Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation

THE WORST OF ALL POSSIBLE UNIVERSES AND THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE EARTHS: THREE-BODY AND CHINESE SCIENCE FICTION by Liu Cixin

A few years ago, a science fiction novel appeared in China under the strange title Three-Body.

There were, in total, three volumes, and the title for the entire work is Remembrance of Earth’s Past. After volume one, Three-Body (note: the official English title for volume one is The Three-Body Problem), the next two volumes are The Dark Forest and Death’s End. However, Chinese readers habitually refer to the entire work as Three-Body.

Science fiction is not a genre that has much respect in China. Critics have long been discouraged from paying attention to the category, dismissed as a branch of juvenile literature. The subject of Three-Body—an alien invasion of Earth—is not unheard of, but rarely discussed.

Thus it surprised everyone when the book gained widespread interest in China and stimulated much debate. The amount of ink and pixels that have been spilled on account of Three-Body is unprecedented for a science fiction novel.

Let me give a few examples. The main consumers of science fiction books in China are high school and college students. But Three-Body somehow gained the attention of information technology entrepreneurs; on Internet forums and elsewhere, they debated and discussed the book’s various details (such as the “Dark Forest Theory” of the cosmos—an answer to the Fermi Paradox—and the dimension-reduction attack on the solar system launched by aliens) as metaphors for the cutthroat competition among China’s web companies. Next, Three-Body came to the attention of China’s mainstream literary world, which had always been dominated by realist fiction. Three-Body was like some monster that suddenly erupted onto the scene, and literary critics were baffled by it while feeling they couldn’t ignore it.

The book even had an effect on scientists and engineers. Li Miao, a cosmologist and string theorist, wrote a book titled The Physics of Three-Body. Many aerospace engineers became fans, and China’s aerospace agency even asked me to consult with them (despite the fact that in my novel, China’s aerospace establishment was described as so conservative and hidebound that an extremist officer had to engage in mass assassinations to allow new ideas to flourish). These sorts of reactions are probably familiar to American readers (e.g., The Physics of Star Trek, and NASA scientists regularly teaming up with science fiction writers), but they’re unheard of in China, and they contrast sharply with the official policy of suppressing science fiction during the 1980s.

On the web, one can find many fan-composed songs for Three-Body and readers yearning for a movie adaptation—some have even gone to the trouble of creating fake trailers out of clips from other movies. Sina Weibo—a Chinese microblogging service analogous to Twitter—has numerous user accounts based on characters in Three-Body, and these users stay in character and comment on current events, expanding the story told in the novel. Based on these virtual identities, some have speculated that the ETO, the fictional organization of human defectors who form a fifth column for the alien invaders, is already in place. When CCTV, China’s largest state television broadcaster, tried to hold an interview series on the topic of science fiction, a hundred-plus studio audience members erupted into chants of, “Eliminate human tyranny! The world belongs to Trisolaris!”—a quote from the novel. The two TV hosts were utterly flummoxed and didn’t know what to do.

Of course, these events are only the latest entries in the century-long history of science fiction in China.

Chinese science fiction was born at the turn of the twentieth century, when the Qing dynasty was teetering on the edge of ruin. At the time, Chinese intellectuals were entranced by and curious about Western science and technology, and thought of such knowledge as the only hope for saving the nation from poverty, weakness, and general backwardness. Many works popularizing and speculating about science were published, including works of science fiction. One of the leaders of the failed Hundred Days’ Reform (June 11–September 21, 1898), the renowned scholar Liang Qichao, wrote a science fiction story called “A Chronicle of the Future of New China.” In it, he imagined a Shanghai World’s Fair—a vision that would not become true until 2010.

Like most genres of literary expression, science fiction in China was subject to instrumentalist impulses and had to serve practical goals. At its birth, it became a tool of propaganda for the Chinese who dreamed of a strong China free of colonial depredations. Thus, science fiction works from the end of the Qing dynasty and the early Republican years almost always presented a future in which China was strong, prosperous, and advanced, a nation which the world respected rather than subjugated.

