In a prosperous China where nearly everyone is happy, a few individuals attempt to track down why an entire month seems to have been wiped from history.

That’s the premise of Age of Prosperity (盛世, 2009), a political fantasy novel by John Chan Koon-Chung (陈冠中). Chan is known for his stories and essays about cities, and his fascination with urban landscape, people, and power structures. Previous fiction includes the Hong Kong Trilogy (香港三部曲), and his extensive writing about Beijing culture includes the essay “Bohemian Beijing,” which approaches life in the city through residents who are situated on the margins.* His new novel, which imagines a China in which the government has succeeded in building a “harmonious society,” displays a similar eye for detail presented in a reportorial style.

Age of Prosperity is a fascinating book that succeeds on a number of levels but fails in one fatal way. The novel presents a convincing depiction of Beijing’s intellectual circles through his protagonist, Chen (a mirror-universe version of the author), and the meandering plot gives the author the opportunity to explore aspects of contemporary Chinese society. References to contemporary scandals such as milk additives, mass demonstrations, brick kiln slaves, product quality concerns, and underground religious movements give the story the feel of a ripped-from-the-headlines thriller at times. Chen, who doesn’t realize at first that a month has gone missing, is drawn into the search by an old colleague who’s noticed the gap and a former flame who feels vaguely uneasy. This uneasiness is all the more remarkable because of the happiness of the public as a whole: two years before, the world slipped into an economic crisis, yet China managed to reach new heights of prosperity and stability.

Eventually the protagonists are able to seek answers through a point-blank interrogation of a high-level official who was in on the plan. What he tells them is both a darkly comic echo of “red menace” fears from 1950s America and a bleak revelation that brings new meaning to the author’s frequent references to the tragedies of the last sixty years – the anti-rightist movement, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and more recently, the “strike hard” campaign in 1983 and the crackdown on the student movement in 1989 – and underscores the prophetic element of the narrative.

Unfortunately, the story grinds to a halt midway through that interrogation. Once the secret of the missing month has been revealed and the official begins to explicate China’s place in the world and its pursuit of international influence, the work feels less like a novel and more like a political speech (at one point, the official is described as responding to a question “as if he were giving a lecture”). Whether or not this is a deliberate subversion of genre conventions, it certainly is tough going for a reader who is looking for a plot movement as opposed to a 40-page political treatise.

And it’s that treatise, and the political commentary in the rest of the novel, that’s at the heart of the attention that Age of Prosperity has received. An interesting exploration of novel’s critique of the “Chinese model of development” by Zhansui Yu can be found at The China Beat; other recent reviews include those by Linda Jaivin at China Heritage Quarterly and by Xujun Eberlein at Foreign Policy. (These reviews all include extensive spoilers, so exercise caution.)

The Foreign Policy review tags the book as “the return of politically charged science fiction in China,” and in it Eberlein suggests that socially-conscious science fiction disappeared in the wake of the anti-spiritual pollution campaign of 1983. It was replaced by “time travel, space voyage, robot battles, you name it — but social or political criticism, as you might read in books like George Orwell’s 1984, is almost completely lacking.” Although the campaign did bring to a close the first stage of reform-era Chinese SF and end the careers of a number of prominent writers, in the decades that followed, science fiction stories that addressed issues in contemporary society and politics were never totally absent.

Chan is not even the first writer of socially-oriented science fiction in China to propose the idea of authorities seeking to maintain stability, boost national prestige, and ensure GDP growth by keeping the public contented and ignorant (chemically or otherwise). For example, “The Olympic Dream” (奥运梦, translated at CDT), a short story that was widely reposted across the Chinese-language Internet in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics, imagined the Beijing authorities giving local residents hibernation pills so they’d stay out of the way of the foreign guests attending the Games.

City of Silence
《寂静之城》
Ma Boyong (马伯庸)
2005.05

Several years ago, I remember being amazed when I opened up an issue of Science Fiction World and started reading Ma Boyong’s “City of Silence” (寂静之城). The short story, ostensibly set in New York (albeit a New York subjected to suspiciously Beijing-like seasonal dust storms), describes the life of an IT worker under an authoritarian regime that monitors each word that everyone utters. In an offline version of China’s current web censorship apparatus, speech is required to be free from “sensitive words,” and to enable the monitors to do their job, people must enunciate clearly and use only words that appear on a whitelist. Silence reigns as a result, except in clandestine “free-speech clubs” (which, in an unedited version of the story, are also free-love clubs). The author has said that the story is merely a riff on 1984, but it really struck a chord with readers and tends to be brought up whenever the authorities attempt some new approach to online censorship.

