EBook For Chinese Science Fiction Concepts, Forms, and Histories 1st Edition By Mingwei Song, Nathaniel Isaacson, Hua Li
advertisement
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com STUDIES IN GLOBAL SCIENCE FICTION Chinese Science Fiction Concepts, Forms, and Histories Edited by Mingwei Song Nathaniel Isaacson · Hua Li Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download. Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at etutorsource@gmail.com You can also order by WhatsApp https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph one_number&app_absent=0 Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and Author Name. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Studies in Global Science Fiction Series Editors Anindita Banerjee Department of Comparative Literature Cornell University Ithaca, NY, USA Rachel Haywood Ferreira Department of World Languages and Cultures Iowa State University Ames, IA, USA Mark Bould Department of Film and Literature University of the West of England Bristol, UK Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download. Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at etutorsource@gmail.com You can also order by WhatsApp https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph one_number&app_absent=0 Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and Author Name. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Studies in Global Science Fiction (edited by Anindita Banerjee, Rachel Haywood Ferreira, and Mark Bould) is a brand-new and first-of-its-kind series that opens up a space for Science Fiction scholars across the globe, inviting fresh and cutting-edge studies of both non-Anglo-American and Anglo-American SF literature. Books in this series will put SF in conversation with postcolonial studies, critical race studies, comparative literature, transnational literary and cultural studies, among others, contributing to ongoing debates about the expanding global compass of the genre and the emergence of a more diverse, multinational, and multi-ethnic sense of SF’s past, present, and future. Topics may include comparative studies of selected (trans)national traditions, SF of the African or Hispanic Diasporas, Indigenous SF, issues of translation and distribution of non-Anglophone SF, SF of the global south, SF and geographic/cultural borderlands, and how neglected traditions have developed in dialogue and disputation with the traditional SF canon. Editors: Anindita Banerjee, Cornell University Rachel Haywood Ferreira, Iowa State University Mark Bould, University of the West of England Advisory Board Members: Aimee Bahng, Dartmouth College Ian Campbell, Georgia State University Grace Dillon (Anishinaabe), Portland State University Rob Latham, Independent Scholar Andrew Milner, Monash University Pablo Mukherjee, University of Warwick Stephen Hong Sohn, University of California, Riverside Mingwei Song, Wellesley College Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Mingwei Song • Nathaniel Isaacson Hua Li Editors Chinese Science Fiction Concepts, Forms, and Histories Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Contents 1 Introduction 1 Nathaniel Isaacson, Hua Li, and Mingwei Song Part I Contesting Science and Fiction 33 2 K ang Youwei’s Book of the Heavens and the Porous Epistemological Grounds of Early-modern Chinese Science Fiction 35 Lorenzo Andolfatto 3 Intelligent Humanoid Machines: Imaginations of Physical and Mental Transformation in Late Qing Literature and Their Intellectual Origins 55 Liyuan Jia 4 The King of Electricity from the East: Science, Technology, and the Vision of World Order in Late Qing China 83 Guangyi Li 5 Formal Fictions: “Chinese” “Science” “Fiction” in Translation 99 Virginia L. Conn v Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com vi Contents Part II Negotiating Media and Genre 121 6 The Writing Editors: Late Qing and Republican Media Professionals as Authors of Science Fiction123 Qiong Yang 7 Projecting Eco-Futures: Cinematic Visions of Utopian Science and Ecology from the Mao Era to the Deng Era145 Melissa A. Hosek 8 Information, the Body, and Humanism in the Chinese Cyber Novel Forty Millennia of Authenticity Cultivation167 Hua Li 9 Open Up Your Brain Hole: Spatial Imaginaries in Chinese Online Science Fiction191 Heather Inwood Part III Beyond Anthropocene and Utopia 211 10 Of Illness and Illusion: The Chaosmology of Han Song’s Hospital Trilogy213 Jannis Jizhou Chen 11 Liu Cixin and the Cosmic Pastoral235 Gwennaël Gaffric 12 Bodies in Transformation: The Politics of Post-80s Science Fiction Authors Chi Hui, Chen Qiufan, and Zhang Ran251 Frederike Schneider-Vielsäcker 13 The Posthuman and the Neo-Baroque in Taiwan Science Fiction271 Mingwei Song Index295 Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Notes on Contributors Lorenzo Andolfatto is a senior researcher at the Department of Geosciences of the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), where he pursues research across the fields of modern Chinese and comparative literature, translation studies, human geography, and ecocriticism. He is the author of Hundred Days’ Literature. Chinese Utopian Fiction at the End of Empire, 1902–1910 (Leiden: Brill 2019), while his most recent work has appeared in journals such as positions: asia critique, C.L.E.A.R. (Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews), and Science Fiction Studies. Jannis Jizhou Chen is both a literary critic and a fiction writer. He is an assistant professor at the Department of Chinese, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on environmental humanities, critical theory (including posthumanism, new materialisms, Object-Oriented Ontology, and Chinese intellectual discourses on things), and 20th and 21st Sinophone literature, film, and culture. His project explores the recent ecological and posthuman themes in narrative fiction produced in Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. Virginia L. Conn is a lecturer at Stevens Institute of Technology and the managing editor of the SFRA Review. Her most recent scholarship has appeared in World Futures Review, Chinese Literature and Thought Today, Vector, Verge, and other scholarly journals. She researches depictions of the “new socialist human” in socialist science fiction; her forthcoming monograph examines how those depictions guided policy decisions in Mao-era China, Soviet Russia, and East Germany. vii Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download. Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at etutorsource@gmail.com You can also order by WhatsApp https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph one_number&app_absent=0 Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and Author Name. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com viii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Gwennaël Gaffric is Assistant Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 (France). His PhD thesis was about ecological issues in Taiwan literature. He is also translator of Chinese, Hongkongese and Taiwanese contemporary novels. His research interests include literary studies (especially science fiction), ecocriticism, postcolonialism, and translation studies. He has recently published a book entitled La Littérature à l’ère de l’Anthropocène: une étude écocritique autour des œuvres de l’écrivain taïwanais Wu Ming-yi (L’Asiathèque, 2019), also translated in Chinese (Xin Jingdian, 2023). Melissa A. Hosek is a lecturer at Stanford University in the program of Civic, Liberal, and Global Education. She has a PhD in Chinese from Stanford University and specializes in modern Chinese literature with interests in science fiction studies and environmental humanities. Her ongoing research explores transforming ideas about ecology as expressed through science-oriented art and literature. Heather Inwood is Associate Professor of modern Chinese literature and culture at the University of Cambridge and a Staff Fellow in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Trinity Hall. Her research focuses on interactions between literature and digital media in contemporary China, especially poetry and online popular fiction. Her articles have been published in journals in Europe, China, the UK, and the US, and she has also written a Chinese-language blog and columns for Chinese newspapers. She is the author of Verse Going Viral: China’s New Media Scenes (University of Washington Press, 2014), which explores the fate of modern Chinese poetry in the age of the internet, and is currently working on a book on Chinese internet fiction. She is also co-editor of the British Journal of Chinese Studies and has edited a special issue on videogaming in the Sinophone world. Nathaniel Isaacson is Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Literature in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at North Carolina State University. His research interests include Chinese science fiction, Chinese cinema, cultural studies, and literary translation. Nathaniel has published articles in the Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures and journals including Osiris and Science Fiction Studies, as well as translations of non-fiction, poetry, and fiction in the translation journals Renditions, Pathlight and Chinese Literature Today. His book, Celestial Empire: the Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction (Wesleyan UP, 2017), Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ix examines the emergence of science fiction in late Qing China and the relationship between science fiction and Orientalism. Liyuan Jia is Professor of Literary Studies and author of fiction, writing under the penname “Feidao.” He is an associate professor in the Department of Chinese Literature at Tsinghua University in Beijing. His short story collections include Chinese Scifi Blockbusters, The Long Journey to Death, and others. His scholarly work has been published in Science Fiction Studies, Literary Review, and other academic journals. His book, ‘Modern’ and ‘Unknown’—a Study of Late Qing Science Fiction (2021) won the 13th World Chinese Science Fiction Association’s Nebula Award in 2022, and the 33rd Chinese sf Galaxy award in 2023. His fiction has been translated into English, Italian, Japanese, and other languages, among them “The Robot Who Liked to Tell Tall Tales” and “Legend of the Giant” appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine. Guangyi Li is Professor of Chinese and Comparative literature, Director of the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, and Vice Dean of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Science, Chongqing University. His research interests include modern and contemporary Chinese literature, twentieth-­century Sino-foreign literary relationship, science fiction literature and culture, and Utopian literature and thought. His work has appeared in the journals such as Wenxue pinglun (Literary Criticism), Zhongguo xiandai wenxue yanjiu congkan (Modern Chinese Literature Studies), Science Fiction Studies, and Utopian Studies. He is the editor of the Late Qing volumes of The Collected Works of Chinese Science Fiction (Zhongguo kehuan wenxue daxi wan Qing juan, 2020), X Ways of Reading Three Body (Santi de X zhong dufa, 2017), Chinese Science Fiction: A New Beginning (Zhongguo kehuan wenxue zai chufa, 2016), and Chinese translator of Ruth Levitas’s The Concept of Utopia (2018). Hua Li is Professor of Chinese in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Montana State University. Her primary research field is modern and contemporary Chinese literature. She has published two monographs: Contemporary Chinese Fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua: Coming of Age in Troubled Times (Brill) in 2011 and Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw (University of Toronto Press) in 