After the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, science fiction became a tool for popularizing scientific knowledge, and its main intended readers were children. Most of these stories put technology at the core and contained little humanism, featuring simplistic characters and basic, even naïve literary techniques. Few of the novels ventured outside the orbit of Mars, and most stuck to the near future. In these works, science and technology were always presented as positive forces, and the technological future was always bright.

An interesting observation can be made when one surveys the science fiction published during this period. In the early years after the Communist Revolution, politics and revolutionary fervor infused every aspect of daily life, and the very air one breathed seemed filled with propaganda for Communist ideals. Given this context, one might have expected that science fiction would also be filled with descriptions of Communist utopias of the future. But as a matter of fact, not a single work of this type can be found. There were practically no science fiction stories that featured Communism as the subject, not even simplistic sketches to promote the concept.

By the 1980s, as Deng Xiaoping’s reforms took effect, the influence of Western science fiction on Chinese science fiction became more apparent. Chinese science fiction writers and critics began to debate whether science fiction was more about “science” or “fiction,” and ultimately the literary camp won out. The debate had tremendous influence on the direction of the future development of Chinese science fiction, and in some ways can be seen as a delayed Chinese response to the New Wave movement in the West. Science fiction was finally able to escape the fate of being a mere tool to serve the goal of popularizing science, and could develop in new directions.

During the period between the mid-1990s and now, Chinese science fiction experienced a renaissance. New writers and their fresh ideas had little connection to the last century, and as Chinese science fiction became more diverse, it also began to lose its distinctness as particularly “Chinese.” Contemporary Chinese science fiction is becoming more similar to world science fiction, and styles and subjects that have been explored by American writers, for instance, can find easy analogs in Chinese science fiction.

It’s interesting to note that the optimism toward science that underlay much of last century’s Chinese science fiction has almost completely vanished. Contemporary science fiction reflects much suspicion and anxiety about technological progress, and the futures portrayed in these works are dark and uncertain. Even if a bright future appears occasionally, it comes only after much suffering and a tortuous path.

At the time of Three-Body’s publication, China’s science fiction market was anxious and depressed. The long marginalization of science fiction as a genre led to a small and insular readership. Fans saw themselves as a tribe on an island and felt misunderstood by outsiders. Writers struggled to attract readers outside the tribe and felt they had to give up their Campbellian “science fiction fundamentalism” and raise the genre’s literary qualities and realism.

The first two volumes of Three-Body show some efforts made in this direction. Much of the first volume was set during the Cultural Revolution, and in the second volume, the China of the future still existed under sociopolitical institutions similar to the present. These were attempts to increase the sense of realism for readers, to give the speculative elements some foundation in the present. As a result, both my publisher and I had little faith in the third volume prior to its publication. As the story continued to develop, it was impossible to root the third volume in present realities, and I had to describe distant futures and distant corners of the cosmos—and by consensus, Chinese readers were not interested in such things.

My publisher and I reached the conclusion that since it was impossible for the third volume to succeed in the market, maybe it was best to give up trying to attract readers who were not already science fiction fans. Instead, I would write a “pure” science fiction novel, which I found comforting, as I considered myself a hard-core fan. And so I wrote the third volume for myself and filled it with multidimensional and two-dimensional universes, artificial black holes and mini-universes, and I extended the time line to the heat death of the universe.

And to our utter surprise, it was this third volume, written only for science fiction fans, which led to the popularity of the series as a whole.

The experience of Three-Body caused science fiction writers and critics to reevaluate Chinese science fiction and China. They realized they had been ignoring changes in the thinking patterns of Chinese readers. As modernization accelerated its pace, the new generation of readers no longer confined their thoughts to the narrow present as their parents did, but were interested in the future and the wide-open cosmos. The China of the present is a bit like America during science fiction’s Golden Age, when science and technology filled the future with wonder, presenting both great crises and grand opportunities. This is rich soil for the growth and flourishing of science fiction.

Science fiction is a literature of possibilities. The universe we live in is also one of countless possibilities. For humanity, some universes are better than others, and Three-Body shows the worst of all possible universes, a universe in which existence is as dark and harsh as one can imagine.

Not long ago, Canadian writer Robert Sawyer came to China, and when he discussed Three-Body, he attributed my choice of the worst of all possible universes to the historical experience of China and the Chinese people. As a Canadian, he argued that he had an optimistic view of the future relationship between humans and extraterrestrials.