One author whose fiction frequently deals with contemporary Chinese society and politics is Han Song (韩松), who has a day-job as a Xinhua journalist. On his blog, Han Song turns a darkly cynical eye on the way the events are reported in the media, and the same black humor comes out in his fiction as well, from the Cultural Revolution-themed “Return to the Past” (回到过去), to “The Great Wall” (长城) and its commentary on “national character,” to the novella Taiwan Drifts (台湾漂移), which satirizes disaster relief, ethnic relations, and territorial integrity by setting the island of Taiwan on a collision course with the mainland.

One major example is the novel 2066: Red Star Over America (2066年之西行漫记, 2000) which, like Ma Boyong’s story, uses an American setting to comment on Chinese society. In the year 2066, the United States is a closed-off, declining, inward-looking society wracked by civil strife. China is now a global superpower and leads world development with its financial prowess and far-reaching thinking. The story begins with a visit to the United States by a team of Chinese Go players who have been dispatched to spread of civilization to the more backward parts of the world through this traditional Chinese game. Tang Long, a 16-year-old go prodigy, is the star member of the team. During a historic match at the World Trade Center, terrorists blow up the sea walls around New York City and other American metropolises, plunging the country into chaos.

2066: Red Star Over America
《2066年之西行漫记》
Han Song (韩松)
327 pages
2000

Tang is separated from his teammates and must make his way across the country in a peculiar coming-of-age story overflowing with ideas: he joins up with a crew of Asian teens devoted to fighting Whitey as they quest for an elusive “magic wand” that can forecast the future, befriends another go player whose skills derive from a bionic kangaroo tail grafted on by his father, and eventually falls in with a warlord fighting mecha battles across the American west. Interspersed throughout Tang’s account of his adventures are transcripts of meetings between high-level Chinese officials, whose attempts at aid are repeatedly rebuffed by the Americans. Han’s America is a fascinating amalgam of present-day American culture mixed with elements of mid-20th Century China, shot through with futuristic technology. Critics noted that the setting, exactly one century after the start of the Cultural Revolution, suggests that the novel should be read as a commentary on contemporary Chinese society.

Another story that more closely parallels the themes of Age of Prosperity is the novella My Homeland Does Not Dream (我的祖国不做梦). Han’s short story imagines a China in which a drugged population is unaware that they are working a second shift in their sleep to help the country meet its GDP targets. Only a few top leaders know of this project, and the young protagonist, for some reason unaffected by the drug, eventually tracks down one of the masterminds who had been using his wife’s second nighttime shift to carry on an affair. The overall narrative arc is quite similar to Chan’s novel, but where Age of Prosperity lingers more on contemporary social issues, Han’s story is a taut pulp adventure and dispenses with the authorities’ motivations in a few paragraphs rather than Chan’s John Galt-style speech. Both stories end with their respective protagonists saying, in effect, “Screw it. Let’s escape to the south and see if they have the guts to chase us.”

Homeland, like many of Han’s edgiest stories, did not appear in print. Like Chan’s novel, which is available in Hong Kong and Taiwan but not on the mainland, the sensitivity of the subject matter restricts them to online publication, or forces China to be swapped out for some other location.

That’s not to say that “social SF” about China itself does not appear at all on the mainland. One of the best stories of 2009, “Year of the Rat” (鼠年) by Stanley Chan Qiufan (陈楸帆), was published in Science Fiction World. Chan addresses the predicament of China’s college graduates facing dim career prospects by putting them to work catching genetically-altered rats (see this recent post).

