SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
On Chinese Science Fiction: Selected Essays and Critical Pieces in English, 2015-2020
Compiled by Liu Jian (China Science Fiction Research Center and Tianjin Art Vocational College) and Hua Li (Montana State University).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Cara Healey, Veronica Hollinger, Nathaniel Isaacson, Frederike Schneider-Vielsäcker, and Mingwei Song for their help. Some of the abstracts have been edited for length.
2020
Luo, Xiaoming. “Unlocking the Future: Characterizing ‘Hope’ in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction.” Cultural Studies 34.2 (Mar. 2020): 235-56.
“The future” is the primary driver for the development of Chinese science fiction. This article examines how “hope” is characterized in Chinese sf from two different perspectives. First, are there any reiterations of the future more free or unique than that which already exists with high-tech life? Second, is there a more active approach to conceptualizing the individual’s relationship with the future? The Town Beneath the Tower by Liu Weijia is this article’s entry point to examining depictions of the future in Chinese sf of the past twenty years. I analyze contemporary Chinese sf’s imagined aspects of a barbarous world vehemently opposed to progress, low-tech society, and the relationship between the individual and the future. What are the advantages and disadvantages that stem from society’s search for hope and projections of its future in contemporary Chinese science fiction?
Li, Hua. “Don’t Allow Troubled Vision in Science Fiction to Become Reality.” “Thinking Through the Pandemic: A Symposium.” SFS 47.3 (2020): 359-61.
China’s science fiction community was the earliest group on the Chinese literary scene to respond to the COVID-19 crisis when it officially began in January 2020. On the one hand, this community foregrounded discussions of both local and international sf stories and films about virus pandemics. On the other, it thought beyond the current COVID-19 moment, actively pondering future scenarios that we might create through our choices going forward about how to implement new advances in science and technology.
Moran, Thomas. “The Perverse Utopianism of Willed Human Extinction: Writing Extinction in Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem.” Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction. Ed. Zachary Kendal et al. Springer, 2020. 119-40.
This essay examines the perverse utopianism in Chinese author Liu Cixin’s novel, The Three-Body Problem. It argues that the text’s exploration of the desire for human extinction functions as a critique of the utopian belief in scientific progress, evident in earlier Chinese sf and in the aesthetics of socialist realism. Extinction becomes a way of mapping the decline of the idea of utopia. The threat of extinction allegorizes a number of threats to the human species, particularly climate catastrophe and the future solar death of the Earth. In Three-Body, extinction pushes allegorical writing to its limit. In reaching the limits of allegory, the text reaches a utopia that is radically inconceivable and refuses inscription.
Special Issue: Alternative Sinofuturisms. SFRA Review 50.2-3 (2020)
Aloisio, Loïc, and Gwennaël Gaffric. “A Discussion between Two French Translators of Chinese Science.” SFRA Review 50.2-3 (2020): 71-78.
Conn, Virginia L. “Photographesomenonic Sinofuturism(s).” SFRA Review 50.2-3 (2020): 79-85.
_____. “Sinofuturism and Chinese Science Fiction: An Introduction to the Alternative Sinofuturisms Special Issue.” SFRA Review 50.2-3 (2020): 66-70.
De Seta, Gabriele. “Sinofuturism as Inverse Orientalism: China’s Future and the Denial of Coevalness.” SFRA Review 50.2-3 (2020): 86-94.
Fisher, Margaret A. “The Science-Fictional in China’s Online Learning Initiatives.” SFRA Review 50.2-3 (2020): 95-103.
Herold, Carmen. “China’s Sonic Fictions: Music, Technology, and the Phantasma of a Sinicized Future.” SFRA Review 50.2-3 (2020): 104-14.
Ireland, Amy. “Empathy, War, and Women.” SFRA Review 50.2-3 (2020): 115-23.
Lyu, Guangzhao. “Capitalist Monster and Bottled Passengers: Political Stakes of Embodiment in The Reincarnated Giant and The Last Subway.” SFRA Review 50.2-3 (2020): 124-32.
Møller-Olsen, Astrid. “Data Narrator: Digital Chronotopes in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction.” SFRA Review 50.2-3 (2020): 133-40.
Ooi, Yen. “Chinese Science Fiction: A Genre of Adversity.” SFRA Review 50.2-3 (2020): 141-48.
Schneider-Vielsäcker, Frederike. “Images of Alternative Chinese Futures: Critical Reflections on the ‘China Dream’ in Chen Qiufan’s ‘The Flower of Shazui’.” SFRA Review 50.2-3 (2020): 149-56.
Silk, Molly. “The Wandering Earth: A Device for the Propagation of the Chinese Regime’s Desired Space Narratives?” SFRA Review 50.2-3 (2020): 157-67.
van Vuren, Mitchell. “Wondering About the Futures of the Wandering Earth: A Comparative Analysis of Liu Cixin’s “The Wandering Earth” and Frant Gwo’s Film Adaptation.” SFRA Review 50.2-3 (2020): 168-75.
Zhang, Dino Ge. “A Diagnosis of Sinofuturism from the Urban-Rural Fringe.” SFRA Review 50.2-3 (2020): 176-81.
2019
Aloisio, Loïc. “A Response to an Alien Invasion: The Rise of Chinese Science Fiction.” Ming-Qing Studies (2019): 11-28.