I don’t agree with this analysis. In the Chinese science fiction of the last century, the universe was a kind place, and most extraterrestrials appeared as friends or mentors, who, endowed with Godlike patience and forbearance, pointed out the correct path for us, a lost flock of sheep. In Jin Tao’s Moonlight Island, for example, the extraterrestrials soothed the spiritual trauma of the Chinese who experienced the Cultural Revolution. In Tong Enzheng’s Distant Love, the human-alien romance was portrayed as poignant and magnificent. In Zheng Wenguang’s Reflections of Earth, humanity was seen as so morally corrupt that gentle, morally refined aliens were terrified and had to run away, despite their possession of far superior technology.

But if one were to evaluate the place of Earth civilization in this universe, humanity seems far closer to the indigenous peoples of the Canadian territories before the arrival of European colonists than the Canada of the present. More than five hundred years ago, hundreds of distinct peoples speaking languages representing more than ten language families populated the land from Newfoundland to Vancouver Island. Their experience with contact with an alien civilization seems far closer to the portrayal in Three-Body. The description of this history in the essay “Canadian History: An Aboriginal Perspective,” by Georges Erasmus and Joe Saunders, is unforgettable.

I wrote about the worst of all possible universes in Three-Body in the hope that we can strive for the best of all possible Earths.

THE TORN GENERATION: CHINESE SCIENCE FICTION IN A CULTURE IN TRANSITION by Chen Qiufan

This past March, I attended the Huadi Literary Awards in Guangzhou, where my debut novel, The Waste Tide, was honored with the top distinction for genre (SF) fiction. Published in the capital of China’s most developed province, Huadi is the magazine supplement for the Yangcheng Evening News, one of the largest newspapers in the world by circulation (in excess of one million). This was also the second literary award my novel has received (after a Chinese Nebula). As a former Googler, I want to invoke the button that rarely gets pressed: “I’m feeling lucky!”

The Huadi Awards was a joint effort by the local government and media, and as one might expect, it was suffused with the trappings of officialdom. Even the ceremony itself was held in a government auditorium. The winners were led on a night tour of the Pearl River, and our hosts excitedly pointed out the splendor of the postmodern architecture on both shores. However, one of the winners, Chen Danqing, a noted liberal opinion leader and artist, reminisced about his childhood visit to Guangzhou in the midst of the Cultural Revolution.

“From here to there,” he said, sweeping his arm across the night, “bodies dangled from every tree.” We looked at where he was pointing, and all we could see were lit-up commercial skyscrapers indistinguishable from those you’d find in Manhattan. “The young are always at the vanguard.”

As the youngest winner among the group—I was the only one born after 1980—I played the role of the eager student seizing an opportunity to learn from respected elders. “Do you have any advice for us, the younger generation?”

Chen Danqing puffed on his cigarette thoughtfully for a while, and then said, “I’ll give you eight words: ‘Stay on the sidelines; hope for the best.’”

I gazed at the reflections of the profusion of neon lights and pondered these eight words. The short voyage was soon over, and the river’s surface disappeared in darkness. I thought there was much wisdom in his words, though the somewhat cynical values they advocated were at odds with the spirit of the “Chinese Dream” promoted by the government.

In the eyes of Han Song, a Chinese science fiction writer born in the 1960s, the Chinese born after 1978 belong to a “Torn Generation.” Han Song’s perspective is interesting. While he is a member of China’s most powerful state-run news agency, Xinhua, he is also the author of extraordinary novels such as Subway and Bullet Train. In these surrealist novels, the order of nature on speeding trains is subverted by events such as accelerated evolution, incest, cannibalism, and so on. Critics have suggested that “the world on the subway reflects a society’s explosive transformation and is a metaphor for the reality of China’s hyper-accelerated development.”

In a widely distributed recent essay, Han Song wrote, “The younger generation is torn to a far greater degree than our own. The China of our youth was one of averages, but in this era, when a new breed of humanity is coming into being, China is being ripped apart at an accelerated pace. The elite and the lowly alike must face this fact. Everything, from spiritual dreams to the reality of life, is torn.”