Wu Yan’s “Flowers of Decline” (衰败之花), included in a year’s best compilation for 2002, is a political fable in which a certain flower begins to flourish in the area surrounding bankrupt business and other failures. As the horticultural invasion spreads, panic grips the population even as the leadership of the country (“China” in the original; “the Empire” in the sanitized reprint) attempts to solve the problem through the usual means of lengthy discussion and energetic campaigns, but ultimately all it can do is urge people to ignore the flower and work harder. The world reacts by fitting the flower into an existing China Threat narrative. Finally, cooks in Guangdong discover that it cooks up well, and in the space of just a few months, the rest of China digs up every last flower to feed the province’s enormous appetite. Wu’s story ends with an orgiastic paean to China’s indomitable spirit and concludes: “The Chinese people are invincible! In the past, invincible! In the present, invincible! And in the future, forever invincible!”

Lost in 2080
《迷失2080》
Cao Zhenglan (曹正兰)
203 pages
2008

From Wang Jinkang (王晋康), a prolific author whose work often involves biological themes, there’s Ant Life (蚁生, 2007), the story of a young man for whom rustication during the Cultural Revolution presents the opportunity to engage in scientific research. Completing the work of his father (a scientist put to death as a class enemy), he creates an “altruism serum” extracted from ant pheromones which, when applied to humans, turns them into perfect collective workers. Not for long, though: scientific hubris and paternalistic leadership soon plunge his artificial communist utopia into chaos.

Liu Cixin (刘慈欣), the most popular SF writer at the moment due to his Three Body alien invasion trilogy, dealt with statecraft and international relations in Supernova Era (超新星纪元, 2003), the tale of a world in which everyone over the age of 13 is killed off by a cosmic event. The preparations for the transfer of power from an adult regime to one composed of pre-teens gives Liu plenty of room to comment on the workings of present-day Chinese government and society, and the global scale of the story in the second half of the book pits the Chinese against the Americans.

Lost in 2080 (迷失2080, 2008) by Cao Zhenglan (曹正兰) goes for high-concept allegory by shunting its characters to an alternate dimension where blood serves as the very foundation of the economy: all services and goods are paid for through blood donations, and people survive by literally sucking blood from their fellow citizens.

Age of Prosperity may be the first political fantasy to take such direct aim at the modern social order and to discuss politics in such depth, but these and other science fiction stories also engage with contemporary Chinese society in thought-provoking ways. And while this strain of science fiction may only represent a minority of what is published in China, the tradition of social criticism that has been part of Chinese SF since its inception in the early twentieth century continues to be carried out.

Notes

1. Included in Bohemian China (波希米亚中国, 2004). An English translation is available online (please forgive the clunkiness — I was just starting out as a translator).
2. Parts of this post began as a comment to this Metafilter thread.
3. Danwei posted an interview with the author in June (mainland accessible link).

The story is narrated by a reporter who is dispatched to an agricultural research center in the Gobi Desert to report on the latest achievements, and it reminded me of a number of other Chinese SF stories that feature journalists as narrators.

The five works discussed below may only be related by virtue of being narrated by journalists, but they are fairly representative of changing trends in Chinese SF in the latter half of the 20th Century.

“Elephants,” written by Chi Shuchang (迟叔昌) with contributions by Middle School Student magazine editor Ye Zhishan (叶至善), is a snapshot of Great Leap Forward-era scientific romanticism. Originally titled “A Twentieth-Century Zhu Bajie” (after the pig-demon hero of Journey to the West), the story is included in Classics of Chinese Science Fiction (中国科幻小说经典, 2006), edited by science fiction writer and court biographer Ye Yonglie, and is also available online here.

In the story, journalist Yuesen, meets up with his former classmate Li Wenjian, who now works at the research center. On the way, Yuesen notices what seem to be white elephants whose trunks are missing, but once he arrives, he learns that they’re actually gigantic pigs known as “Wonder #72,” which were created by accelerating the growth of cross-bred Sichuan white pigs and Yorkshire pigs by irradiating the pituitary gland.