The intellectual life of the late Qing dynasty was closely connected to political history. Born in a setting of humiliation and fear provoked by Western domination over Chinese territory and the West’s political power during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sf turned out to be a major ideological and political tool for Chinese authors, the incarnation of the intelligentsia’s ideals. These ideals involve history, hopes for a brighter future, and a rejection of millennia-old traditions. Science has been viewed as the only way for China to regain its dignity and to enable its people, who were hammered by the Darwinian theories of evolution, to avoid the outright extinction of their “race.” This paper undertakes a historical study that enables us to understand how and why science fiction was introduced in China at this time and what its role was, in order to have a better understanding of its proper place in Chinese society at the end of the Qing dynasty.
______. “Translating Chinese Science Fiction: The Importance of Neologisms, Coined Words and Paradigms.” Journal of Translation Studies 3.1 (Jun. 2019): 97-115.
Recently, Chinese science fiction literature seems to have gained unprecedented visibility in Western countries, having been translated into many Western languages, in particular English. The question of translation of this literature seems therefore to be a topical issue with several potential difficulties, such as the translation of neologisms and coined words, as well as that of the resulting encyclopedias (Eco; Saint-Gelais) and paradigms (Angenot). Hence, this paper aims to discuss the difficulties and possibilities of recreating Chinese written neologisms and coined words in Western alphabetic languages.
Dougherty, Stephen. “Liu Cixin, Arthur C. Clarke, and ‘Repositioning.’” SFS 46.1 (2019): 39-62.
This essay investigates the work of the contemporary Chinese science-fiction writer Liu Cixin in the context of his relation to the British sf icon Arthur C. Clarke. Liu identifies himself as a great fan of Golden Age Anglo-American sf, and I argue that Liu is no more original, no more distinctively “local” a writer, than when he is channeling the ghosts of his Anglo-American forebears, especially Arthur C. Clarke. My aim is to consider the relation between Liu and Clarke in terms of a dynamic that the translation theorist Emily Apter refers to as “repositioning.”
Gaffric, Gwennaël. “Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Trilogy and the Status of Science Fiction in Contemporary China.” Trans. Will Peyton. SFS 46.1 (2019): 21-38.
The recent success of Liu Cixin’s hard sf trilogy Santi [The Three-Body Trilogy, 2006-2008] (the first volume in English translation won the Hugo Award in 2015) is symbolic of the important rise of Chinese sf both in China and globally. 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. Liu Cixin has become for the readers, critics, and supporters of Chinese soft power the standard-bearer of a new “era” of Chinese sf. In light of the history of sf in China since 1949 and its political reappropriation, this essay examines 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.
Healey, Cara. “Madmen and Iron Houses: Lu Xun, Information Degradation, and Generic Hybridity in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction.” SFS 46.3 (2019): 511-24.
Chinese sf can be characterized by its generic hybridity: it combines, subverts, and reinterprets conventions of both earlier Chinese literary traditions and the Western sf canon. One example of this hybridity is the paradigm of information degradation, a common sf trope from H.G. Wells on that shares epistemological and ontological features with the work of early-twentieth-century Chinese realist writer Lu Xun. I use this paradigm to present a science-fictional reading of Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” (1918), a foundational text in Chinese national literature. I then extrapolate how this reading of “Diary” is relevant to contemporary Chinese sf through close readings of Han Song’s “The Passengers and the Creator” (2006) and Zhang Ran’s “Ether” (2012). These stories adapt the information-degradation paradigm in ways that evoke both Lu Xun and Wells, illustrating a characteristic of contemporary Chinese sf that may account in part for its growing popularity.
Isaacson, Nathaniel. “Locating Kexue Xiangsheng (Science Crosstalk) in Relation to the Selective Tradition of Chinese Science Fiction.” Osiris 34.1 (Spring 2019): 139-57.
Kexue xiangsheng [science crosstalk] features comic dialogues aimed at popularizing knowledge in the physical and social sciences. It emerged in the PRC in the late 1950s as part of a massive effort in the state-supervised culture industry to promote science. The genre shared many of the hallmarks of PRC instrumentalist science fiction, as both were based on a Soviet model. These works of socialist realism narrated transformations in the consciousness of their characters as they came to understand the guiding principles of the world around them, including basic science, evolution, and dialectical materialism. Forms such as kexue xiangsheng worked in concert with other socialist-realist modes. Through education in what I term the “quotidian utopian”—small health and hygiene measures with the potential to ameliorate major health challenges—these popular science genres also straddled the line between Frederic Jameson’s “Utopian form and Utopian wish.”
______. “Science as Institutional Formation in The New Era and Journey to Utopia.” Le Monde Chinois: nouvelle Asie 51/52 (Mar.-Apr. 2017): 28-37.
The emergence of science fiction in China was conditioned by an awareness of the potential complicity of the genre with the imperial imagination and by a desire to use the genre as a means of creating counter-narratives. Late Qing intellectuals agonized over how to reconcile westernization, modernization, and the adoption of foreign technologies with a Chinese epistemological framework. Long before critiques of Orientalism had gained traction as a cornerstone of postcolonial studies, Biheguan Zhuren’s The New Era (1908) and Xiaoran Yusheng’s Journey to Utopia (1906) expressed an implicit understanding that Orientalism profoundly conditioned early twentieth-century geopolitics. Here I highlight a particular phenomenon in late Qing science fiction: insofar as sf addressed the significance of “science,” late Qing intellectuals often depicted science as the product of specific modern institutional formations. Both novels also pay close attention to the institutions dedicated to the production and dissemination of knowledge, and to modes of social organization, especially time.