As a journalist with Xinhua, Han Song has a broader perspective than most. He points out that the young people who have been grouped into one generation by the accident of their dates of birth have wildly divergent values and lifestyles, like fragments seen in a kaleidoscope.

My generation includes the workers at Foxconn, who, day after day, repeat the same motions on the assembly line, indistinguishable from robots; but it also includes the sons and daughters of the wealthy and of important Communist officials, princelings who treat luxury as their birthright and have enjoyed every advantage in life. It includes entrepreneurs who are willing to leave behind millions in guaranteed salary to pursue a dream as well as hundreds of recent college graduates who compete ruthlessly for a single clerical position. It includes the “foreigners’ lackeys” who worship the American lifestyle so much that their only goal in life is to emigrate to the United States as well as the “fifty-cent party” who are xenophobic, denigrate democracy, and place all their hopes in a more powerful, rising China.

It’s absurd to put all these people under the same label.

Take myself as an example. I was born in a tiny city in Southern China (population: a million-plus). In the year of my birth, the city was designated one of the four “special economic zones” under Deng Xiaoping, and began to benefit from all the special government policies promoting development. My childhood was thus spent in relative material comfort and an environment with improved education approaches and a growing openness of information. I got to see Star Wars and Star Trek and read many science fiction classics. I became a fan of Arthur C. Clarke, H. G. Wells, and Jules Verne. Inspired by them, I published my first story when I was sixteen.

Not even seventy kilometers from where I lived, though, was another small town—administratively, it was under the jurisdiction of the same city government—where a completely different way of life held sway. In this town of fewer than two hundred thousand people, more than 3,200 businesses, many of them nothing more than family workshops, formed a center for e-waste recycling. Highly toxic electronic junk from around the world, mostly the developed world, was shipped here—often illegally—and workers without any training or protection processed them manually to extract recyclable metals. Since the late 1980s, this industry has managed to create multiple millionaires but also turned the town into one of the most polluted areas in all of Guangdong Province.

It was this experience in contrasts and social rips that led me to write The Waste Tide. The novel imagines a near future in the third decade of this century. On Silicon Isle, an island in Southern China built on the foundation of e-waste recycling, pollution has made the place almost uninhabitable. A fierce struggle follows in which powerful native clans, migrant workers from other parts of China, and the elites representing international capitalism vie for dominance. Mimi, a young migrant worker and “waste girl,” turns into a posthuman after much suffering and leads the oppressed migrant workers in rebellion.

Han Song described my novel this way: “The Waste Tide shows the fissures ripping China apart, the cleavages dividing China from the rest of the world, and the tears separating different regions, different age cohorts, different tribal affiliations. This is a future that will make a young person feel the death of idealism.”

In fact, I am not filled with despair and gloom for the future of China. I wrote about the suffering of a China in transformation because I yearn to see it change gradually for the better. Science fiction is a vehicle of aesthetics to express my values and myself.

In my view, “what if” is at the heart of science fiction. Starting with reality itself, the writer applies plausible and logically consistent conditions to play out a thought experiment, pushing the characters and plot toward an imagined hyperreality that evokes a sense of wonder and estrangement. Faced with the absurd reality of contemporary China, the writer cannot fully explore or express the possibilities of extreme beauty and extreme ugliness without resorting to science fiction.

Since the 1990s, the ruling class of China has endeavored to produce an ideological fantasy through the machinery of propaganda: development (increase in GDP) is sufficient to solve all problems. But the effort has failed and so created even more problems. In the process of this ideological hypnosis of the entire population, a definition of “success” in which material wealth is valued above all has choked off the younger generation’s ability to imagine the possibilities of life and the future. This is a dire consequence of the policy decisions of those born in the 1950s and 1960s, a consequence which they neither understand nor accept responsibility for.

These days, I work as a mid-level manager in one of China’s largest web companies. I’m in charge of a group of young people born after 1985, some even after 1990. In our daily contact, what I sense in them above all is a feeling of exhaustion about life and anxiety for success. They worry about skyrocketing real estate prices, pollution, education for their young children, medical care for their aging parents, growth and career opportunities—they are concerned that as the productivity gains brought about by China’s vast population have all but been consumed by the generation born during the 1950s–1970s, they are left with a China plagued by a falling birthrate and an aging population, in which the burdens on their shoulders grow heavier year after year and their dreams and hopes are fading.