The pigs in the story match up perfectly with the description given in the poem on the top left of the poster (source):

Like much of 20th-Century Chinese SF, “Elephants” is not simply entertainment — it also fulfills an pedagogical mission. Both men were math and physics enthusiasts in high school, and the story demonstrates that they were able to pursue that interest in their chosen careers. The value of math in agriculture is illustrated through a discussion of the cube-square law as it relates to breeding such enormous animals (they’ve had to use a special “bone strengthening serum”). The accelerated growth also means that the pigs are fully grown at ten months, making their meat especially tender and tasty. And math in journalism? “Look at the newspapers. Isn’t there an increasing amount of math and physics vocabulary?” (Ye, 128)

The story is set in some undisclosed year in the future (“19xx”). Hi-tech details, such as wristwatch radios and “Beijing” model hovercraft, place the action toward the end of the century, but many of the issues, from giant pigs to the necessity of conserving iron, are rooted in the late 50s. It’s a dissonance that shows up in several of the stories discussed in this post:

Li Wenjian took me across the pasture and we arrived at a large shed. The shed was a little like an airplane hanger, with a single large door over four meters wide and five meters high. As soon as Li pressed a switch, the door, which appeared as solid as an iron plate, suddenly turned as thin and soft as silk and rolled up immediately.

“Miraculous,” I gasped involuntarily.

“You mean this door?” Li said. “This isn’t a miracle. This door was made out of ‘plastic #908.’ It’s a plastic that can be compressed as thin as a sheet of paper, soft enough to roll up and practically weightless, but is also so hard that an American bison horn can’t penetrate it. Nothing’s more appropriate than using it for an animal shed. The roof, walls, and door to this shed are all made from plastic #908. We used this material especially to reduce the use of steel in the building frame.”

“Is this the newest achievement you mentioned?” I asked.

“No,” laughed Li. “Have you forgotten? My specialty is animal husbandry, not architecture. Of course, sometimes we have to combine things. But it’s not really an achievement. Our newest achievement is inside the shed! Come on in!” (129)

Perhaps the most famous writer of children’s science fiction in the late 20th Century is Ye Yonglie, whose series of SF adventures for children, Little Smart’s Roamings in the Future (小灵通漫游未来, 1978), remains popular to this day.

His hero is an eight-year-old magazine reporter who’s assigned to report on the future as a way of producing a ready-made answer that can be sent off to all of the children who write into the magazine asking “What will the future be like?” The answers are fanciful imaginings of life in “Future City,” set in no particular year. Little Smart returned for more roamings in 1984 and again in 2000 to offer new reports of life in the future updated for China’s rapidly-developing society.

Time travel is also an SF device in Yan Jiaqi’s A Flight Across the Ages (跨越时代的飞行, 1979), subtitled “Reason, Religion, and Practice: Visits to Three Courts of Law.” A Guangming Daily reporter is dispatched by time ship to visit courts in three eras: Italy in 1633 for the “court of religion,” France in 1755 for the “court of reason,” and Beijing in 2009 for the “court of practice.” His duty is to observe the workings of the law in those three eras for the purpose of educating his readers, who have just emerged from an extended period in which the law was abused.

The novel was first published in the Guangming Daily as a series of columns, which were then expanded for their publication as a standalone “philosophical fantasy” (哲学幻想小说). The original versions were translated by David S.K. Hong and Denis C. Mair for Toward a Democratic China, an English-language collection of Yan’s work. Portions are available via Google Books.

Yan’s reporter is more involved in his experiences than the passive journalist of “Elephants.” Fleshing out the legal theory are depictions of futuristic Beijing and its 21st-Century media, and the future setting makes his amazement at some of the advanced technology more believable:

At the door of the courthouse I showed my Guangming Daily press pass, much to the surprise of the judge who greeted me. He looked me over, then looked at my pass and said, “There is no Guangming Daily now! This pass is outdated. Look!” He held up the color-printed newspaper that was in his hand. On the masthead were printed the large words Guangming Times. The judge went on to say: “Beginning in 2005 the Guangming Daily officially changed its name to the Guangming Times. It now comes out in two daily editions to keep up with the latest domestic and world news. Why do you come to cover this story with a Guangming Daily press pass?” (translation by Hong and Mair; SPPH edition 94)

Later on he expands on the media landscape of the future (in my own translation):

In less than five minutes, the moving walkway delivered me to the Ritan Hotel on the south side of Jianguomenwai Street.