Junker, Nicklas. “Chinese Science Fiction Literature: Can It Do for China What K-Pop and Manga Do for Korea and Japan?” Asia in Focus 7 (2019): 24-33.
There has been little success with exporting Chinese culture abroad, despite considerable efforts made by the Chinese government. Contemporary Chinese science fiction has attracted increasing global attention and may be an important cultural tool to express a Chinese narrative abroad. In this paper I examine the role of Chinese sf as a transnational cultural tool from a bottom-up perspective. I attempt to understand the current role and function of Chinese sf in the Sinosphere by looking into cultural flows within the sf community and examining the routes of this transnational and transcultural voyage. The findings show that Chinese sf is becoming globalized, reaching consumers all over the world while still maintaining its regional context. This paper contributes to an enhanced understanding of how Chinese sf can create a positive and powerful image of China from the bottom-up.
Li, Guangyi. “China Turns Outward: On the Literary Significance of Liu Cixin’s Science Fiction.” Trans. Nathaniel Isaacson. SFS 46.1 (2019): 1-20.
Modern Chinese literature has seen more than one wave of realist movements aimed at effecting change by “writing the world.” This is both a reflection of writers’ national consciousness and a modern expression of the classical political ideals of “All Under Heaven” and the “Great Unity.” Liu Cixin’s science fiction is characteristic of China once again “turning outward” to engage with the world. His works carry on the nationalist tradition of Chinese salvation from ruin prevalent since the late Qing Dynasty. His works also embody a true universal humanism, showing profound concern and hope for the challenges and fate of humanity. Only by placing his work as a whole in the context of the birth of Chinese sf at the turn of the twentieth century--and its evolution through the socialist period and beyond--can contemporary Chinese literary studies adequately breathe in the vital air of Liu Cixin’s science fiction.
Li, Hua. “Twenty-First Century Chinese Science Fiction on the Rise: Anti-Authoritarianism and Dreams of Freedom.” The Cambridge History of Science Fiction. Ed. Gerry Canavan and Eric Carl Link. Cambridge UP, 2019. 647-63.
This chapter examines Chan Koonchung’s The Fat Years (2009) and Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem (2008), two branches of contemporary Chinese sf: socially engaged sf and hard sf. I focus on the anti-utopian nature of these novels and reveal various interactions among imagined utopia, narrative paradigm, and ideology. The anti-utopian quality is reflected in the transformation of traditional utopian elements and the application of new narrative techniques borrowed from realist literature. At the ideological level, the two authors have undertaken a sober yet creative response to the party-state’s high-flown rhetoric about building a harmonious Chinese society, and its almost single-minded focus on fast economic growth and enabling China’s self-styled “peaceful rise” in the world. They have cautioned readers that technological and economic progress might become instruments for the imposition of an even more regimented tyranny, aiding in a revival of totalitarianism.
Pesaro, Nicoletta. “Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction: Preliminary Reflections on the Translation of a Genre.” Journal of Translation Studies 3.1 (2019): 7-43.
This paper deals with the rise of a new wave of Chinese science fiction over the last decades, attempting to draw a parallel to twentieth-century American science fiction. The paper explores the many similarities (as well as some differences) between these two phenomena, relying on both translation studies and genre studies. Drawing on a definition of genre as a “recurring response to recurring situations” (Miller 1984), the paper briefly examines historical, social, and literary conditions of the two countries, providing examples of the agents, the works, and the reasons that allow us to describe this process as a form of “inter-generic translation.” This study aims at providing an overview of the present discourse on Chinese science fiction in relation to the American experience, highlighting the potential for further and deeper developments of this kind of analysis.
Solomon, Jon. “Discovering the Modern Regime of Translation in China: Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past and Wuhe’s Remains of Life.” Journal of Translation Studies 3.1 (Jun. 2019): 139-83.
This essay focuses on the salient place given to staging both the modern regime of translation and the institution of literature alongside a dramatization of anthropological difference in Liu Cixin’s acclaimed trilogy, Remembrance of Earth’s Past (also known as The Three-Body Trilogy, 2008-2010; Eng. trans. 2014-2016). These are concerns that are, I would argue, not only historically central to twentieth-century Chinese literature, but also place twentieth-century Chinese literature squarely at the crux of some of the most fundamental questions about aesthetic modernity. I argue that Liu’s fiction should not be seen as what happens when a large developing nation with a tradition of literary talent achieves the concentration of capital and technology that might permit an ambitious space program, but rather as what happens when the international institution of literature develops on the basis of an historical repression of its own aesthetic ideology.
Sun, Mengtian. “Imagining Globalization in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl and Chen Qiufan’s The Waste Tide.” SFS 46.2 (2019): 289-306.
A growing number of twenty-first century sf novels have taken up the complexities of globalization. While Anglo-American sf has tended to receive a lot of academic attention, texts from other parts of the world that can provide valuable alternative viewpoints and narratives have not been so widely studied. This essay looks at a Chinese sf novel, The Waste Tide (2013) by Chen Qiufan, that imagines the future of globalization from the perspective of a small town in southern China. I compare it to Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009), examining how Chen’s novel reveals the hidden faces of globalization and provides new ways of seeing and dealing with it. The Waste Tide criticizes the neo-imperialist tendency of contemporary globalization by depicting the global flow of e-waste from developed to developing countries, and it corrects The Windup Girl’s misreading of the waning of the nation-state resulting from the rise of transnational corporations.