Meanwhile, the state-dominated media are saturated with phrases like “the Chinese Dream,” “revival of the Chinese people,” “the rise of a great nation,” “scientific development”… Between the feeling of individual failure and the conspicuous display of national prosperity lies an unbridgeable chasm. The result is a division of the population into two extremes: one side rebels against the government reflexively (sometimes without knowing what its “cause” is) and trusts nothing it says; the other side retreats into nationalism to give itself the sense of mastering its own fate. The two sides constantly erupt into flame wars on the Internet, as though this country can hold only One True Faith for the future: things are either black or white; either you’re with us, or you’re against us.

If we pull back far enough to view human history from a more elevated perspective, we can see that society builds up, invents, creates utopias—sketches of perfect, imagined futures—and then, inevitably, the utopias collapse, betray their ideals, and turn into dystopias. The process plays out in cycle after cycle, like Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence.

“Science” is itself one of the greatest utopian illusions ever created by humankind. I am by no means suggesting that we should take the path of antiscience—the utopia offered by science is complicated by the fact that science disguises itself as a value-neutral, objective endeavor. However, we now know that behind the practice of science lie ideological struggles, fights over power and authority, and the profit motive. The history of science is written and rewritten by the allocation and flow of capital, favors given to some projects but not others, and the needs of war.

While micro fantasies burst and are born afresh like sea spray, the macro fantasy remains sturdy. Science fiction is the byproduct of the process of gradual disenchantment with science. The words create a certain vision of science for the reader. The vision can be positive or full of suspicion and criticism—it depends on the age we live in. Contemporary China is a society in the transition stage when old illusions have collapsed but new illusions have not yet taken their place; this is the fundamental cause of the rips and divisions, the confusion and the chaos.

In 1903, another revolutionary time in Chinese history when the new was replacing the old, Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature, said, “The progress of the Chinese people begins with scientific fiction.” He saw science fiction as a tool to inspire the nation with the spirit of science and to chase away the remnants of feudal obscurantism. More than a hundred years later, the problems facing us are far more complicated and likely not amenable to scientific solutions, but I still believe that science fiction is capable of wedging open small possibilities: to mend the torn generation, to allow different visions and imagined future Chinas to coexist in peace, to listen to one another, to reach consensus, and to proceed together.

Even if it’s only an insignificant, slow, hesitant step.

WHAT MAKES CHINESE SCIENCE FICTION CHINESE? by Xia Jia

In the summer of 2012, I was on a panel on Chinese science fiction at Chicon 7. One of the attendees asked me and the other Chinese authors: “What makes Chinese science fiction Chinese?”

This is not at all an easy question to answer, and everyone will have a different response. It is true, however, that for the last century or so, “Chinese science fiction” has occupied a rather unique place in the culture and literature of modern China.

Science fiction’s creative inspirations—massive machinery, new modes of transportation, global travel, space exploration—are the fruits of industrialization, urbanization, and globalization, processes with roots in modern capitalism. But when the genre was first introduced via translation to China at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was mostly treated as fantasies and dreams of modernity, material that could be woven into the construction of a “Chinese Dream.”

“Chinese Dream” here refers to the revival of the Chinese nation in the modern era, a prerequisite for realizing which was reconstructing the Chinese people’s dream. In other words, the Chinese had to wake up from their five-thousand-year-old dream of being an ancient civilization and start to dream of becoming a democratic, independent, prosperous modern nation-state. As a result, the first works of science fiction in Chinese were, in the word of the famous writer Lu Xun, seen as literary tools for “improving thinking and assisting culture.” On the one hand, these early works, as myths of science, enlightenment, and development based on imitating “the West”/“the world”/“modernity,” attempted to bridge the gap between reality and dream. On the other hand, the limitations of their historical context endowed them with deeply Chinese characteristics that only emphasized the depth of the chasm between dream and reality.