This hotel had been built in 2005 and equipped with the latest amenities. With the Information Transmitter, for example, you had no need to exit your room, but through the “television newspaper” you could learn the major news from inside the country and around the world for the day or the past week. The television newspaper wasn’t an ordinary TV; it was similar to the Information Storage Device in the R-1001 Airship. Its screen looked like an ordinary piece of paper laid out flat on a desk (the desk was especially designed for the TV Newspaper). With the press of a button, you could select different newspapers to read. One day at six in the morning I pressed the button for the Guangming Times and a true-to-life copy of the paper, printed just one and a half hours before, appeared on the screen. (115)

Given the book’s origin and purpose, it comes as no surprise that the people of 2009 Beijing are obsessed with Lin Biao, the Gang of Four, and the debate over the truth criterion. Yan visits a Panoramic Holographic Theater, where he’s shown an immersive film about Cultural Revolution-era show-trials. And when he is taken to the B-250 Nuclear Power Plant in the hills of Changping District, he learns how scientists are still struggling against bureaucrats who make their choices based on political expediency rather than scientific analysis (he may have hit the mark with that one, to be honest).

Appearing in the same era as Flight is Interviews with the Missing (访问失踪者, 1981) by Meng Weizai (孟伟哉). In this novel, a journalist for the magazine Lovely China (可爱的中国) is assigned to interview several missing persons. The year is 2026; the missing persons were abducted by aliens in 1974, before the fall of the Gang of Four and the end of the Cultural Revolution.

Although Interviews is more story-driven than Yan Jiaqi’s political tracts, the post-CR ideological slant is still laid on fairly thick, as in the following passage reflecting on the meaning of non-human life in the universe:

You ought to know that I used to teach Marxist philosophy. But what even the most revolutionary, least conservative Marxist philosophy on earth gave me was a perspective on the infinite boundlessness of the universe. This is of course correct, but the world of the universe is so rich in variety, so seductive and surprising. This doesn’t mean I blame early great thinkers like Marx and Engels at all, and really, they’re incredibly great men. I just want to say that no matter how great the individual and his theories, he is limited in the presence of the universe because of its boundlessness. If I have brought anything back from this voyage through the universe, first of all I would tell you: Don’t make anyone — even a great man — into a god! Don’t turn any theory into lifeless dogma! My voyage through the universe proves that Marx’s view of the universe is correct. (60)

One of the characters is given the name Zha Zi (查梓), which is a homophone for “scum” or “dregs” (渣滓 or 渣子), so you know right off the bat that he’s the villain — he’s a craven opportunist given to shouting CR-era slogans and , and his unfortunate demise is hinted at throughout the interviews.

Here’s a scene from early in the book, when the humans have just encountered a strange race of aliens:

The blue-haired people became quiet with amazement and curiosity, and looked us all over. My son said to me that he would play a Strauss waltz, and that we should dance to the music. No shame is felt in a completely unfamiliar environment, and since the black-toothed people had made merry for us, we naturally had to do something in return. Even though friendly dancing had been banned for many years, we were in outer space and no need to fear labels like “capitalist thought” and “revisionism,” so we began to dance to Zhongmin’s accompaniment. There were four men and four women apart from Zhongmin, which meant we could form four dancing pairs, but as our compatriot Zha Zi said that he did not know how to dance, my husband Yu Qimin and I had to take turns dancing with my daughter Aihua.

Our dancing pleased the blue-haired people, but I noticed that they were more interested in my son’s performance, and they seemed to draw more from the music than from the dance.

As we were dancing, the blue-haired people began to stomp their feet. This was difficult to interpret, but from their eyes and faces, they seemed happy.

After we had finished, Zha Zi said that he would add an another item to the program, and we had no right to stop him. What did he add? Somersaults and handstands. He turned five somersaults in a row, and the black-toothed people began to stomp their feet. When he turned upside-down, and used his hands to walk, the golden-haired people fiercely clapped their hands. We thought this was to applaud him, and he thought the same, but we soon discovered that their expressions were not right. Yet he continued to walk on his hands. To win more and more applause, he walked circle after circle on his hands until he could no longer remain upright and fell over. The spectators’ clapping became louder and more ferocious. The clapping continued as we helped Zha Zi to his feet, and we felt upset and angry that they would continue to clap after someone fell over. But much later we figured things out: they stomped their feet to express praise, and their hand claps represented full-on mockery and opposition.