2018
Chau, Angie. “From Nobel to Hugo.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 30.1 (2018): 110-35.
In 2015, Ken Liu’s English translation of Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem [Santi] became the first translated novel to win the Hugo Award. The following year in 2016, another Chinese author, Hao Jingfang, received the Hugo for best novelette for “Folding Beijing” (Beijing zhedie), also translated by Ken Liu. This article traces how the circulation of Chinese sf is facilitating contemporary Chinese literature’s foray into world literature. The article argues that the strength of the genre rests in its flexibility in bypassing the low vs. high culture divide, at the same time that it implies universal significance and purports to offer the most appropriate lens through which readers can understand the most pressing social issues in present day China.
Gaffric, Gwennaël. “Chinese Dreams: (Self-)Orientalism and Post-Orientalism in the Reception and Translation of Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Trilogy.” Journal of Translation Studies 3.1 (Jun. 2018): 117-37.
After receiving the Hugo Award in 2015 for the English translation of The Three-Body Problem, Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Trilogy and its many translations have been a massive success, prompting many responses and much praise. In this article, I attempt to discuss the global processes of translation and reception of Liu’s novels beyond China. I particularly focus on the Orientalist imaginary conveyed by the publication of the trilogy, at a time when Chinese science fiction has become a tool for China’s soft power strategy. I also examine the reception in China of the success of Liu Cixin’s translations, and the way in which Chinese media and officials are also engaging in a process of self-Orientalization. I try to question the task and the strategy of the translators when confronting these Orientalist projections. This reflection is illustrated by concrete examples from my own translation of Liu’s trilogy into French.
Jia, Liyuan. “Chinese People Not Only Live in the World but Grow in the Universe: Liu Cixin and Chinese Science Fiction.” Trans. Lei Du and James Fashimpaur. Chinese Literature Today 7.1 (Jan. 2018): 58-61.
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 (14 Dec. 2014), but the current version contains slight changes.
______. “‘Soul-Stealing Sand’: War and Time in Xin Jiyuan [The New Era].” Trans. Nathaniel Isaacson. SFS 45.1 (2018): 1-23.
This article examines the late Qing science-fiction novel Xin jiyuan [The New Era, 1908] to investigate how its imagination of tomorrow’s world was affected by racist discourse and by an unconscious replication of the logic of colonialism. The entanglement of different time systems in the novel provided a starting point for the narration of the future. But the “future of China” described in this fiction is little more than a description of the contemporary west. Magic weapons such as “soul-stealing sand” (zhuihun sha), which determine the outcome of the war in this story, have long been regarded by researchers as the remnants of Chinese novels about spirits and devils. This article demonstrates, however, that the author borrowed these speculative and fantastic novelties from contemporary newspaper and magazine reports introducing the latest western inventions.
Li, Guangyi. “Eerie Parables and Prophecies: An Analysis of Han Song’s Science Fiction.” Trans. Nathaniel Isaacson. Chinese Literature Today 7.1 (2018): 28-32.
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 permeated by 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.
Li, Hua. “‘Are We, People from the Earth, so Terrible?’: An Atmospheric Crisis in Zheng Wenguang’s Descendant of Mars.” SFS 45.3 (2018): 545-59.
Terraforming fiction is the closest of kin to climate fiction. Since the 1950s, many Chinese sf narratives have dealt with both these subgenres. This essay focuses on the atmospheric transformation project depicted in Chinese sf writer Zheng Wenguang’s terraforming narrative Descendant of Mars (1983). The essay includes two dimensions of reading this novel. The first dimension is to situate the novel within the Chinese literary scene of the early 1980s, and I argue that Descendant reveals Zheng’s heartfelt skepticism about human interference with nature and climate, specifically Mao’s radical wars against nature in the 1950s and 1960s. In the second dimension of reading, I situate Zheng’s Mars narrative in the topography of world sf. The novel features instances of geoengineering as a form of climate change mitigation. The characters’ different positions and debates about space colonization and terraforming resonate with ongoing debates about climate change and environmental ethics in today’s world.
_______. “The Environment, Humankind, and Slow Violence in Chinese Science Fiction.” Communication and the Public 3.4 (2018): 270-82.
This essay examines some Chinese sf narratives with the themes of climate change, terraforming, and environment degradation, from the mid-twentieth century to the early years of the twenty-first century. I treat these narratives as textual sources that document a historical development of the impact of human activities on nature. They are all closely related to the country’s modernization, its economic takeoff, and the rhetoric of building a powerful China. They can also be understood as part of an emerging body of Chinese fiction located firmly within the Anthropocene. They offer a venue for exploring how economics, technological development, and government policies have transformed the biosphere in the Anthropocene, and they echo the concept of slow violence coined by Rob Nixon in 2011. 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 has caused severe environmental and occupational impacts.
Luo, Xiaoming. “The Divided City: Imagining the ‘Urban’ in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China. 12.4 (Oct. 2018): 583-609.
