazine Nos. 77 & 78—Spring and Autumn 2012, edited by Mingwei Song. This double issue contains both works from the early twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. The more relevant contemporary works include:
Liu Cixin, “The Poetry Cloud,” translated by Chi-yin Ip and Cheuk Wong
Liu Cixin, “The Village Schoolteacher,” translated by Christopher Elford and Jiang Chenxin
Han Song, “The Passengers and the Creator,” translated by Nathaniel Isaacson
Wang Jinkang, “The Reincarnated Giant,” translated by Carlos Rojas
La La, “The Radio Waves That Never Die,” translated by Petula Parris-Huang
Zhao Haihong, “1923—a Fantasy,” translated by Nicky Harman and Pang Zhaoxia
Chi Hui, “The Rainforest,” translated by Jie Li
Fei Dao, “The Demon’s Head,” translated by David Hull
Xia Jia, “The Demon-Enslaving Flask,” translated by Linda Rui Feng
FOOTNOTES:
1 Figures obtained from Gardner Dozois’ 2013 summation in his Year’s Best Science Fiction, Thirty-First Annual Collection.
2 A selected bibliography is given at the end of this essay so that readers may find some of these works.
3 For more on the history of Chinese science fiction, see Xia Jia’s essay, “What Makes Chinese Science Fiction Chinese?” July 22, 2014, Tor.com.
4 Xia Jia, “What Makes Chinese Science Fiction Chinese?” July 22, 2014, Tor.com.
About the Author
Ken Liu is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.
Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, will be published by Saga Press, Simon & Schuster’s new genre fiction imprint, in April 2015. Saga will also publish a collec
tion of his short stories.
In Civilized Society:
A Conversation with Kameron Hurley
Alvaro Zinos-Amaro
I first learned of Kameron Hurley’s work when Jeff VanderMeer wrote about God’s War as one of his top books from 2011 in a piece for Locus. He referred to the novel’s “fascinating insect-based tech” and “unique cultural underpinnings,” which pretty much sold me right there. He also noted that Hurley’s prose was “muscular,” which further intrigued me. For readers who don’t know the series, I’ll add that Nyx, the protagonist, is a character with whom it’s impossible not to develop a relationship—though I won’t say of what type.
As someone who enjoys non-fiction related to science fiction, I was (doubly?) impressed when, at the most recent WorldCon, Kameron was awarded with two Hugos for her non-fiction: one for Best Fan Writer and one for Best Related Work, for her essay “ ‘We Have Always Fought’: Challenging the ‘Women, Cattle and Slaves’ Narrative.” You can find this piece, and much else besides, in her non-fiction collection, We Have Always Fought: Essays on Writing, Craft and Fandom (2014).
These days whenever I download the latest copy of Locus, one of the first things I do is click through to see if there’s a new commentary piece by Kameron—they are invariably impassioned and thought-provoking.
Kameron Hurley is the two-time Hugo awarding winning author of The Mirror Empire and the science fantasy noir God’s War Trilogy. The trilogy earned her a Kitschy Award for best Debut Novel, Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer, and a Nebula and Locus Award nomination. She has lived in Washington, Alaska, Ohio, Chicago, and Durban, South Africa. Her short fiction has appeared in magazines such as Lightspeed, EscapePod and Strange Horizons, as well as the anthologies Year’s Best SF, The Mammoth Book of SF by Women, andThe Lowest Heaven. Her work has been translated into Romanian, Swedish, Chinese, Spanish and Russian. She also writes a regular column for Locus Magazine and blogs at kameronhurley.com.