Evidently the people of that planet had a unique ethical concept and moral standard. To them, people were great, and people were equal. Everyone had the same supreme dignity, and everyone should guard their own dignity and respect other individuals. No one ought to play the clown, no one ought to flatter someone else. Long ago in their early history, clowns and sycophants were represented by falling head-over-heels to crawl on the ground in front of the powerful. Therefore, they had interpreted Zha Zi’s actions, as a show of contempt and an insult to their dignity. That’s how strange it was. (52)

Zha Zi’s error divides the aliens into two camps who disagree over the humans’ intelligence and cultural status. As part of the subsequent evaluation process, the abductees are taken on tours of alien worlds at various stages of civilization. They have no idea that they are being tested until they finally prove themselves: armed and taken to observe a ceremony that involves the sacrifice of slaves, they intervene to kill a slaver. The aliens are convinced that humanity stands on the side of justice for the oppressed and accepts the abductees into their utopian civilization.

In a review of the novella written for the Literature Press (文学报) and included as a foreword to the book, Chen Jue (陈珏), now a well-known translator of foreign SF, called Interviews “China’s first utopian novel,” tracing its lineage back to domestic works like Tao Qian’s “Peach Blossom Spring” and Kang Youwei’s Great Unity, and more directly to voyage fantasies like Destiny of the Flowers in the Mirror and Gulliver’s Travels. Chen notes:

Under the author’s pen, 21st-Century China is already a utopia, but the missing persons return with news of another, even higher utopia; China will ascend to an even more perfect utopian plane. China will become an Evergreen Planet on Earth — I believe this is the main theme behind the fantastic story the author has carefully constructed.

Like any other work, Interviews with the Missing is not perfect. Like all Chinese SF, it is relatively young. Since the 1960s, it has been common overseas for famous literary writers to make guest appearances in SF. Our writers have just begun to write SF novels. E Hua (鄂华) and Zhang Xiaotian (张笑天) have written SF, and Interviews with the Missing is the first SF novel by a literary writer. The first volume has just finished its serialization, and we have high hopes that the author will continue to write, advancing the cause of world science fiction to new heights. (5)

In an afterword, Meng writes that the second volume, titled Confirmation for the Missing (失踪者信礼), would be forthcoming. I have not been able to find any evidence that it was published. It’s unfortunate, because underneath the ideology, the novel contains some engaging depictions of alien civilization. In particular, the tension and bleakness of a scene in a deserted cityscape where the humans and their alien guides are stalked by a fierce beast is handled quite effectively.

Chinese SF grew up considerably over the next two decades. By the time Han Song’s Let’s All Look For Aliens (让我们一起寻找外星人, 1999) was published, a work of science fiction no longer needed to enlighten or educate its readership about science.

In this novel, a journalist is at the center of the action rather than a passive observer. Chen Yu, a reporter working for G Daily, launches an investigation into possible paranormal explanations of recent unexplained phenomena. His interest is sparked by a catastrophic subway accident (Han’s got a thing for subways and other forms of mass transit) that followed the vague uneasiness he felt after an interview with a disaster science expert. Chasing down stories of alien abductions and getting involved in the the work China’s UFO societies are doing with abductees is much more exciting than the monotony of contemporary urban life.

Chen’s status as a journalist gives him access to experts and institutions and often facilitates interviews with ordinary people, but unlike the earlier SF journalists whose editors expected them to inform the general public of their astonishing findings, Chen’s stories are quashed by his superiors. Han, himself a Xinhua journalist, is pretty cynical about the news media on his blog, and the journalists in this novel are constantly withholding information and watering down reports to get past the censors, while the novelty-seeking, publicity-mad public forgets major stories within a few days.

Despite all of the paranormal elements, the unknown remains unknown, and Aliens remains a rigorously scientific novel, even as it devotes a full chapter to a vision of what the world might be like if aliens really were to arrive on Earth. Han has written about ghosts, aliens, and other paranormal phenomena in Field Investigations of Ghosts (鬼的现场调查, 2002), and he is well-acquainted with rational, scientific approaches to such issues. As appendices, Han includes a timeline of UFO sightings in China, a translation of a 1997 Newsweek article on the subject, and a copy of a 1978 UN initiative on UFOs, and in an afterword, he dispels the notion that UFO investigation is a field run by kooks:

The work of the China UFO Research Organization is actually quite serious and professional. Eighty percent of its members have at least a junior-college education, and the core membership consists of people employed as experts in the fields of aeronautics and aerospace, geology, and meteorology. In the novel I mentioned that they also accepted qigong and spiritualism into their research, but even if they did, it was in their early stages. They certainly do not today, and in fact they actively oppose it. They strongly support using modern scientific techniques to study they mystery of UFOs. Many people are unaware of these facts and mock them as “zen for foxes”. (368; previously translated as a comment on Shanghai Scrap)

Han Song often notes that real life in contemporary China, particularly life in the state media, is often more science fictional than any SF story. He may have a point, but the imaginative stories written as fiction are usually more fun to read than fabricated statistics, reports filed before the events they purport to record, and credulous accounts of quack cure-alls.

The death of science fiction master Arthur C. Clarke last Wednesday drew reactions from science fiction authors and fans all over the world, China included. Here are some of the commemorations that Chinese SF enthusiasts posted online this week:

· Wu Yan, probably the most well-known SF critic in China, immediately posted an old appreciation piece he had written on the occasion of Clarke’s 75th birthday. The article, which ran in Science Fiction World in 1992, told of the early encounters that Chinese SF had with Clarke: letters exchanged in which he expressed interest in Chinese SF.

· Liu Cixin, possibly the most popular Chinese SF currently writing, also wrote on his blog of drawing inspiration from Clarke:

Clarke has left us….

Twenty-seven years ago, he was the one who gave me the idea to write science fiction. 2001 taught me how SF could be used to exhibit the breadth and mystery of the universe. Rendezvous With Rama let me see how SF could be like a creator, fashioning an imaginary world real enough to practically reach out and touch. Later, all of my own novels are but clumsy imitations of those two classics.

Now, alas, that man is gone…

· The SFW group on the book-related social networking website Douban changed its name to “Farewell to Clarke.” In its extensive obituary thread, Commenter BRDX wrote:

Arthur, have you become tired of the 21st Century?

We have no moon city, no space elevator to a synchronous orbit, no robot that can read our feelings — we have nothing at all!

In the first year of the 20th Century, Marconi’s wireless signal crossed the Atlantic. In the the third year, the Wright brothers took to the skies in the flying machine they built. In the fifth year, Einstein wrote out his mass-energy equation….

In the 21st Century, a complacent humanity has lost its spirit of adventure.

Sorry, we have let you down.

Farewell, Arthur, farewell.

The dreamer may die, but the dream never will…

· Another commenter, NStar, posted a link to a blog post:

More than twenty years ago, I read Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama. My enchantment with that book was probably one of the reasons I ultimately fell in love with science fiction. About one year ago, I happened to receive a letter from the master. When I opened it, I saw it was an invitation to join the Planetary Society. In my excitement, I couldn’t help feeling confused: how did the master know of me? Thinking it through, I decided that it probably was because of a science fiction Sudoku — just a small block of text — that ran in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine that gave the Planetary Society the idea that I was a prospect. Probably, they had given the master a whole stack of things to sign, which they then sent to all the authors whose names appeared in the British and American SF mags, so their advertisement had been sent to me.

Although it wasn’t the master himself who had noticed me, at any rate I was fortunate to receive a letter with his autograph.

· Han Song, SF author and Xinhua journalist, remembered Clarke in a blog post that characteristically touched on contemporary Chinese politics:

When I heard the news that Clarke had died, it was already late, but although I was ill, I still wanted to get up and write a few words. I first read 2001: A Space Odyssey in Modern Foreign Science Fiction, edited by Shi Xianrong and published by the Shanghai Literature and Arts Press. This was probably around 1984-85, and at that time lots of publishers would go to universities to sell old books. I bought that book (it was only the second volume). Clarke’s classic story was the first, and was translated by Guan Zaihan. Published in 1968, this story is still readable today. Clarke’s strongest influence on me was on my outlook on the world and on the universe, just like Marx, the Buddha, Einstein, and Plank. Like Kubrick said of Clarke, he gave us a new perspective, letting us see humanity in its earthly cradle extending its hands to a future in the stars. Very few people you meet in your life will truly influence you. Regrettably, however, I often feel that a compliment from a certain leader was most influential in my life.