Following China’s large-scale process of urbanization, the distinctive characteristics of China’s “city(s)” has also begun taking shape. Descriptions and imaginative writings about the city found in contemporary Chinese science fiction have demonstrated unique and yet very specific ways of understanding the city. They display discontent with the high-level fragmentation of urban space and its implicit social inequality, yet also reflect upon the urban individual’s resort to acquiescence and self-justification to rationalize their inability to effectively dismantle such predicaments. In these kinds of imaginary relations, the city becomes an object difficult to fathom yet unable to be resisted. Though sf novels are able to reconceptualize the city through the reconstruction of space and time, thus bringing about seemingly new visions of the city, when these narratives begin to deviate from topics such as the “social property of time,” or that of “social labor,” they themselves then become problematic.
Ren, Dongmei, and Chenmei Xu. “Interpreting ‘Folding Beijing’ through the Prism of Science Fiction Realism.” Chinese Literature Today 7.1 (Jan. 2018): 54-57.
With its distinctive sf-realist style, Hao Jingfang’s novella Folding Beijing serves as a strong voice for social critique. Setting the story in the capital mega-city Beijing adds a grim sense of reality. In addition to highlighting the worsening condition of social stratification and class solidification in China, the story, by pointedly disclosing some social problems, mirrors the living conditions of a proportion of the population in big cities. It also asks: how would machines and automation affect the economy? Supposing that in the future more and more robots have replaced workers, what would happen to the unemployed? If the basic value of labor is jeopardized and most people’s work has lost its meaning, how would they demonstrate their existence as human beings? A somber and profound contemplation is hidden behind this seemingly mild and composed story.
Rojas, Carlos. “Han Song and the Dream of Reason.” Chinese Literature Today 7.1 (Jan. 2018): 33-41.
Beginning with a discussion of the Reform Era slogans “marching into the world” and “matching up with the world,” this essay first considers the contradictory status of rail transportation in contemporary China and then offers an analysis of a pair of recent science fiction works by Han Song, both of which take inspiration from rail technologies. The essay concludes that these fictional works seek to interrogate a set of local histories, and to dream a set of alternate futures.
Song, Mingwei. “Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Trilogy: Between the Sublime Cosmos and the Micro Era.” Lingua Cosmica: Science Fiction from Around the World. Ed. Dale Knickerbocker. U of Illinois P, 2018. 107-28.
This chapter introduces the life and work of Liu Cixin, a Chinese sf writer who has played a major role in reviving the genre in twenty-first-century China. The chapter discusses Liu’s work in the context of the genre’s history in China. Liu and other writers belonging to the same generation have created a new wave and the genre has gained unprecedented popularity in China. The main part of the chapter analyzes several major works by Liu, attempting to theorize the aesthetics and politics of the new wave represented in Liu’s stories and novels. The new wave makes the invisible visible, revealing the hidden dimensions of Chinese science fiction and the darker side of reality that it addresses.
Sun, Mengtian. “Alien Encounters in Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Trilogy and Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 12.4 (2018): 610-44.
Chinese sf writer Liu Cixin has been dubbed China’s Arthur C. Clarke ever since he won the 2015 Hugo Award for best novel. He himself humbly states that everything he writes is just a clumsy imitation of Clarke. One similarity between Liu and Clarke is the obsession with the imagination of the alien encounter, although their speculations demonstrate one major difference: while Clarke’s aliens are mostly benevolent, Liu’s are mostly malevolent. This essay focuses on Clarke’s Childhood’s End and Liu’s Three-Body Trilogy [Santi sanbuqu] to examine how point of view and the consequence of the alien encounter differ in the two texts. I argue that Childhood’s End is an unapologetic justification of (British) colonialism and propaganda for colonial logics, whereas Liu’s trilogy is a representation of the colonial encounter written from the point of view of the (semi)colonized, for whom this experience is characterized by dehumanization.
Wang, Yao. “Evolution or Samsara? Spatio-Temporal Myth in Han Song’s Science Fiction.” Trans. Nathaniel Isaacson. Chinese Literature Today 7.1 (2018): 23-27.
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. In post-1990s Chinese science fiction, particularly the discourse of “evolution/competition/selection,” has constituted a dominant narrative mode. In contrast, 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 uncertainty underlying the modern myths of “civilizational progress” and “scientific ideals,” these works present the author’s own paradoxical musings about modernity.
Wu, Yan, and Jiabin Yao. “A Very Brief History of Chinese Science Fiction.” Trans. Andrea Lingenfelter. Chinese Literature Today 7.1 (2018): 44-53.
After laying the groundwork by suggesting that ancient texts offering 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 sf authors and trends since the late nineteenth century, when science fiction was introduced into China. Tying the development of science fiction in China to the nineteenth-century importation of Western science and sf, 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.
2017
Andolfatto, Lorenzo. “Discourses of Science-Fictional Futuribility in Late Qing Fiction.” Monde Chinois 51/52 (2017): 17-27.
This paper aims to highlight, in the words of Georg Lukács, the “intimate connection” between the literary category of science fiction and the historical context of late imperial China. Building upon Suvin’s notion of “the novum” as the defining trope of sf, as well as upon Csicsery-Ronay’s reframing of this as a “signum novi” that enables discourses of futurity, I frame the emergence of the kexue xiaoshuo [science fiction] genre during the late Qing as a novum in itself, a new form of writing whose revolutionary appeal was predicated upon its capacity to engender discourses of futurity that were instrumental in semi-colonial China’s emancipation from the Western imperial yoke. This argument relies on a close reading of the early sf novel The New Era [Xin jiyuan, 1908] by Bihe Guan Zhuren, whose textual genesis and narrative construction qualify it as one of the first prominent examples of science-fictional writing in Chinese.