One such early work was Lu Shi’e’s “New China” (published in 1910). The protagonist wakes up in the Shanghai of 1950 after a long slumber. He sees around him a progressive, prosperous China, and is told that all this is due to the efforts of a certain Dr. Su Hanmin, who had studied abroad and invented two technologies: “the spiritual medicine” and “the awakening technique.” With these technologies, a population mired in spiritual confusion and the daze of opium awakened in an instant and began an explosive bout of political reform and economic development. The Chinese nation has not only been revived, but is even able to overcome abuses which the West could not overcome on its own. In the author’s view, “European entrepreneurs were purely selfish and cared not one whit for the suffering of others. That was why they had stimulated the growth of the Communist parties.” However, with the invention of Dr. Su’s spiritual medicine, every Chinese has become altruistic, and “everyone views everyone else’s welfare as their responsibility; it is practically socialism already, and so of course we’re not plagued by Communists.”

After the founding of the People’s Republic, Chinese science fiction, as a branch of socialist literature, was handed the responsibility for popularizing scientific knowledge as well as describing a beautiful plan for the future and motivating society to achieve it. For instance, the writer Zheng Wenguang once said, “The realism of science fiction is different from the realism of other genres; it is a realism infused with revolutionary idealism because its intended reader is the youth.” This “revolutionary idealism,” at its root, is a continuation of the Chinese faith and enthusiasm for the grand narrative of modernization. It represents optimism for continuing development and progress, and unreserved passion for building a nation-state.

A classic example of revolutionary idealism is Zheng Wenguang’s “Capriccio for Communism” (published in 1958). The story describes the celebration at Tiananmen Square in 1979 at the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. The “builders of Communism” parade across the square, presenting their scientific achievements to the motherland: the spaceship Mars I, the gigantic levee that connects Hainan Island with the mainland, factories that synthesize all sorts of industrial products from ocean water, even artificial suns that melt the glaciers of the Tianshan Mountains to transform deserts into rich farmland… Faced with such wonders, the protagonist exclaims, “Oh, such fantastic scenes made possible by science and technology!”

After the lull imposed by the Cultural Revolution, the passion for building a modern nation-state reignited in 1978. Ye Yonglie’s Little Smart Roaming the Future (published August 1978), a thin volume filled with enticing visions of a future city seen through the eyes of a child, heralded a new wave of science fiction in China with its initial print run of 1.5 million copies. Paradoxically, as China actually modernized with the reforms of the Deng Xiaoping era, these enthusiastic dreams of the future gradually disappeared from Chinese science fiction. Readers and writers seemed to fall out of romantic, idealistic utopias and back into reality.

In 1987, Ye Yonglie published a short story called “Cold Dream at Dawn.” On a cold winter night in Shanghai, the protagonist has trouble falling asleep in his unheated home. A series of grand science fictional dreams fills his mind: geothermal heating, artificial suns, “reversing the South and North Poles,” even “covering Shanghai with a hothouse glass dome.” However, reality intrudes in the form of concerns about whether the proposed projects would be approved, how to acquire the necessary materials and energy, potential international conflicts, and so forth—every vision ends up being rejected as unfeasible. “A thousand miles separate the lovers named Reality and Fantasy!” The distance and the gap, one surmises, demonstrate the anxiety and discomfort of the Chinese waking up from the fantasy of Communism.

Starting at the end of the 1970s, large numbers of European and American science fiction works were translated and published in China, and Chinese science fiction, long under the influence of Soviet scientific literature for children, suddenly realized its own lag and marginal status. Motivated by binary oppositions such as China-the West, underdeveloped-developed, and tradition-modernity as well as the desire to reintegrate into the international order, Chinese science fiction writers attempted to break away from the science-popularization mode that had long held sway. They hoped to rapidly grow (or perhaps evolve) Chinese science fiction from an underdeveloped, suppressed, juvenile state to a mature, modern mode of literary expression. Simultaneously, controversy erupted as writers and critics debated how to approach international standards in content and literary form while exploring unique “national characteristics” of Chinese science fiction so that “China” could be relocated in global capitalism. Chinese writers had to imitate and reference the subjects and forms of Western science fiction while constructing a position for Chinese culture in a globalizing world, and from this position participate in the imagination of humanity’s shared future.