2021. She has also published numerous refereed journal articles and book chapters on various topics in contemporary Chinese literary fiction, cinema, animation, and science fiction in Cambridge History of Science Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Fiction, Science Fiction Studies, China Information, Communication and the Public, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Frontier of Literary Studies in China, Forum for World Literature Studies, and other peer-reviewed journals. Frederike Schneider-Vielsäcker is an independent researcher who received her PhD in Chinese Studies from the Free University of Berlin in June 2021 and was Assistant Professor at the Institute of Chinese Studies at Heidelberg University from 2020 to 2022. Her forthcoming monograph focuses on socio-political discourses in contemporary Chinese science fiction literature written by authors of the post-80s generation. In 2019 and 2020, she co-hosted an event series with major Chinese SF writers in Berlin and organized panel discussions for the Frankfurt book fair. Recently, Frederike organized a workshop with filmmaker Fan Popo on anti-Asian racism and Chinese queer film at the Centre of Asian and Transcultural Studies of Heidelberg University. Mingwei Song is Professor of Modern Chinese Literature at Wellesley College. His research interests include modern Chinese literature, youth culture, and science fiction. He is the author of numerous books and research articles, including Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900–1959 (Harvard, 2015), New Wave in Chinese Science Fiction: History, Poetics, Texts (Shanghai, 2020; in Chinese), and Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia, 2023). He is the co-editor of The Reincarnated Giant: An Anthology of Twenty-First Century Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia, 2018). Qiong Yang is Associate Editor of literature and translation at Social Sciences in China Press (Beijing). Her research interests include the history of Chinese science fiction, scientific writings in general, and Chinese popular culture. She is the author of The Construction of the Genre of Science Fiction in the Chinese Context (2020, in Chinese). Yang has also published a dozen research papers in journals such as Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, The New Ray Bradbury Review, and Contemporary Chinese Literary Studies (Zhongguo dangdai wenxue yanjiu). Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com CHAPTER 1 Introduction Nathaniel Isaacson, Hua Li, and Mingwei Song Even though the three of us have all published monographs on Chinese science fiction (hereafter sf) during recent years, each of our books addresses a specific time period and the corresponding concepts and forms of sf. A volume like this one can only be produced through collective efforts, by the editors as well as all the twelve contributors, with an aim toward presenting a relatively coherent, continuous, detailed discussion of the genre and its place in modern Chinese culture throughout its history from the early twentieth century to the twenty-first century. Such a claim certainly does not mean that this volume can be counted as an exhaustive and definitive research on the topic; what we can do is, at best, to provide a range of samples to outline the field—case studies that open windows to N. Isaacson (*) North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA e-mail: nkisaacs@ncsu.edu H. Li Montana State University, Bozeman, MT, USA e-mail: huali@montana.edu M. Song Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, USA e-mail: msong2@wellesley.edu 1 M. Song et al. (eds.), Chinese Science Fiction, Studies in Global Science Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53541-3_1 Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 2 N. ISAACSON ET AL. research and theoretical thinking concerning the concepts, forms, and histories of Chinese sf. As an introductory reader to those interested in the genre, this volume brings together the three keywords in the title of this book: concepts, forms, histories—in a way that they help readers find coordinates in a journey into the unknown. Needless to say, it goes beyond the scope of this book to provide encyclopedic interpretations to the concepts, forms, and histories of sf. What we have been doing in this volume is rather to intertwine inquiries to both theories and histories, questions about both concepts and forms, and reflections on genre—and, of course, gender. A synthetic method guides almost each of the case studies that make the twelve chapters of the volume. The volume does not aim to be exclusive, but rather border-crossing, with our visions of sf to be transgressive and nonbinary. As a modern genre, science fiction has a long history in China, at least as long as that of most other modern print genres that began to be introduced into Chinese literature at the end of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), such as political fiction and detective fiction. Compared with the realist fiction that has dominated the Chinese literary scene since the May Fourth era, science fiction has an even longer history. Like many other modern genres, science fiction was imported from abroad. Its world building represented an otherworldly imagination from its beginning as a translated genre, unfolding visions of modern worlds shaped by the flourishing of new technologies. A translated literary genre, early Chinese sf manifested the cultural hybridity resulting from a combination of translated modernity and self-conscious yearning for the rejuvenation of the Chinese tradition. Despite such a promising beginning, the history of Chinese sf has never been continuous. It is full of gaps and interruptions caused by politics and changes in cultural paradigms. The discontinuity of sf should not be mistaken for insignificance, and even moments of perceived or real absence speak to important shifts in the cultural sphere. Following the first “golden age” of late Qing sf and the Republican Era, only a few short booms can be identified—the reemergence of sf as children’s literature in the 1950s–1960s under the socialist regime, the flourishing of more popular versions in Hong Kong during the Cold War, the comeback in Taiwan and mainland China during the late 1970s—none of which gained enough momentum to prevail and continue. This situation persisted until the rise of the new wave at the turn of the twenty-first century. The booms alternated with dormant periods lasting long enough for later writers to be Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download. Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at etutorsource@gmail.com You can also order by WhatsApp https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph one_number&app_absent=0 Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and Author Name. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 1 INTRODUCTION 3 little influenced by their predecessors. Each time the genre was revived, the new generation of writers had to invent their own tradition, thus giving Chinese sf multiple points of origin. Each reinvention was influenced by a foreign source, such as the Japanese impact in the late Qing; Russian in the socialist period; Anglo-American in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the post-Mao mainland China; and the worldwide new wave as well as global sf during the Chinese new wave. Each generation had to find their own ways to integrate foreign influences into domestic variations of the genre’s forms and conventions to represent new modes of political ethos, intellectual visions, and epistemological paradigms. The rise of a new wave of sf has been a momentous literary phenomenon in contemporary China. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the genre has reemerged and gradually achieved wide popularity both domestically and globally. This has happened at a time when China is aiming at a new stage of national rejuvenation and mapping out various political, economic, and scientific projects to achieve a “Chinese dream.” Yet, for the country concurrently embracing technological renovations and sparing no effort to secure its status quo, the shape of things to come remains far from certain. Simultaneous with the recognition of contemporary Chinese sf as world literature has come the rise of Chinese sf studies. In this volume, we seek to inaugurate a second generation of Chinese sf criticism. Through diverse perspectives on the histories, forms, and conceptual experimentation of the genre, the authors featured herein demonstrate the historical significance and thematic breadth of a genre that was once marginal, if not invisible to literary history. A central challenge to global sf studies is the definition of the genre itself. This is compounded by the various calques used to translate terms like “science” and “sf” over the course of China’s long twentieth century. The earliest translation we have for sf is kexue xiaoshuo (科学小说), which was replaced after the founding of the PRC by science-fantasy fiction kexue huanxiang xiaoshuo (科学幻想小说), a calque of the Russian nauchnaya fantastika. At the turn of the twentieth century, a number of other terms like gezhi (格致)—shorthand for neo-Confucian investigation of things and extension of knowledge—and xixue (西学), or “western knowledge,” were also used as loose translations for categories like science, natural philosophy, and Western thought in general. Ignoring the limitations of both “science” and “fiction” in understanding the relationship between systematic forms of knowledge and literary and visual culture diachronically and across national borders, the term “China” in this volume speaks to at least Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 4 N. ISAACSON ET AL. three state formations—the Qing dynasty, the Republic of China, and the PRC; Chinese sf is a highly complex form. That said, Chinese sf shares a number of important features, functions, and forms with the global tradition of sf. It often examines the relationship between humanity and technology and does so through speculative visions of the potential for both to evolve. One of its most readily recognized features is the presence of imagined technologies. Sf also often features the application of rational thought as a means of solving fictional challenges. In terms of function, sf offers an aesthetic, experiential examination of the implications of knowledge gained from systematic study of the world around us. Sf is intimately concerned with the implications of deep time: how the universe came to be and what it might yet become. Chinese sf, like its foreign counterparts, often manifests as a mass-produced genre, geared for mass consumption, while striving for deeper recognition by literary and scientific elites. Narrative prose and cinema are two of its most common forms, but the attitudes and considerations of sf can manifest in all manner of media from propaganda posters to video games, to advertisements for space programs. Sf is narratively diffuse, and historically mutable, with no platonically ideal locus classicus, that it might better be understood as a means of organizing and interpreting texts. For this reason, Veronica Hollinger and others have argued in favor of understanding sf as a “mode” rather than a genre (Hollinger 139–142). Another way of articulating the expansiveness of sf is as a “selective tradition,” a body of work spanning multiple forms and “high” and “low” culture that are continuously disrupted, re-established, re-negotiated, or potentially preserved (Milner 36–40). Identifying what differentiates Chinese sf from the global selective tradition risks setting works by Chinese authors aside as an exception to the Western “rule.” That said, as scholars of the history and cultural significance of Chinese literature