Conn, Virginia L. “Technologies of National Narration, Erasure, and Invisibility in the Chinese Science-Fiction Short Story, ‘The Olympic Dream.’” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 31 (2017). Online.
Set within a historically realistic context of food rationing, withheld medical services, and socioeconomic segregation experienced by Beijing citizens in the lead-up to the 2008 Olympic Games, the digitally published science-fiction story “The Olympic Dream” explores how a normativizing national dream is only possible through the erasure of its individual citizens. While the central conceit of the text is fictional, it allows for the making-visible of the process of invisibility that is its realistic theoretical underpinning. Drawing on theories of boundary collapse and asynchronous temporal rupture, this paper will examine how participation within a shared structural system necessitates and invites complicit participation on the part of those individuals being erased from the national narrative. I argue that China’s historical interest in its own Olympic dream is predicated on this very self-selected invisibility of its citizens.
Healey, Cara. “Estranging Realism in Chinese Science Fiction: Hybridity and Environmentalism in Chen Qiufan’s The Waste Tide.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 29.2 (Fall 2017): 1-33.
This essay considers Chinese sf author Chen Qiufan’s 2013 novel The Waste Tide from the perspective of generic hybridity, the way it combines, subverts, and reinterprets conventions of both twentieth-century Chinese realism and of the sf subgenre of cyberpunk. The Waste Tide combines thematic and stylistic elements characteristic of modern Chinese realism with the cognitive estrangement of cyberpunk (body modification, focus on global capitalism as unknowable totality, and multiply-positioned subjectivity), maintaining continuity with both mainstream Chinese literary tradition and Western sf. This generic hybridity, reinforced by the novel’s focus on human/machine hybridity, allows The Waste Tide to explore the enormity of ecological destruction in China in a way that acknowledges humanity’s ambiguous relationship with nature and tensions between the local and the global in environmental consciousness.
Isaacson, Nathaniel. “Science as Institutional Formation in The New Era and Journey to Utopia.” Le Monde Chinois: nouvelle Asie 51/52 (Mar./Apr. 2017): 28-37.
The emergence of science fiction in China was conditioned by an awareness of the potential complicity of the genre with the imperial imagination, and a desire to use the genre to create counter-narratives. Late Qing intellectuals agonized over how to reconcile westernization, modernization, and the adoption of foreign technologies with a Chinese epistemological framework. Long before familiar postcolonial critiques of Orientalism, Biheguan Zhuren’s The New Era (1908) and Xiaoran Yusheng’s Journey to Utopia (1906) expressed an implicit understanding that Orientalism profoundly conditioned early twentieth-century geopolitics. Here I highlight a particular phenomenon in late Qing sf: insofar as sf addressed the significance of “science,” late Qing intellectuals often depicted science as the product of specific modern institutional formations. Both The New Era and Journey to Utopia feature wondrous imaginary technologies, but both novels also pay close attention to the abstract and concrete institutions that featured prominently in late Qing sf as crucial axes in a social Darwinian contest for national survival.
Li, Hua. “Animating Science and Technology: From Little Tadpoles to the Space Monkey (1950s-1980s).” Association for Chinese Animation Studies Research Center. 1 Sept. 2017. Online.
This article focuses on Chinese scientific animated films produced from 1957 to 1983 by the Shanghai Animation Film Studio (SAFS) in order to shed light on the important function of scientific animation as a media tool that contributes to the nation’s political, cultural, and scientific development. This article discusses six representative animated scientific short films. My reading of these six films reveals both continuities of aesthetic expressions and subtle propaganda, along with changes of narrative strategies and thematic concerns that Chinese scientific animation underwent from the late 1950s to the early 1980s. Produced at various junctures in the history of Chinese animation, these works differ drastically in their approach to the power of science and technology as well as the relations between characterization and science and technology.
_______. “Spaceship Earth and Technological Utopianism: Liu Cixin’s Ecological Science Fiction.” Tamkang Review: A Quarterly of Comparative Studies of Chinese and Foreign Literatures 47.2 (Jun. 2017): 17-32.
With the occurrence of energy crises and ecological degradation since the 1960s, many ecologists, philosophers, economists, and sf writers have begun to adopt the intergenerational spaceship as a metaphor and a model of human life in a finite environment. This article explores how the idea of spaceship earth is reflected in four novellas by the Chinese sf writer Liu Cixin. These narratives deal with various key issues in environmental discourse: clean energy, water shortages, resource depletion, and the possible solution of minimizing production and consumption. They depict the disastrous consequences of exploitive relationships between humans and natural resources, and the paradoxical relationship between the tapping of new energy sources and the devastating ecological consequences that are likely to ensue.
Lyau, Bradford. “Many Paths, One Journey: Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem Novels.” Dis-Orienting Planets. Ed. Isiah Lavender III. UP of Mississippi, 2017. 160-74.
This essay carefully situates Cixin Liu’s Three Body trilogy within both Chinese and Western literary traditions before offering a brief critical analysis of the first two books, in which humanity struggles against an impending alien invasion and also faces its destiny. These two resonances with Western literature, both popular and elite, invite the reader to consider the different literary roots of Liu’s novels: 1) American genre science fiction, 2) the philosophical tale as it emerged in the West, 3) the role of philosophy in Chinese literature, and 4) Chinese science fiction.