The end of the Cold War and the accelerating integration of China into global capitalism in the 1990s led to a process of social change whose ultimate demand was the application of market principles to all aspects of social life, especially manifested in the shock and destruction visited upon traditions by economic rationality. Here, “traditions” include both the old ways of life in rural China as well as the country’s past equality-oriented socialist ideology. Thus, as China experienced its great transformation, science fiction moved away from future dreams about modernization to approach a far more complex social reality.

The science fiction of Europe and America derives its creative energy and source material from the West’s historical experience of political and economic modernization and, through highly allegorical forms, refines the fears and hopes of humanity for its own fate into dreams and nightmares. After taking in a variety of settings, images, cultural codes, and narrative tropes through Western science fiction, Chinese science fiction writers have gradually constructed a cultural field and symbolic space possessing a certain degree of closure and self-discipline vis-à-vis mainstream literature and other popular literary genres. In this space, gradually maturing forms have absorbed various social experiences that cannot yet be fully captured by the symbolic order, and after a series of transformations, integrations, and reorganizations, resulted in new vocabularies and grammars. It is in this sense that the Chinese science fiction of the era dating from the 1990s to the present can be read as a national allegory in the age of globalization.

Overall, Chinese science fiction writers are faced with a particular historic condition. On the one hand, the failure of Communism as an alternative for overcoming the crises of capitalism means that the crises of capitalist culture, accompanied by the process of globalization, are manifesting in the daily lives of the Chinese people. On the other hand, China, after a series of traumas from the economic reforms and paying a heavy price for development, has managed to take off economically and resurge globally. The simultaneous presence of crisis and prosperity guarantees a range of attitudes toward humanity’s future among the writers: some are pessimistic, believing that we’re powerless against irresistible trends; some are hopeful that human ingenuity will ultimately triumph; still others resort to ironic observation of the absurdities of life. The Chinese people once believed that science, technology, and the courage to dream would propel them to catch up with the developed nations of the West. However, now that Western science fiction and cultural products are filled with imaginative visions of humanity’s gloomy destiny, Chinese science fiction writers and readers can no longer treat “where are we going?” as an answered question.

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. However, by carefully reading and parsing their work, I can still find aspects of commonality among them (myself included). Our stories are written primarily for a Chinese audience. The problems we care about and ponder are the problems facing all of us sharing this plot of land. These problems, in turn, are connected in a thousand complicated ways with the collective fate of all of humanity.

In reading Western science fiction, Chinese readers discover the fears and hopes of Man, the modern Prometheus, for his destiny, which is also his own creation. Perhaps Western readers can also read Chinese science fiction and experience an alternative Chinese modernity and be inspired to imagine an alternative future.

Chinese science fiction consists of stories that are not just about China. For instance, Ma Boyong’s “The City of Silence” is an homage to Orwell’s 1984 as well as a portrayal of the invisible walls left after the Cold War; Liu Cixin’s “Taking Care of God” explores the common tropes of civilization expansion and resource depletion in the form of a moral drama set in a rural Chinese village; Chen Qiufan’s “The Flower of Shazui” spreads the dark atmosphere of cyberpunk to the coastal fishing villages near Shenzhen, where the fictional village named “Shazui” is a microcosm of the globalized world as well as a symptom. My own “A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight” includes fleeting images of other works by masters: Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, Tsui Hark’s A Chinese Ghost Story, and Hayao Miyazaki’s films. In my view, these disparate stories seem to speak of something in common, and the tension between Chinese ghost tales and science fiction provides yet another way to express the same idea.

Science fiction—to borrow the words of Gilles Deleuze—is a literature always in the state of becoming, a literature that is born on the frontier—the frontier between the known and unknown, magic and science, dream and reality, self and other, present and future, East and West—and renews itself as the frontier shifts and migrates. The development of civilization is driven by the curiosity that compels us to cross this frontier, to subvert prejudices and stereotypes, and in the process, complete our self-knowledge and growth.

At this critical historic moment, I am even firmer in my faith that reforming reality requires not only science and technology, but also the belief by all of us that life should be better—and can be made better—if we possess imagination, courage, initiative, unity, love, and hope as well as a bit of understanding and empathy for strangers. Each of us is born with these precious qualities, and it is perhaps also the best gift that science fiction can bring us.