in the global canon of world literature, it is important we appreciate what Chinese authors bring to the global selective tradition. We should also consider how the unique features and forms of Chinese sf might help us understand what has previously remained unseen in the global selective tradition. It is our hope that this volume will challenge readers to reconsider the contours of sf as a global genre. One feature of global sf particularly germane to the history of Chinese sf is the significance of colony and empire in shaping our imagination of global technoscientific development. Sf emerged in the era of European imperial expansion, and scholars like Patricia Kerslake (2007) and John Rieder Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 1 INTRODUCTION 5 (2008) have pointed out the profound connections between sf and the imperial imagination. Chinese sf authors were keenly aware of the relationship between sf and empire as well (Isaacson 2017). From the Late Qing to 1949 The advent of China’s literary modernity is fairly universally recognized as taking place at the end of the nineteenth century, and 1895 is a deeply significant year. China’s defeat in the Opium wars in the mid-nineteenth century awakened intellectuals and the ruling class to the need to modernize, but China’s defeat at the hands of the expanding Japanese empire in the Sino-Japanese war dealt the finishing blow to Sinocentrism. Ti-yong (体用) discourse attempted to open the door to technological change while closing the door on social transformation by disentangling Chinese spiritual essence and western material use, while the Yangwu (洋务) or “foreign affairs” movement which insisted on the Chinese origins of western science and technological know-how both came to an end at the turn of the twentieth century. The period 1895–1915 saw an era of reform with an eye toward Weberian, rational modernity, and this movement prepared Chinese soil for the propagation of sf, both foreign transplants and native species. After 1895, Chinese intellectuals were in almost universal agreement that being modern, in all of its dimensions, would require modernizing fiction. A reconstituted nation required new fictions, and sf, oriented toward the world to come and ripe with explanations of technological achievements real and imagined, embodied the spirit of new fiction in a way few other genres could. The earliest seeds of sf were planted through translation. Among the earliest and most significant of translated works was Edward Bellamy’s utopian fiction, Looking Backward 2000–1887 (1888), translated by Baptist missionary Timothy Richard (1845–1919). Richard’s translation was published serially between 1891 and 1892, reprinted as a book in 1894 and 1898, and reprinted by the Commercial Press in 1913, among others (Wu Yan 2011, 266–274). Andrew Jones notes that Bellamy’s work helped to establish a number of significant tropes for modern Chinese literature, among them the literary thematics of Darwinian evolution and the image of the “iron house” (Jones 39–40). One of the most frequently translated authors during the period was Jules Verne, whose works were translated into Chinese dozens of times over the early decades of the twentieth century, often based on Japanese translations. Other prominent Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 6 N. ISAACSON ET AL. authors in translation included H.G. Wells, Camille Flamarrion, and H. Rider Haggard. Works in translation were indeed so popular that some Chinese authors presented their original works as translations (Jiang 15). These translated texts were nevertheless immediately and undeniably Chinese. Early renderings of sf into Chinese relied on familiar narrative structures, language, and tropes in a translingual practice of localization, adaptation, and acculturation. If a turn of the century author may have desired the cachet of masquerading as foreign, a contemporary reader could be forgiven for mistaking late Qing translations as original Chinese works. These works were soon followed by original works, which were simultaneously derivative of their western counterparts and undeniably Chinese in their semantic and syntactic content. Following the sociopolitical shock of 1895, the next benchmark year in the history of both Chinese sf and China’s “new novel” writ-large was 1902. Liang Qichao (梁启超 1873–1929), living in exile in Japan following the failed Hundred Days Reform of 1898, went on a literary spree, establishing three journals in as many years: The China Discussion (Qingyi bao 清议报, 1898); New Citizen (Xinmin Congbao 新民丛报, 1902); and New Fiction (Xin xiaoshuo 新小说, 1902). Liang established the journal New Fiction in large part as a venue for printing his unfinished novel chronicling a Chinese utopia sixty years in the future, The Future of New China (Xin Zhongguo weilai ji 新中国未来记, 1902). Liang’s essay “On the Relationship between Fiction and Mass Governance” (Lun xiaoshuo yu qunzhi zhi guanxi 论小说与群治之关系, 1902) called for a revolution in fiction and set the tone for fiction as a critical tool in China’s quest for modernity. Fiction was not an entirely new technology, but it would henceforth be the tool par-excellence for renovating social structures and norms. An advertisement for New Fiction appearing in New Citizen is equally significant to the history of Chinese sf. The ad reading, “China’s Only Literary Journal—New Fiction” (“Zhongguo weiyi zhi wenxue bao Xin xiaoshuo” 中国唯一之文学报:新 小说), promised a panoply of genres, among them science fiction, political fiction, social fiction, romance, detective fiction, and more. Other serial publications soon adopted Liang’s new literary taxonomy. The label sf, while used with an arguably greater degree of regularity in China prior to its appearance as a genre category in the west, was nevertheless used inconsistently. Works labeled sf in one given issue of a periodical might be labeled ideal fiction, political fiction, or utopian fiction by the editorial Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 1 INTRODUCTION 7 staff in another issue. In many respects, sf was understood as a subset of or little cousin to philosophical-political fiction (Jia 7–17). New Citizen was also an important site for the publication of information on new scientific discoveries, or pseudoscientific discoveries as the case may be. Jia Liyuan’s chapter in this volume details how Liang Qichao used New Citizen as a site for disseminating knowledge about mesmerism and hypnotism. A common feature of sf in China was the introduction of western science to audiences in news and popular science pieces, which was gradually sensationalized and eventually adapted into works of fiction, occasionally word for word. Reportage on radium, for example, journeyed from scientific fact in the popular science press to science fiction in Biheguan zhuren’s The New Era (Xin jiyuan 新纪元, 1908), through exactly this process. We might refer to this as a motion from science fact to fictional science, and finally to science fiction. Lorenzo Andolfatto’s chapter offers further consideration of the semantic breadth of “science” and “fiction” in the Late Qing. For all its newness, late Qing sf drew creatively on its pre-modern literary roots. This included liberal use of Daoist and Buddhist cosmological and spiritual terms to make sense of new ideas about the age and nature of the universe. It also included borrowing tropes of knight-errantry from wuxia (武侠) fiction for new heroes and chuanqi (传奇) “stories of the strange” to create an atmosphere of uncanny novelty familiar to Chinese readers. Early Chinese sf also borrowed structure and narrative conventions from Ming-Qing zhanghui xiaoshuo (章回小说) chapter fiction, employing rhyming verse to introduce or summarize key aspects of the narrative. Xu Nianci’s (徐念慈 1875–1908) farcical sequel to a Japanese translation of a Baron Von Munchausen story, “New Tales of Mr. Braggadocio” (“Xin faluo xiansheng tan” 新法螺先生谭, 1904), features a narrator whose soul and body are split apart allowing him to explore the solar system and the center of the earth before perfecting the art of “brain electricity,” allowing human beings to communicate telepathically and eliminating the need for most modern technology. Tales of the Moon Colony (Yueqiu zhimindi xiaoshuo 月球殖民地小说, 1904), written by the “Old Fisherman of the Yellow River” (Huangjiang diaosou 黄江钓叟), was the first attempt at a sf novel published in Chinese and featured a group of explorers in a balloon visiting various allegorical territories that again reflect upon China’s relationship to the colonial order. Wu Jianren (吴趼仁 1866–1910) re-imagined Jia Baoyu (贾宝玉) exploring semi-colonial China at the turn Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download. Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at etutorsource@gmail.com You can also order by WhatsApp https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph one_number&app_absent=0 Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and Author Name. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 8 N. ISAACSON ET AL. of the twentieth century before visiting a Chinese utopia that has reversed the colonial order in New Story of the Stone (Xin shitou ji 新石头记, 1905). Lü Sheng’s (旅生 b?) Dream Records of a Madman (Chiren shuomeng ji 痴 人说梦记 1904) told the tale of three exiled intellectuals traveling the world before returning to China to establish a new utopian order. Haitian duxiaozi’s (海天独啸子 b?) The Stone of Goddess Nuwa (Nuwa shi女娲 石,1903) addressed the late Qing semi-colonial crisis from the perspective of an educated woman. Cai Yuanpei’s (蔡元培 1868–1940) New Year’s Dream (Xinnian meng 新年梦, 1904) is a utopian dream of a future where China is a major player in a world order inspired in part by Tan Sitong’s (谭嗣同 1865–1898) “Great Unity” (“Datong” 大同). Novels like Biheguan zhuren’s (碧荷官主人 b?) The New Era Xin jiyuan (1908) and Lu Shi’e’s (陆士谔 1878–1944) New Ramblings of the Rustic Elder (Xin yesou puyan 新野搜曝言, 1909) both offered revanchist visions of China’s conquest of Europe, and New Ramblings went on to consider the question of colonizing outer space. A number of other works are listed in various contemporary, late Qing, and Republican-era bibliographies. Scholars continue to “unearth” them, but in many cases, these works were never completed, or we have little more than their descriptive titles to glean their contents. These include, The Future Book League of New China (Weilai zhi Zhongguo tushu tongmenghui 未来中国图书同盟会, 1906), Journey to Utopia (Wutuobang youji 乌托邦游记,1906), The Method of Restoring Life (Huisheng shu 回生 术,1906), Champion of the New Chinese Woman (Zhongguo xinnü hao 中 国新女豪, 1907), Women’s Rights (Nüzi quan女子权, 1907), Li Minzhai’s Flying Ship (Feiting 飞艇,1907), and Bao Tianxiao’s Future War in the Air (Kongzhong zhanzheng weilai ji 空中战争未来记,1908). New takes on familiar vernacular novels also flourished. Titles included New Flowers in the Mirror (Xin Jinghuayuan 新镜花缘, 1907) by Xiaoran Yusheng (萧然郁生) and New Records of the Three Kingdoms (Xin sanguo zhi 新三国志, 1909). More than any other text, Wu Cheng’en’s classic Journey to the West (Xi you ji西游记) was re-imagined in the late Qing through a flurry of adaptations. These included Another Journey to the West (Ye shi xiyou ji 也是西游记, Xi Mianzhou 奚冕周 and Lu Shi’e, 1909). In 1909, Li Xiaobai (李小白) and Chen Jinghan (陈景韩) published competing versions of New Journey to the West (Xin xiyou ji 新西游 记). These westward journeys, often science-fictional in nature, exemplify how late Qing authors ruminated upon the relationship between China and western knowledge. Could science, natural philosophy, and other Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 1 INTRODUCTION 9 “western learning” or xixue (西学) be compared to the Buddhist canon brought back to China by Tripitaka? Wu Cheng’en’s Ming Dynasty novel, Journey to the West, recounting