Schneider-Vielsäcker, Frederike. “An Ideal Chinese Society? Future China from the Perspective of Female Science Fiction Writer Hao Jingfang.” Monde Chinois 51/52 (2017): 50-62.
This paper examines social and political commentary in contemporary Chinese science fiction literature written by women. I argue that these writings pose challenging views of a future Chinese society as well as providing suggestions for a more equal society. Through a close reading of Hao Jingfang’s novelette “Folding Beijing” (2014) and her short story “Invisible Planets” (2010), this paper analyzes the discrepancies between the official image and her perceptions of the “Harmonious Society” and the “China Dream.”
Song, Mingwei. “2066, Mars over America: Chinese Science Fiction Presents the Posthuman Future.” A New Literary History of Modern China. Ed. David Der-wei Wang. Harvard UP, 2017. 951-57.
2016
Isaacson, Nathaniel. “Orientalism, Scientific Practice and Popular Culture in Late Qing China.” Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures. Ed. Carlos Rojas and Andrea Bachner. Oxford UP, 2016. 73-91.
As the sequel to a translation of a translation, Xu Nianci’s “New Tales of Mr. Braggadocio” (1905) is a case study in the linguistic negotiations central to Lydia Liu’s reflections on translation. The story is marked by a double consciousness through which the narrator’s body and soul explore alternate explanations for evolution and scientific knowledge, thus engaging in many of the thematic and historical hallmarks of colonial modernity, situated at the junction of a number of intellectual realms. Thematically and linguistically, the text suggests a number of potential points of resistance to western epistemology, attempting to subsume science under the umbrella of Daoist cosmology. Especially prominent in the story is the degree to which the narrator’s resistance to Western science contrasts with his ready appropriation of the tenets of capitalist accumulation of wealth, as his success in perfecting the techniques of “brain electricity” ultimately results in a global economic crisis.
Li, Hua. “A Cautionary View of Rhetoric about China’s Imagined Future in Liu Cixin’s Alternate History ‘The Western Ocean.’” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 10.2 (2016): 184-203.
This article focuses on the sf novel The Western Ocean (1998) written by contemporary Chinese sf novelist Liu Cixin. The Western Ocean is a parody of Zheng He’s (1371-1433) expeditionary voyage to the Western [Indian] Ocean in 1420. In reality, Zheng did not make this voyage until 1431, during the reign of the Xuande Emperor. In Liu Cixin’s story, instead of making a return voyage, Zheng decides to navigate further to the Cape of Good Hope. Eventually, his fleet arrives in Europe, conquers the continent, and goes on to colonize the rest of the world. As in many other of Liu’s sf narratives, The Western Ocean has both a political subtext and an allegorical dimension. It also provides socio-political commentary on contemporary Chinese society and international affairs. More importantly, this story provides its readers with some fresh and otherwise unobtainable insights into China’s peaceful rise and soft power.
Song, Mingwei. “Popular Genre Fiction: Science Fiction and Fantasy.” The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. Ed. Kirk Denton. Columbia UP, 2016. 394-99.
Song, Mingwei.”Representations of the Invisible: Chinese Science Fiction in the Twenty-first Century.” The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures. Ed. Carlos Rojas and Andrea Bachner. Oxford UP, 2016. 546-65.
This chapter centers on three related topics: Chinese science fiction as an invisible genre; the new wave of Chinese science fiction’s representation of the “invisible” reality of China; and the invisible body and universe in Liu Cixin’s alternative vision of the sublime. The chapter discusses two major writers: Han Song and Liu Cixin. In Han Song’s surreal stories and novels, the textual fabrication of China’s “reality” as scientific speculations illuminates the “truth” of the otherwise invisible reality, and thus decides the subversive nature of the genre that defies the “fear of seeing [the truth].” Liu Cixin seeks to transform the invisible and infinite into a plausible physical reality in a different way, which lifts science fiction from determinism or whatever is rooted in certainty into a transcendental, sublime imaginary realm that opens up to possibilities and perceptions beyond ordinary reality.
2015
Fan, Yilun. “The Identity Vacillation of a Technological Elite: The Tension between Poetry and Technology in Liu Cixin’s ‘The Poetry Cloud’ (Shi yun).” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 9.3 (Jul. 2015): 417-35.
This article explores Chinese science-fiction writer Liu Cixin’s novelette “The Poetry Cloud” (1997) in the context of the debate between scientism and humanism in 1990s China, an event that has been downplayed in its influence on Liu’s ideas. First, this article investigates how the narrative framework of science fiction represents and refreshes the symbolic meaning of poetry in the abovementioned context. Second, by analyzing the perceptions of poetry of the three main characters, it discusses the different opinions they represent with regard to the debate. Finally, by studying Liu’s work in the context of Heidegger’s reflections upon technology, it examines his solution to the tension between scientism and humanism in the programming of a “poetry cloud” that marries poetic imagination with technological means.
Hollinger,Veronica. “‘Great Wall Planet’: The Estrangements of Chinese Science Fiction.” 2015. Dis-Orienting Planets: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction. Ed. Isiah Lavender III. UP of Mississippi, 2017. 13-25.