In the late 1990s, my office was about to send me to Sri Lanka, but because the departmental leader thought “things are too busy now, so we can’t let you go,” I ended up not going (you see the enormous influence a leader has). This was fairly regrettable. I had even planned out how I would request an interview with Clarke. Later, friends told me that Sri Lanka was oh such a nice place. And it was the place where Clarke predicted a space elevator going out to the universe. The communications satellites that Clarke predicted have become reality. And after humanity ascended to the moon, an American astrophysicist praised Clarke for providing the most important motivation.

Clarke said: “I regard myself primarily as an entertainer and my ideals are Maugham, Kipling, Wells. My chief aim is the old SF cliché, ‘The search for wonder.’ However, I am almost equally interested in style and rhythm, having been much influenced by Tennyson, Swinburne, Housman, and the Georgian poets.” “My main themes are exploration (space, sea, time), the position of Man in the hierarchy of the universe, and the effect of contact with other intelligences.”These ideas had an influence on contemporary Chinese science fiction authors. But today there is still not enough of that “search for wonder” (猎奇), and poetry is still lacking.

Let us draw inspiration from these words, just as we draw inspiration from President Hu Jintao’s remarks at the legislative sessions, to work cleanly for the country and the people, or as we draw encouragement from the words of Premier Wen Jiabao: we must liberate the minds of every individual — that is, we must have independent thought, critical thinking, and creativity.

I think that Clarke could be said to have worked cleanly within the science fiction realm (as clean as the ocean and skies of Sri Lanka), and his independent thought, critical thinking, and creativity should serve as a worthy model.

Clarke worked cleanly in science fiction until he was ninety years old. I am quite young compared to him, but already I’m not very clean: I’ve been polluted, led astray, made mistakes, a body covered in mud. What will the future bring? Will independence, criticism, and creativity — values intrinsic to science fiction — be illuminated by the Olympic torch climbing Mt. Everest?

· Just a few months ago, the now-defunct translations magazine World Science Fiction ran a short biographical introduction to Clarke in its December, 2007, issue. The piece was written by Chinese SF author Xing He, who also posted a commemoration to his blog this week.

Image from Wu Yan’s blog.

Where’s the SF?

I bring up this question because yesterday, when I went to the Beijing Book Building to buy a science fiction book for a guest who was visiting from far away, I found a sign reading “Chinese Fantasy” in an area that had once sold domestic SF; the whole bookshelf was like this, and it was identical to what I had seen at the Wangfujing Bookstore – they’d all been changed. So in Xinhua Bookstores today, there are only “Chinese Fantasy” and “Western Science Fiction” sections that seem to mock each other. This in and of itself makes an excellent SF topic; I couldn’t help but recall that back when Liu Cixin described the SF-Fantasy Wars, he had complete confidence in SF being victorious.

At this point, I searched carefully through the “Chinese Fantasy” section of the bookstore, and finally came up with three or five SF books — Science Fiction World‘s Nebula IV and V, an annual SF anthology edited by Wu Yan, and two volumes of a four-volume collection of Pan Jiazheng’s works — nothing else. So I asked the salesgirl, “Where’s the domestic science fiction?”

She said, “Here, it’s basically all fantasy. There’s no pure science fiction. Tell me the title you want.”

I said, “Ball Lightning?”

She said, “Nope. That’s an old one.”

I asked, “Why are there so few domestic SF books?”

She said, “They don’t publish them, so we don’t have them.” I didn’t know whether she was joking or telling the truth.

The International SF-Fantasy Conference hosted by Yao Haijun et al. will open in Chengdu at the end of the month. From what I hear, it might be a Zunyi Conference. Fortunately at this point I found Lala’s chilling “Projection of the Multiverse” and I let out a bitter sigh.

I’ve wondered about the strange lack of SF at the major bookstores in downtown Beijing; the bookstores in Zhongguancun seem to have a better selection. Why this is I don’t know — is it their proximity to the university district, or does SF sell better to the tech crowds in so-called “Beijing’s Silicon Valley”? Or it could just be a random coincidence; shelving systems in most Chinese bookstores make it fairly difficult to find a title without knowing the publisher.

Might as well just order online, as people have suggested in the comments to Han’s post.