of Buddhist monk Xuanzang’s pilgrimage to Central Asia and India, accompanied by an entourage of magical disciples may not have had anything to do with sf as we know it today. But the heroes fly through the air, have magical weapons that change size and form, and the Monkey King Sun Wukong is turned two-dimensional, can change sizes, and even clone himself using his own hairs. All of this easily adapts itself to contemporary sf. The weapons and bodily transformations of Sun Wukong have become so thoroughly imbricated in the East Asian mediascape, it is hard to know where to start—from the Dragon Ball manga and anime series to fan-­ created sf adaptations and sequels, to the film Super Monkey Returns (Dong-Yeop Sin 2011), or Australia and New Zealand-produced Netflix series “New Legends of Monkey” (Gerard Johnstone 2018–2020). Sun Wukong is a hybrid, a shapeshifter, a transformer; an apt metaphor for the multifaceted nature of Chinese sf. The Republican Period (1911–1949) in many ways saw a continuation of the above patterns for sf. A number of factors can be attributed to the new landscape of sf during this period. On the one hand, an increasingly commercial culture resulted in serious literary magazines turning toward the entertainment category of “mandarin ducks and butterflies” fiction. At the same time, scientific content was increasingly sublimated into other genres including popular science, and various genres aimed at juvenile audiences. Intellectuals like Chen Duxiu continued to pair rational inquiry with rational statecraft, as he advocated for China’s transformation by Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy. Headed by Chen, another literary magazine of the new, New Youth, was at the center of the May Fourth movement, which replaced late Qing reform with outright iconoclasm. The magazine sought to use literature as a tool to transform society, admonishing young readers to “be scientific and eschew irrationality” (科学的而非想象的) (Chen Duxiu 5). The Science Society of China—a group of students studying in the US with money from the Boxer Indemnity—established the journal Science the same year and for the same cause. The word science (kexue 科学) was featured in the titles of more than 80 Republican-era journals. Translation still comprised a significant portion of the sf available to audiences. Ren Dongmei argues that if the Late Qing was the era of Jules Verne, the Republican period was the era of H.G. Wells, as multiple versions of his novels were translated into Chinese. Rather than seeing this Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 10 N. ISAACSON ET AL. as a weakness, we should remain aware that Chinese audiences were reading foreign-language sf in translation long before Anglophone audiences were reading Chinese sf (Ren Dongmei 279–281). What was labeled kexue xiaoshuo often took the form of dialogues or lectures on science with a fictional setting. These works were highly specialized at best and tedious at worst. Like their late Qing predecessors, there was no clear distinction between popular science and sf. Republicanera sf often sacrificed narrative style and plot for the sake of transmitting scientific knowledge, informing readers of processes like the production of vanishing cream and synthetic rubber (Ren Dongmei 281). Ren Dongmei argues that while these works may be aesthetically lacking, they were highly experimental. They shared with their late Qing predecessors a keen interest in popularizing science for the sake of national salvation. Like their late Qing predecessors, they also featured an admixture of vernacular and classical language, borrowed from various pre-modern poetic forms, or made translingual puns about the periodic table. Other forms produced—science Q&A, science vignettes, and science novelties—should prompt us to reconsider what counts as sf in the global selective tradition. While the plots of many more “pure” sf stories are familiar, their sense of crisis often increased in the face of mounting corruption, the chaos of the Warlord Era (1916–1928), and Japanese encroachment into Manchuria. The shipwrecked narrator of Bi Yihong’s (毕倚虹 1892–1926) “Shanghai of the Future” (“Weilai zhi shanghai”未来之上海, 1917) returns to the city after a hundred years stranded on an island to find that the city is highly technologically advanced, and while people live lives of great ease, the state is corrupt and incompetent. Jing Feng’s (劲风 b?) short story “China a Decade Hence” (“Shinian hou de Zhongguo” 十年 后的中国, 1923) imagines an invasion by the fictional nation of “Anada” in which the citizenry saves China from defeat despite a corrupt and incompetent government. Gu Junzheng’s “Nation Without Air” (“Wu kongqi guo” 无空气国,1926) explains how birds would not be able to fly, fires would not burn, and people would not be able to speak in a place that lacked air; this final point brings out the allegorical meaning of the story— people who physically cannot speak are the same as those with no freedom of speech. Lao She’s City of Cats (Mao cheng ji 猫城记, 1932) is a thinly veiled, deeply satirical allegory for political incompetence, factionalism, and social stagnation in Republican China set in a feline city on Mars. Gu Junzheng’s “Dream of Peace” (“Heping de meng” 和平的梦, 1940) tells the story of an American spy’s discovery that the “Easternmost Nation” is Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 1 INTRODUCTION 11 on the verge of hypnotizing the American public with false promises of peace. Sf publication fell off precipitously after the Rape of Nanjing, as China was brought into the Pacific War, leaving us only approximately a dozen works of sf between 1937 and 1945; about a third of these were written by Gu Junzheng. From 1950 to the Early 1980s With the founding of the PRC in October 1949, Chinese sf entered a new stage. In the 1950s and 1960s, Chinese sf actively responded to the central government’s various policies, especially those on science and technology. For example, in 1956, the central government raised the rhetoric of marching toward science to confirm the role of science and technology in building a new socialist China. In 1957, Mao Zedong declared that Chinese youth resembles the morning sun and that the future belongs to young people. Equipping the younger generation with a basic knowledge of modern science and technology became a major part of the country’s educational agenda. In 1963, Premier Zhou Enlai (1898–1976) formulated the concept of the Four Modernizations, proclaiming: “We will achieve the modernization of industry, agriculture, national defense, and science and technology … and build our country into a powerful socialist nation” (“Zhongguo gongchandang dashi ji 1963”). Responding to the government’s various policies and talking points, Chinese sf functioned to some extent as a propaganda tool geared toward serving the new socialist order, promoting scientific thinking, and educating the next generation of Communist functionaries. Under these new political circumstances, it was not surprising that sf had long been placed in the category of children’s literature in the PRC. In the 1950s and 1960s, sf works were mainly written for juvenile readers and were published in children’s magazines or by presses catering to juvenile readers in Shanghai and Beijing. Meanwhile, sf writers benefited from the label of children’s literature because this label has provided sf writers with a relatively relaxed space in which to explore controversial and forward-­looking ideas that would be difficult to articulate effectively in most genres of serious or realist literature. Chinese sf had also been a sub-­ branch of kexue wenyi (literature and art about science 科学文艺). Within the broad spectrum of kexue wenyi, with non-fiction narratives about science at one end and literature at the opposite end, science primers, science essays, science travelogues, and descriptions of scientific research are closer Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 12 N. ISAACSON ET AL. to the pole of science; science stories, comedic dialogues about science, and science fairy tales are in the middle of the spectrum; and sf is closest to the pole of literature (Zheng, “Kexue wenyi zatan” 81). Throughout most of the 1950s, the PRC was still at the honeymoon stage in its relations with Soviet Russia. Chinese sf came under the strong influence of Stalin Era Soviet popular fiction, particularly with respect to an optimism and interest in scientific progress, emphasis of scientific and technological minutiae, and the style of socialist realism. PRC translators and scholars introduced a substantial amount of Soviet Russian literature into China, including classics of socialist realism, treatises on literary theory, and various genres of popular literature such as science fiction and adventure novels. The term kexue wenyi was also borrowed from USSR writer Maxim Gorky’s (1868–1936) essay “On Theme” in which Gorky encouraged scientists to delve into the literature and urged fiction writers to explore the world of science. The popular science writer Mikhail Il’in (1896–1953) actually put Gorky’s advocacy into practice by writing numerous science primers and essays about science during the 1930s and 1950s. Many of Il’in’s works were translated into Chinese and exerted a profound influence upon many Chinese intellectuals and readers during the 1950s and 1960s. Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935) and Alexander Belyaev (1884–1942) were the most influential Soviet Russian writers on scientific themes in Mao Era China. Tsiolkovsky’s writing about space travel and rocketry inspired many PRC writers to explore these topics in their own writings. Belyaev’s sf narratives about organ and body part transplants in Professor Dowell’s Head and The Amphibian Man (1928) likewise encouraged some PRC writers to take up this topic. In addition, Ivan Pavlov’s research on conditioned reflexes such as a dog salivating after hearing a bell ring also contributed to the emergence of Chinese sf narratives about biomedical experiments. Under the strong influence of Soviet sf and responding to the central government’s policies on science and technologies, Chinese sf writers remained active from 1950 to 1965 and covered a wide range of themes in their works. These themes include space exploration, robots, organ transplantation, marine aquaculture, high-tech pastures, plant and animal breeding, and weather modification. The two earliest Chinese sf narratives published in the PRC were Zhang Ran’s (张然) Dream Travel in the Solar System (Mengyou taiyang xi 梦游太阳系, 1950) and Xue Dianhui’s (薛殿 会 b. 1926) Space Travel (Yuzhou lüxing 宇宙旅行, 1951). Both narratives are about space exploration. In 1954, Zheng Wenguang (郑文光 Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download. Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at etutorsource@gmail.com You can also order by WhatsApp https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph one_number&app_absent=0 Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and Author Name. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 1 INTRODUCTION 13 1929–2003) published his first sf story “The Second Moon” (“Dierge yueliang” 第二个月亮) about a man-made satellite. In the following six years, Zheng continued to address the theme of space exploration in most of his narratives. Another active writer was Tong Enzheng (童恩正 1937–1997) who published his first two sf works in 1960, Dense Fog over the Old Gorge (Guxia miwu 古峡迷雾) and “A Guest from Fifty Thousand Years Ago” (“Wuwannian yiqian de keren” 五万年以前的客人). Both narratives combine his archeological knowledge with scientific speculation. Over the next couple of years, he also published on the themes of robots, computers, and biological electronic currents in such novellas as Miracle of An Electric Brain (Dianzi danao de qiji 电子大脑的奇迹, 1962), A Missing Robot (Shizong de jiqiren 失踪的机器人, 1962), and The Lost Memories (shiqu de jiyi 失去的记忆, 1962). Xiao Jianheng (萧建亨 b. 1930) wrote about organ transplantation, electronic technology, and robots in such narratives as Fisherman’s Gramophone Records (Diaoyu aihaozhe de changpian 钓鱼爱好者的唱片, 1960), Buke’s Adventure (Buke de qiyu 布克的奇遇, 1962), and The Amazing Robotic Dog (Qiyi de jiqigou 奇异的机器狗, 1965). Liu Xingshi (刘兴诗 b. 1931) was another dominant sf writer during this period. He wrote about weather modification and terraforming the Earth in such narratives as “An Underground Hydropower Station” (“Dixia shuidianzhan” 地下水电站, 1961), “Northern Clouds” (“Beifang de yun” 北方的云, 1962), “The Blue Train Under the Ocean” (“Lanse lieche” 蓝色列车, 1963), and “The Nomad City” (“Youmu cheng” 游牧城, 1964). Wang Guozhong (王国忠 ?-2010) also wrote about weather modification and land reclamation in order to benefit agricultural and industrial production in such narratives as “A Marine Fishery” (“Haiyang yuchang” 海洋渔场, 1961), “Dragon in the Bohai Sea” (“Bohai jülong” 渤海巨龙, 1963), and “Reservoir in Air” (“Bankong zhong de shuiku” 半空中的水库, 1963). Chi Shuchang (迟书 昌1922–1997) wrote about genetic engineering and animal breeding in “Elephants Without Trunks” (“Gediao bizi de daxiang” 割掉鼻子的大象, 1956); marine aquaculture in “Whale Pasture” (“Dajing muchang” 大鲸 牧场, 1961); and high-tech suspended animation in “Frozen Shrimps and Cryonics” (“Dongxia he dongren” 冻虾和冻人, 1963). Several other writers during this period are also worth mentioning. Yu Zhi (于止, pen name of Ye Zhishan 叶至善, 1918–2006 ) wrote the first PRC narrative about cryonics in his famous short story “The Missing Brother” (“Shizong de gege,” 失踪的哥哥 1957). Ji Hong ­ (稽鸿, 1920–2017) was a prolific writer and published stories on bionics and Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 14 N. ISAACSON ET AL. electronic technologies used in daily life in “The Secrets of the Motorcycle” (“Motuoche de mimi” 摩托车的秘密, 1961),“Old Doctor’s Hat” (“Lao yisheng de maozi” 老医生的帽子, 1963), and “A Strange Hunter” (“Qiguai de lieren” 奇怪的猎人, 1963). In addition to sf, other subgenres in kexue wenyi, such as science essays, science travelogues, comedic dialogues about science, and science animation had all functioned to popularize science and technology among children and young adults. For example, many science crosstalk performances promoted such quotidian hygienic practices as toothbrushing and handwashing (Isaacson 139–57). Gu Junzheng published a collection of science essays entitled Not Afraid of Headwinds (Bupa nifeng 不怕逆风, 1962) to introduce basic physics to young adults. In addition, some science animation films such as The Cuckoo Is Late (Buguniao jiao chi le 布谷 鸟叫迟了, 1959), The Little Inventor (Xiao faming jia 小发明家, 1958), and Little Tadpoles Look for Mama (Xiao kedou zhao mama 小蝌蚪找妈妈, 1960) conveyed clear scientific and technological messages through a narrative strategy of focused problem solving. These scientific themes are based on known science and existing technologies, with bits and pieces of factual knowledge interspersed throughout the films. During this period, sf writers and critics also wrote essays to engage in theoretical exploration of the genre. For example, Zheng Wenguang’s 1956 essay “On Science Fiction” is probably the first essay to discuss this genre in the PRC. In the essay, Zheng pointed out that science fiction should “reveal the power of modern science and technology, depict the glorious future of humankind, showcase the conquerors of nature, and single out scientists for praise with respect to the war between humankind and nature” (“Tantan kexue huanxiang xiaoshuo” 21). Chinese sf remained dormant from 1966 to 1975. The year 1976 saw the publication of the first sf work since the Cultural Revolution—Ye Yonglie’s “Petroleum Protein” (“Shiyou danbai” 石油蛋白). The revival of sf writing was endorsed by the central government’s favorable policies on science and technology. Deng Xiaoping affirmed that science and technology were productive forces, and highly educated professionals such as intellectuals, scientists, and technicians would henceforth be considered part of the working class at the opening ceremony of the National Science Conference on March 18–21,1978. In the same year, he revived the long-­ dormant policy of the Four Modernizations and announced his strategic decision to shift the Communist Party’s main focus from the Mao Era’s Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 1 INTRODUCTION 15 emphasis on class struggle to the Reform and Opening Era’s pursuit of modernization and economic prosperity. With the arrival of this “springtime for science” (kexue de chuntian), many veteran sf writers such as Zheng Wenguang, Tong Enzheng, Liu Xingshi, and Xiao Jianheng returned to the field. Relatively young writers, such as Ye Yonglie (叶永烈 1940–2020) and Wei Yahua (魏雅华 b. 1949), joined them. Chinese sf experienced a flowering period from 1978 to 1983, which has commonly been characterized as the post-Mao cultural thaw. During this period, PRC sf was still a largely government-backed literature that helped to popularize and support various government policies, while meshing adroitly with governmental rhetoric about strengthening the state through science and technology. Meanwhile, it could be aptly characterized as blooming, contending, and boundary-breaking (Li 165–180). Chinese sf strove to overcome its former categorization as a mere subgenre of kexue wenyi or mere children’s literature and to instead rise to the level of popular fiction and bona fide Chinese literature. The thematic concerns of many sf narratives resonated with contemporary works of PRC fiction in the categories of “scar literature,” “contemplative literature,” and “roots-seeking literature.” Some sf narratives assimilated elements from other popular genres such as love stories and detective fiction. Many sf works continued and expanded the sf motifs popular in the 1950s and 1960s, and such new subgenres as detective sf and tech-sf were created in the late 1970s and 1980s. In this short introduction, we can only briefly mention a few representative writers from this period. Tong Enzheng’s “Song of the Stalagmites” (“Shisun xing”石笋行, 1982) and Liu Xingshi’s Columbus Who Came from the Americas (Meizhou lai de gelunbu 美洲来的哥伦布, 1980) combine scientific extrapolations with archeological findings. In addition, Liu Xingshi’s work is probably the first alternate history sf narrative in PRC. Xiao Jianheng’s “Qiao the Younger Fell Ill” (“Qiao er huan bing ji” 乔二患病记, 1982) and Wei Yahua’s “I’ve Decided to Divorce My Robot Wife” (“Wo jueding yu jiqiren qizi lihun,” also known as “Wenrou xiang zhi meng” 温柔乡之梦, 1981) envision how robots will transform our personal lives and social interactions in the near future. Zheng Wenguang’s Descendants of Mars (Zhanshen de houyi 战神的后裔, 1983) not only extolls the future terraforming of Mars but also reflects upon moral issues connected with the future colonization of space. In addition to his near-­ future sf classic Xiao Lingtong Travels to the Future (Xiaolingtong manyou weilai 小灵通漫游未来, 1978), Ye Yonglie single-handedly promoted Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 16 N. ISAACSON ET AL. detective sf through his Jin Ming series (金明系列). In addition, some writers wrote short tech-sf stories that frequently celebrate increasing productivity in agriculture, manufacturing, and military technology in such stories as Wei Yahua’s “The Tumult of the Flying Blanket” (“Feitan de fengbo” 飞毯的风波, 1979), Xu Jie’s “The Architects on a Coral Island” (“Shanhu dao shang de jianzhushi” 珊瑚岛上的建筑师, 1978), and Jia You’s “Growing a House” (“Zhong fangzi” 种房子, 1978). Echoing the prolific sf writings, a lot of science popularization and sf magazines were launched at municipal, provincial, and national levels. Even mainstream literary magazines published sf works, and some newspapers have contained supplements to publish literature and art about science. Among them, the most renowned ones have been dubbed “the four magazines and one newspaper”: Science, Literature and Art (Kexue wenyi 科学文艺, first quarterly then bimonthly, 1979–present) in Chengdu; Age of Science (Kexue shidai 科学时代, bimonthly, 1979–1984) in Harbin; Wisdom Tree (Zhihui shu 智慧树, bimonthly, 1981–1985) in Tianjin; Science Fiction Ocean (Kehuan Haiyang 科幻海洋, anthology series, 1981–2001) in Beijing; and the newspaper The Chinese Science Fiction Gazette (Zhongguo kehuan xiaoshuo bao 中国科幻小说报, biweekly, 1981) in Harbin. These magazines and newspapers published not only speculative fiction but also popular science articles, interviews, reviews, and essays about the genre. Sf writers benefited economically from their creative writing through royalties or other remuneration paid by these magazines. The various publication venues also became an important marketplace of ideas for sf writers and critics engaged in discussions and debates. For example, in 1979 the Supplement of the influential state media outlet China Youth Daily published a series of opinion pieces in the column “Modest Discussions of Popular Science Writing.” These opinion pieces broached such topics as the nature of sf—literary or scientific; the faulty understanding and over-simplified presentation of scientific ideas in some sf works; and the need to make popular science writing more interesting and entertaining. Starting in 1979, Zheng Wenguang, Tong Enzheng, Ye Yonglie, and Xiao Jianheng also published essays about their experiences and ideas about sf writing in the newspaper Guangming Daily. In addition to writing critical essays, these writers also evaluated their peer’s sf works by writing reviews and canonized some classic works by editing sf anthologies. Such writers and scholars as Ye Yonglie and Wu Dingbo started to research earlier and less well-known Chinese sf works in order to compile histories of Chinese sf. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 1 INTRODUCTION 17 During this period, a significant withering of influence from old Soviet Russian sf was accompanied by a rapidly burgeoning influence from Western sf. Besides reprinting classic sf narratives by famous Western authors such as Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, the works of more recent Western writers were also translated and introduced to Chinese readers, such as the works of Arthur C. Clarke, George Lucas, and Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein. Many Soviet Russian sf works were also translated into Chinese, such as A. Kazantsev’s Strong Times, and Alexander Belyaev’s novels Glittering Man and Master of the World. The works of Japanese writers such as Sakyo Komatsu and Takashi Ishikawa were also translated into Chinese (Wu, “Looking Backward” xxvi–xxviii). These foreign sf works introduced Chinese readers and writers to an unprecedentedly broad range of sf subject matter and techniques, thereby inspiring Chinese writers to experiment with a widening variety of subject matter and techniques. Chinese sf fandom also emerged in the 1980s. In 1979, the first college-­ level PRC course on science fiction was taught by Philip Smith, a visiting professor from University of Pittsburgh, at Shanghai Foreign Language Institute. Shortly afterward in July 1980, fifteen faculty members from this university’s English Department founded a local sf fandom club. In February 1981, a student fandom club was founded in the same university. During the 1980s, campus-based, region-specific, and nationwide sf fan clubs spread broadly throughout the PRC in such provinces as Sichuan, Guangdong, Heilongjiang, and Liaoning (Wu, “Fandom” 134–36). These clubs also published their own fanzines or newsletters. The first Chinese sf fanzine Xingyun (Nebula 星云) was published by an avid and dedicated reader named Yao Haijun in 1988. Several other fanzines were published in the mid-1990s, such as Beijing’s Cube Light Year (Lifang guangnian 立方光年, 1995–1996), Tianjin’s Supernova (Chao xinxing 超新星, 1996–1997), Zhengzhou’s Milky Way (Yinhe 银河, 1996), and Chengdu’s Ladder to the Sky (Shang tianti 上天梯, 1996). However, none of these fanzines lasted as long or exerted as much influence on sf circles as Xingyun (Zhang 37–40). PRC sf fanzines accelerated connections amongst sf writers, readers, researchers, editors, and publishers. The first PRC sf award, the Galaxy Award, was established by the magazines Science, Literature and Art and the short-lived Wisdom Tree in 1986. All the works participating in the competition of the Galaxy Awards have been confined to those published in Science, Literature and Art (except in 1986). This practice reveals that the award has become an important Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download. Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at etutorsource@gmail.com You can also order by WhatsApp https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph one_number&app_absent=0 Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and Author Name. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 18 N. ISAACSON ET AL. means for the genre magazine to build up its team of writers and establish its status and authority in the field. PRC sf has prominently engaged in transmedia (kua meiti 跨媒体) storytelling since the late 1970s when sf expanded its media venues from the print forms of fiction, comics, and illustrated books to the electronic forms of radio and TV dramas, animation, and feature films. Here we shall provide an introductory review of PRC sf’s various multimedia forms. The cartoonist Miao Yintang (缪印堂 1935–2017) published the science manhua “Keke Goes Hunting for Wolves” (“Keke dalang ji” 科科打狼记) in the popular science magazine Knowledge Is Power (Zhishi jiushi liliang 知识就是力量) in 1979. “Keke Goes Hunting for Wolves” consists of sequential panel comics and features a young protagonist named Keke who draws upon modern technological advances to more effectively hunt for wolves in mountainous regions. Sf lianhuanhua (连环画) also became an increasingly common vehicle for Chinese sf due largely to their commercial success as entertainment fiction. A lot of sf narratives were adapted into lianhuanhua form. The key transitional work—both artistically and in terms of its unprecedented commercial success as a trade item—was Ye Yonglie’s Jin Ming series. Some sf narratives were also adapted into radio plays, such as Death Ray on a Coral Island adapted from Tong Enzheng’s prize-winning short story of the same name, Xiao Lingtong Travels to the Future adapted from Ye Yonglie’s novel of the same name, and A Green Cloned Horse (lüse kelong ma 绿色克隆马, 1980) adapted from a short story by an anonymous author. Some sf narratives bypassed radio altogether and were instead adapted into TV dramas, such as Wu Boze’s (1933–2005) novella Invisible Man (Yin xing ren 隐形人, 1979), Zhang Fengjiang’s and Jia Wanchao’s “The Last Cancer Patient” (“Zuihou yige aizheng huanzhe” 最后一个癌症患者, 1980), and Ye Yonglie’s The X-3 Case (X-3 an jian X-3案件, 1980). Yet since televisions were still a rarity in most PRC homes during the early 1980s, TV dramas failed to achieve the popularity of radio dramas and sf films at that time. Starting in the late 1970s, more scientific animation films also came out. These animation films focused more on future possibilities, introducing the viewer to elements of science fiction and futurism, such as in The Hens Move to a New Home (Muji banjia 母鸡 搬家, 1979), Yuanyuan and the Robot (Yuanyuan he jiqi ren 圆圆和机器 人, 1980), and Dingding Fights the Monkey King (Dingding zhan houwang 丁丁战猴王, 1980). The 1980s also saw the release of two sf feature films. Zhang Hongmei adapted Tong Enzheng’s famous short story as the Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 1 INTRODUCTION 19 feature film Death Ray on a Coral Island in 1980. Another sf film Shadow of a Ghost (Qianying 潜影, 1981) came out in 1981. The film was adapted from the sf novella A Ghost in the Imperial Palace (Wangfu guaiying 王府 怪影, 1981), which was co-authored by Ji Hongxu and Ji Sanmeng. More sf films were produced in the 1990s, such as PRC’s first eco-sf film The Ozone Layer Vanishes (Daqiceng xiaoshi 大气层消失, 1990), the time-­ travel film Magic Watch (Mo biao 魔表, 1990), and two detective sf films, Invisible PhD (Yinshen boshi 隐身博士, 1991) and Revived Warrior (Zaisheng yongshi 再生勇士, 1995). These various adaptations enabled a continuous and serial consumption of sf across different forms of media. These multimedia practices increased the visibility of the genre, promoted the consumption of sf artifacts, and extended the genre to a much broader audience than it had ever previously enjoyed in China. The favorable political climate for science fiction from the late 1970s to early 1980s was interrupted by the “Campaign to Eliminate Spiritual Pollution,” which was launched by the Communist Party with Deng Xiaoping’s speech at the Second Plenum of the Twelfth Central Committee on October 11–12, 1983. This campaign of cultural suppression reached its climax in mid-November 1983, later fading into obscurity in Spring 1984. During the short-lived campaign, sf was denounced for spreading bourgeois ideology, and many sf writers temporarily stopped writing sf or left the field. PRC sf remained at a low ebb from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. The publication of sf works slowed to nearly a standstill, and the translation of foreign works of science fiction also fell sharply in comparison to some previous periods. The New Wave: From the Late 1980s to the 2010s The game-changing new wave was conceived in the 1980s, when futurology, cybernetics and informatics, quantum physics, chaos theory, new methods in scientific and humanistic research, and various experiments in literature and arts collectively challenged the monolithic ideological discourse with an emerging, diversified space for a multiplicative structure tolerant of different kinds of knowledge and ideas. The decade also saw China’s widening reform and a young generation’s struggle for democracy, which ended abruptly when the 1989 nationwide student protest came to a tragic conclusion in Tiananmen Square. Liu Cixin (刘慈欣 b. 1963) and Han Song (韩松b. 1965) both started writing science fiction around the end of the 1980s, and their first stories and novels, such as Han Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 20 N. ISAACSON ET AL. Song’s “Tombs of the Universe” (“yuzhou mubei” 宇宙墓碑, 1988, published in 1992) and Liu Cixin’s China 2185 (Zhongguo 2185中国2185, 1989, unpublished), contained reflections on the failed idealism and China’s lost opportunity to become a democracy. Their efforts, together with the growth of the sf fandom and online communities, prepared for the genre’s revival exactly one hundred years after the late Qing “golden age.” Some contemporary factors appear similar to conditions in the late Qing, such as the rapidly changing mediasphere, technological advances, and anxious expectations concerning China’s future changes. In particular, the free platform for new authors to publish on the internet and a “perfect vacuum” for fantasy when mainstream realism lost appeal to younger readers contributed to a profound change in the field of literary production, which helped create the cultural conditions for the rise of a new wave of Chinese science fiction. However, it does not mean that the new wave sf authors enjoy full freedom to publish whatever they want. Censorship from online platforms under supervisions of the country’s central propaganda department and other related divisions has played a heavy role in determining what works can be posted and publicized on the platforms. This is evident in the fact that a few sf narratives with “sensitive topics” were only published online for a very short period of time and soon removed from internet, such as Liu Cixin’s China 2185, and Bao Shu’s “Watching the Boat at South Lake Together” (“Yiqi qu kan nanhu chuan”一起去看南湖船, 2011) and “The Great Era” (“Da shidai” 大时 代, 2012). All these three works play with various temporal orders and touch upon such “sensitive topics” as Mao Zedong, the Communist Party’s history, the Cultural Revolution, and the Tiananmen crackdown. Though considered a genre fiction, the new wave science fiction challenges the distinctions between “popular” and “serious” literatures and engages with experiments altering our perceptions on what is literature, what is contemporary, what is real, and what is human. Its proliferation destabilizes the power structure in the field of literary production, and its adventurous experiments in thought and style push toward a paradigm shift while bringing new meanings to the political, ethical, and epistemological connotations of the literary imagination. To say the least, the Chinese new wave has grown out of continuous contestations with the conventions of both genre fiction and Chinese literature in general— mimetic realism in particular; and its most valorous visions give rise to a new mode of literariness that can be defined as a poetics of the invisible. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 1 INTRODUCTION 21 The unique strength of the Chinese new wave science fiction lies in its illumination of the “invisible.” The invisible can be viewed as a key element in the poetics of the genre’s Chinese new wave variation. Representing the invisible functions as the center of gravity for the new wave textuality, such as Liu Cixin’s overpoweringly blinding sublime visions of the cosmic terror—the “dark forest” in both human and cosmic senses, the hyperdimensional universe, the unknowable physical rules—in the Three-Body Trilogy (三体三部曲, 2007–2010), and Han Song’s fearless gaze into the abysmal deep in the dark, the gleams of a “dark consciousness” or “unthought” in the chthonic and posthuman lives, and the confrontation with the unembodied and unmanifest intelligent network of algorithms executing total control over the (post-)human world in the Hospital Trilogy (医院三部曲, 2016–2018). In contemporary Chinese science fiction, to see the invisible is never a simple and easy thing. It evokes fear of seeing, a formidable feeling of confronting the opaque mystique in the unknown and unpredictable, and above all, a sense of apocalyptical revelation “Fear of Seeing” constitutes the culmination of a reflection on the master-­plot of the Chinese new wave science fiction. To see the invisible registers the courage to take on an exigent mission to seek the truth. Catching a glimpse of what has been, or been made, “invisible” may lead to gusty discoveries at odds with the fabricated smooth surface of “reality” represented in common knowledge, mass media, state propaganda, and “normative” human consciousness. By transcending that reality, the new wave science fiction dismantles the commonly accepted notions about not only the political, artistic, scientifical and technological permissible and probable, but it also rewrites what is real after all. The design of the science fiction plots is therefore closely intertwined with the ethics of storytelling, and the moral question of seeing or not seeing drives the narrative toward a process of truth-seeking through penetrating the conventionally knowable reality and adventuring into an invisible world that unfolds and becomes. Science fiction with a self-conscious intellectual tendency taps into the deep discords with the old-fashioned mimetic realism regarding what is reality. For the new wave authors, fictional representation is not bound by the phenomenal world and conventional social constructs but accentuates a variety of alternative ways of disputing what is real and contravening the rationales of mimetic realism. In a nutshell, we can describe the new wave as an audacious experiment with novelty, which entangles the quantum poetics with a baroque infinity. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 22 N. ISAACSON ET AL. The new wave rises with a curiosity about the unknown, uncertain, and unpredictable, a gesture of transgression across borders between the familiar and nonexistent, and an act of dreaming about the alternative and beyond. We contend that at its most radical, the new wave has been thriving on an avant-garde cultural spirit that calls into question a whole set of commonly accepted ideas and observed rules regarding morals, ideologies, and knowledge about the self and or in the world, the human and or in the universe. It generates new modes of literary discourse that estrange what we take for granted, open our eyes to insurgent knowledge and subversive images, and evoke an array of (un)real or virtual sensations ranging from chthonic to sublime, from uncanny to spectacular, from inebriate to exuberant, from transcendental to apocalyptical, and from human to posthuman, etc. The harbinger of the larger epistemological shift, the new wave breaks apart the binary correspondence between reality and representation. When looking both outward and inward, the new wave brings out such unorthodox nonbinary forms as cyborg, chimera, heterotopia, singularity, hyper-dimensionality, multiverse, sympoiesis, metaverse, etc., which transgress the borderline between reality and representation, dismantle exclusive identities and dichotomies across many categories such as gender, class, race, hierarchy, and certainly ideology, and recast the human self in or as the posthuman other—so that “I” can have or be an invisible “monster” residing in a nonbinary universe that shines with the Neo-­ Baroque splendor, which illuminates infinite possibilities and may never settle in a certain reality. In Han Song’s science fiction emerges a “Sinotopia” (中托邦), a virtual form of China, a fictive un-reality that speaks acutely and phenomenally to the country’s undefined, unclear transforming areas, where phantoms rewrite what is real, unfolding an invisible world that grows from within China, like a chimera, into a monstrous conglomerate of wreckage and ruins, taboo and trauma, memories and regrets, dreams and nightmares. Science fiction depicting the hideous, disastrous, apocalyptic side to the story of modernity casts shadows of uncertainty and unknowability over many domains of contemporary China’s national program for reform, enlightenment, revolution, and rejuvenation; and even mundane life scenes depicted in science fiction can become paradoxical and phantasmagorical, when reality loses its meanings and purposes in estranging new experiences that may never settle in a singular form of truth. It was through Han Song and other new wave writers’ experimentations with various imaginary world-buildings that Chinese science fiction created a literary Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download. Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at etutorsource@gmail.com You can also order by WhatsApp https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph one_number&app_absent=0 Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and Author Name. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 1 INTRODUCTION 23 space where one can overcome the fear of seeing and approach the invisible “truth” of our world, a wonder, a horror, a black hole, a singularity with irregular pulls of gravitation that blurs what is real, what is contemporary, what is literature, what is China, and what are humans. The new wave front of contemporary Chinese science fiction has been like a triumphant army and reached a breaking point to mark a larger paradigm shift for literary representation. In terms of the poetics, the new wave science fiction has rebuilt the potentials for literary representation in the twenty-first century, when the way we write about the world and the way how the world is becoming merge into a same process of storytelling. In a more provocative sense, the experiments that science fiction brings out create a subversion not only to the genre conventions but also to the authorities of a system that requires certainty and absolutism, both of which the new wave unsettles. However, the international success of the genre attracted the government’s attention as well. National leaders and cultural authorities have seen the genre’s potentials in association with the promotion of scientific advancement. Chinese authorities have since tried to domesticate the new wave and appropriate it for its own advantage, but as far as we have observed, nothing has been able to stop the flow of the free imagination that the genre has liberated. In 2010, Liu Cixin published the last volume of his “Three-Body” trilogy: Death’s End. It quickly reached the market and became a national bestseller. Han Song published Subway (Ditie 地铁, 2010), one of his most notable and darkest novels, around the same time. Extensive Chinese media coverage on science fiction began near the end of 2010. David Der-­ wei Wang (王德威 b. 1954) lifted science fiction studies to the top level of academic research through delivering a widely influential keynote speech, “From Lu Xun to Liu Cixin” (“Cong Lu Xun dao Liu Cixin” 从鲁迅到刘 慈欣), at Peking University in 2011. Academic journals solicited research articles and reviews about Liu Cixin, Han Song, and other science fiction writers. Mainstream literary journals began to print science fiction, such as People’s Literature(人民文学), which even reprinted four stories by Liu Cixin in 2012. This rapid rise posited challenges both to the genre itself and to the larger literary field. It raised questions about science fiction’s “definition” as a genre, whether its strength came from its uniqueness, its stereotypes, and its distance from the mainstream or whether it has arrived at a pivotal point in a new cultural phase when science fiction came to represent a newness far more prevailing and significant than the genre itself; when new scientific visions and technologies are changing our daily Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 24 N. ISAACSON ET AL. lives with artificial intelligence, big data, mobile internet, and metaverse, as if we were now living in a science fiction novel. Marketed as China’s national bestseller when Wall Street Journal made a sensational announcement that China has launched a sf invasion of the US (Geng 2014), The Three-Body Problem crossed national borders smoothly and achieved unrivaled international bestselling scores among all translations of Chinese literature only weeks after its release in the US. Ken Liu (b. 1976), a Chinese-American science fiction writer who established his reputation after winning the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards with one single short story “The Paper Menagerie” (2012), has fine-tuned Liu Cixin’s novels with a smooth combination of the original Chinese text’s dynamism and the stylish accuracy and neatness of American science fiction. Tor Books released The Three-Body Problem to critical acclaims in November 2014, followed by its sequel The Dark Forest (translated by Joel Martinsen) in August 2015, with the final volume of the trilogy Death’s End (translated by Ken Liu) released in August 2016. The publisher’s promotion campaign imitated what happened with The Lord of the Rings or The Hunger Games, and the strategy of releasing the trilogy at a steady pace within a less than three-year time frame was apparently intended to create a similar momentum to entice American readers. Liu’s novels received endorsements from American writers and celebrities ranging from the Utopian novelist Kim Stanley Robinson to the popular fantasy author George R.R. Martin, as well as from President Barack Obama and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The “Three-Body” universe eventually remapped world science fiction through renditions in over a dozen languages. In 2015, Liu Cixin won the Hugo Award for Best Novel as the first non-English author. He also won Spain’s Premios Ignotus award as a non-Spanish writer and Germany’s Kurd Laßwitz Award as a non-­ German writer. On the Chinese New Year’s Day in 2019, the Chinese audiences witnessed the launching of Earth as a planet-size spaceship into deep space, an arresting spectacle visualized through advanced VFX techniques combining live-action footage and computer-generated imagery, which for the first time in Chinese film history achieved a “realistic” representation of the sf wonder on the large screen. The release of The Wandering Earth (Liulang diqiu 流浪地球) in theaters was widely regarded as an exciting moment when Chinese sf reached its maximum visibility. Sf, the marginal and invisible genre, was no longer hidden. It came into the mainstream. The film adaptations of the popular new wave sf works such as Liu Cixin’s Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 1 INTRODUCTION 25 Three-Body Problem series novels began as early as 2014; numerous projects have been developed since then. But it was the success of The Wandering Earth that eventually gave the Chinese film industry the confidence in the genre. During this past year, The Wandering Earth II made an even more successful impact on the film market. A Chinese domestic version of The Three-Body Problem TV drama series was released in spring 2023, while Netflix has announced the release date of its own “Americanized” version of 3–Body: March 2024. Since the new wave came to the public and Liu Cixin first spoke to a wide audience through television in 2010, his novels have attracted more and more readers to a marvelous world open to more possibilities and alternates beyond the options presented by mainstream literature, social thought, or government policies. He has been particularly fond of reminding Chinese readers to look up into the starry sky and the unknown beyond, the source of inspiration for ideas larger than mundane everyday life. He told an interviewer in 2011: “Everything is uncertain and beyond prediction… So much evidence is shown to us, our reality is very likely completely different from what we know.” In 2015, Han Song wrote an essay to celebrate the magic power of science fiction, echoing Liang Qichao’s words uttered more than a century ago: “Science fiction is a sort of literature that dreams, and it is itself a utopia. It is not wild conjecture, but an imagination based on a certain reality … it is so fortunate for me to encounter science fiction in such a special epoch, because I can therefore dream of more worlds.” Darko Suvin defines the utopian nature of science fiction: “As a minimum, we must demand from [science fiction] that it be wiser than the world it speaks to” (Suvin 36). The world images created by Liu Cixin and Han Song are not necessarily better than the real world, but they try to shed light on realms of “invisibility,” seeking the deeper truism beneath the glossy, shiny surface of reality, pointing to the hideous side of the splendid vision of the universe and the success story of the nation as well as to the unsettling, unnamable darker dimensions in the physics and psychology of our world. When translated into English and other foreign languages, works by Liu Cixin and Han Song present an unconventional, folded image of China. If they are wiser than the world they speak to, the “wisdom” that Chinese science fiction brought into the world is not a cautious optimism but rather a cautious revelation that foregrounds rich possibilities in alternative visions about our worlds. During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Chinese science fiction entered an Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 26 N. ISAACSON ET AL. unprecedented new epoch of experimentation and success and represented a new hope for change, a curiosity about the larger world, and a promise of more wonders and revelations