Andrew Milner’s wide-ranging study of science fiction’s “selective tradition,” Locating Science Fiction (2012), makes little mention of China, even as it argues for the increasing importance of “a globalised SF field.” For Milner, Chinese sf is “peripheral” to the Anglo-American tradition and, as such, it is available to be read as an estranged version of western mainstream sf. I look at this experience of estrangement through several vectors: China as the alien planet; the “rise” of China in globalization; Chinese sf as alternate history; Chinese sf as global sf; and sf as the language of globalization. I include readings of two short stories, Liu Cixin’s “The Village School Teacher” (2001) and Han Song’s “The Passengers and the Creator” (2005).
Isaacson, Nathaniel. “Blurred Visions of Nation and State in Tong Enzheng’s ‘Death Ray on a Coral Island.’” Simultaneous Worlds: Global Science Fiction Cinema. Ed. Jennifer Feely and Sarah A. Wells. U of Minnesota P, 2015. 272-88.
“Death Ray on a Coral Island” [Shanhudao shang de siguang]— archaeologist, historian, and sf writer Tong Enzheng’s 1978 short story—was printed in People’s Literature [Renmin wenxue] and awarded the National Prize for Outstanding Short Story [Quanguo youxiu duanpian xiaoshuo jiang] in 1978. Its exotic locations and technoscientific wonders were ripe subjects for Zhang Hongmei’s 1980 cinematic adaptation, the first sf film produced in mainland China. The story later was produced as a radio drama, spawned numerous print knockoffs as a lianhuanhua (children’s pocket-comic), recently was reincarnated as a cellphone video game, and now enjoys a vibrant second life on the Internet. Tong’s work and its facsimiles and imitations in the Chinese mediascape signaled the revival of a literary genre that had been all but invisible during the Maoist era, bringing critical recognition to a form often dismissed as a subcategory of children’s literature.
Li, Hua. “The Political Imagination in Liu Cixin’s Critical Utopia: China 2185.” SFS 42.3 (2015): 519-41.
This article focuses on contemporary Chinese science fiction, specifically the political elements in Liu Cixin’s critical-utopian novel China 2185 [Zhongguo 2185], written in 1989 against the social and political background of China in the 1980s. I analyze China 2185 at the “iconic level,” “discrete level,” and the level of “generic form” in the framework of Tom Moylan’s study of the critical utopian novel. I also relate this novel to other contemporary Chinese sf narratives as well as to Liu’s other works. The novel foresees important issues in post-socialist China, such as the consequences of the ageing of the population and gerontocracy and the impact of digital information resources and the Internet on China’s political system. Liu amplifies both sociopolitical problems and the potential for change in mainland China and conjures forth an imaginary future transformation in order to create a critical distance from the present.
Song, Mingwei. “After 1989: The New Wave of Chinese Science Fiction.” China Perspectives 1 (Mar. 2015): 7-13.
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 for this study. 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 energize the utopian/dystopian variations rather than simply denying utopianism or totally embracing dystopian disillusionment, and this is particularly represented in Liu Cixin’s novels. The paper also provides some preliminary thoughts on the vision of a posthuman future depicted in Liu Cixin’s science fiction.
Thieret, Adrian. “Society and Utopia in Liu Cixin.” China Perspectives 1 (Mar. 2015): 33-39.
This article examines utopianism in contemporary China through the short stories “Taking Care of Gods” (2012) and “Taking Care of Humans” (2012) by best-selling sf author Liu Cixin. It argues that these stories constitute an ethical resistance to the shortcomings of the capitalist world order into which China has become merged during the reform period. Read as a continuation of the modern Chinese utopian tradition as well as a reaction to contemporary trends, these stories offer an articulation of hope that a more just social order can yet be achieved despite the seemingly intractable problems facing the world today.
Wang, Chaohua. “Dreamers and Nightmares: Political Novels by Wang Lixiong and Chan Koonchung.” China Perspectives 1 (2015): 23-31.
Wang Lixiong’s Yellow Peril (1991) represents the return of political fiction of the future not seen in China for decades. Chan Koonchung’s The Fat Years (2009) brings the imagination to a full dystopian vision. Reading the two novels side by side, this paper argues that Chinese fiction of the future in the early 1990s responded to the country’s struggle for direction when the bloody crackdown of the Tiananmen protest wiped out collective idealism in society. In the twenty-first century, such fiction is written in response to China’s rapid rise as one of the world’s superpowers, bringing to domestic society a seemingly stabilized order that has deprived it of intellectual vision.
Yang, Qiong. “Tales of Encounter: A Case Study of Science-Fiction Films in Greater China in the 1970s and 1980s.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 9.3 (Jul. 2015). 436-52.
An important motif in sf films is the encounter between different species—usually between humankind and alienkind. In films of this type, both anxieties and hopes are imagined and exhibited. By examining three sf films made in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese mainland in the late 1970s and early 1980s—including The Super Inframan [Zhongguo chaoren, 1975], God of War [Zhanshen, 1976], and Death Ray on Coral Island [Shanhudao shang de siguang, 1980]—this paper analyzes the ideologies and anxieties behind such encounters. These films present different “Chinese” pictures, revealing the fluidity of Chineseness as well as the variety of frameworks within the genre of Chinese-language sf films. In this time of globalization, it is important to examine these early sf films in order to explore the relation between local social concerns and their artistic presentation.
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