for Chinese readers. From here, this genre brought China to the center stage of world literature. In addition to Liu Cixin and Han Song, the new wave writers who emerged around the turn of the twenty-first century also include Wang Jinkang (王晋康 b. 1948), Liu Wenyang (柳文扬 1970–2007), Ling Chen (凌晨 b. 1971), He Xi (何夕 b. 1971), Pan Haitian (潘海天 b. 1975), Jiang Bo (江波 b. 1978), and Zhao Haihong (赵海虹 b. 1977), and a few younger authors still in their twenties at the time, including Fei Dao, Xia Jia (夏笳 b. 1984), Chen Qiufan (陈楸帆 b. 1981), Chi Hui (迟卉 b. 1984), Chang Jia (长铗 b. 1984), Hao Jingfang (郝景芳 b. 1984), Qi Yue (七月 b. 1983), Ma Boyong (马伯庸 b. 1980), Cheng Jingbo (程婧波 b. 1983), Bao Shu (宝树 b. 1980), Zhang Ran (张冉 b. 1981) and Liu Yang (刘洋 b. 1986). These authors have all been translated into English and other foreign languages, such as Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide (Huangchao 荒 潮, 2018), Bao Shu’s Redemption of Time (Santi X: guanxiang zhi zhou 三 体X:观想之宙, 2019), and Hao Jingfang’s “Folding Beijing” (“Beijing zhedie”北京折疊, 2015) and Vagabond 流浪蒼穹 (2020). They have formed a new force for world science fiction. Since 2010, the year when Liu Cixin’s “Three-Body Trilogy,” an even much younger authors emerged in the so-called post-Three-Body age (hou santi shidai 后三体时代). This new generation has been largely a group of women and nonbinary authors. Their visions of the “Möbius” time-space without beginning or end and their identifications with “chimera” as the monstrous self-other combination (Gu 2020, pp.1–82) create new breakthroughs for the new wave’s posthuman turn that began with Liu Cixin, Chen Qiufan, and Han Song, but these new writers are those who truly make kinship in a nonbinary posthuman universe, with more radical notions about sex, gender, class, cyborgian constructs, transspecies, symbiosis and sympoiesis. These younger writers include Tang Fei (糖匪 b. 1983), Wang Kanyu (王侃瑜 b. 1990), Peng Simeng (彭思萌 b. 1990), Shuangchimu (双翅目 b. 1987), Gu Shi (顾适 b. 1985), Mu Ming (慕明 b. 1988), Duan Ziqi (段子期 b. 1992), Wang Nuonuo (王诺诺 b. 1991), Liao Shubo (廖舒波 b. 1988), and A Que ( 阿缺 b. 1990). The evolving new wave has kept generating new modes of literary representation that shatter what people take for granted, challenge the conventional values, and liberate the imagination to transcend categories and dichotomies, dissolve borders between so many things that Chinese Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 1 INTRODUCTION 27 science fiction can be viewed as an enormous “spaceship” holding all sorts and species together to lift off from the grounded reality. The Chinese literary universe has widened to include a whole range of new concepts and new sensations: ecological and environmental themes, Anthropocene and its challengers, Chthulucene and transspecies kinship, algorithm and poesis, etc. The impact of the new wave has reached beyond the People’s Republic and reached writers who were not originally science fiction authors, such as two great literary experimentalists: Lo Yi-chin (骆以军 b. 1967) and Dung Kai-cheung (董啟章 b. 1967). In the Sinophone literary world, there are writers already engaged in daring storytelling in the forms of science fiction and dystopian fiction, who respond to a variety of social, political, cultural, ethical and aesthetic questions in their own distinctive voices—such as Chan Koonchung (陈冠中 b. 1952), a Hong Kong writer living in Beijing, and numerous writers from Taiwan: Chi Ta-wei (纪大伟 b. 1972), Hung Ling (洪凌 b. 1971), Egoyan Zheng (伊格言 b. 1977), Wu Ming-yi (吴明益 b. 1971), and Ho Ching-pin (贺景滨 b. 1958). Chapter Outline In this volume, we present emerging approaches, addressing shifting paradigms in Chinese sf studies, offering a window on fan cultures, internet fiction, gender, eco-criticism, posthumanism, and biomedical discourse. These studies represent a “second wave” of Chinese sf studies, re-­ evaluating the canon of Chinese sf print and cinematic production, and expand the range of critical approaches to the subject. While the structure of the volume is both chronological and theme-focused, readers will notice that there is significant overlap in the historical breadth of individual chapters, illustrating how traditional political and literary inflection points shaped but do not fully account for the various waves of sf literary production analyzed herein. Acknowledging the impossibility of covering the entire breadth of what we now know to be Chinese sf, the editors and authors hope for this volume to be the beginning of a new conversation regarding the relationship between scientific discourse and cultural production in the Sinosphere. Part I consists of four chapters that focus on the earliest science fiction that emerged in the last decade of China’s last imperial dynasty, with special attention to utopian thinking, the revolution in fiction, the question of Chinese technology, and the genre’s making as a representation of the translated modernity. The early history of Chinese sf established some Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download. Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at etutorsource@gmail.com You can also order by WhatsApp https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph one_number&app_absent=0 Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and Author Name. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 28 N. ISAACSON ET AL. enduring features of the genre. New concepts introduced to a reading public with a renewed interest in the form of the novel would establish sf as an avant-garde genre. This section challenges us to consider the meanings of science, the limits of fiction, the implications of empire, and the limitations of translation. Lorenzo Andolfatto’s opening chapter, “Kang Youwei’s Book of the Heavens, and the Porous Epistemological Grounds of Early-Modern Chinese Science Fiction,” starts us off with a consideration of the limits of science and fiction in the late nineteenth century. Andolfatto examines how Kang Youwei’s work, inspired by contemporary western astronomy and articulated in archaic Chinese prose, reconsidered China’s place not just in the geopolitical order, but in the cosmic order. Chapter 3 offers another consideration of the porous nature of science and fiction, and their role in late imperial cosmology. Jia Liyuan’s “Intelligent Humanoid Machines: Imaginations of Physical and Mental Transformation in Late Qing Literature and Their Intellectual Origins” turns from outer space to inner space, examining how the often pseudoscientific discourse of hypnotism and mesmerism, and the vision of the body as a rationalized, mechanical assemblage were acculturated through western source texts and took on its own life in Chinese popular and consumer culture. In Chap. 4, “The King of Electricity from the East: Science, Technology, and the Vision of World Order in Late Qing China,” Li Guangyi examines variations of themes of imperial domination and revanchism in late Qing utopian fiction and science fiction, revealing how late Qing authors considered the question of overcoming the institutional, philosophical, and technological advantages that had allowed the western world and a rapidly westernizing Japan to leap ahead, while China appeared to have remained stagnant. In Chap. 5, “Formal Fictions: ‘Chinese’ ‘Science’ ‘Fiction’ in Translation,” Virginia Conn warns against oversimplifying equivalencies between sf from China and the global sf tradition by reminding readers that the meaning of all three terms is historically and geographically contingent within a given language, and even more contingent in seeking translingual equivalencies across languages. Part II, also consisting of four chapters, examines the genre’s crossover with other media and other genres, with case studies drawn from the late twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first century. These chapters showcase the genre’s metamorphosis in the cinematic form as well as in cyberspace. In Chap. 6, “The Writing Editors: Late Qing and Republican Media Professionals as Authors of Science Fiction,” Qiong Yang examines the dual roles of editor-writers in shaping the discourse of scientific Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 1 INTRODUCTION 29 nationalism, and how their dual role shaped the genre during the Republican era both creatively and practically. In Chap. 7, “Projecting Eco-Futures: Cinematic Visions of Utopian Science and Ecology from the Mao Era to the Deng Era,” Melissa Hosek again challenges limits of sf as a genre, this time asking us to consider how prevailing attitudes toward science and the political help shape visions of environment and ecology by contrasting two films, Breaking with the Old Ideas (1975), produced at the end of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and Death Ray on a Coral Island (1980), produced during China’s era of “reform and opening up.” In Chap. 8, Hua Li’s “Information, the Body and Humanism in the Chinese Cyber Novel Forty Millennia of Authenticity Cultivation” examines a subset of Chinese sf with strong roots in the Daoist alchemical tradition. The language of mesmerism and electrical currents popular in the early twentieth century has been replaced by upgrades, consciousness uploads and virtual embodiments, as Chinese popular fiction continues to imagine the radical potentials of contemporary technology and their implications for humanity and transcendence of the corporeal body. Online fiction in China has become a massive industry, rarely afforded the cultural cache of print fiction but deeply significant if measured in terms of available content of economic impact. Chapter 9, “Open Up Your Brain Hole: Spatial Imaginaries in Chinese Online Science Fiction,” gives us a window into one salient feature cutting across the vast swathe of “fake sci­fi” appearing in online: narrative considerations of dimensions outside of the three spatial dimensions we are familiar with from middle school geometry, arguing that popular online fiction exists in a unique space outside the vaunted halls of printed and globally canonized “serious” Chinese sf that allows it to speak to cultural understandings of the interplay between physics, text, and the imagination in unique ways. With inquiries into topics such as gender, posthumanism, and heterotopia, the last four chapters, which make Part III, focus on contemporary science fiction, including major authors such as Han Song as well as the Sinophone avant-garde writers experimenting with science fictionality. In Chap. 10, “Of Illness and Illusion: The Chaosmology of Han Song’s Hospital Trilogy,” Jannis Jizhou Chen examines the philosophical implications of illness and regimes of health in Han Song’s Hospital trilogy. Chen examines Han Song’s work in terms of the “chaosmos” of the hospital, a delirious space where the relationship between illness, history, fiction, transcendence, and reality itself is under constant negotiation. In Chap. 11, “Liu Cixin and the Cosmic Pastoral,” Gwennael Gaffric examines the Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 30 N. ISAACSON ET AL. harmonies and dissonances of the author’s work with the contemporary discourse of the “Chinese Dream,” through close reading of the presence of pastoral aesthetics and ethics in the author’s work. Turning to the existential anxieties, disorientation, and pressure felt by China’s post-80s generation, Chap. 12, Fredericke Schneider-Vielsäcker’s “Bodies in Transformation: The Politics of Post-80s Science Fiction Authors Chi Hui, Chen Qiufan, and Zhang Ran,” again examines how literary depictions of physical and mental conditions are used to represent sociopolitical conditions. Chapter 13, “The Posthuman and the Neo-Baroque in Taiwan Science Fiction,” moves beyond the PRC as the gravitational center of contemporary Chinese sf to examine the relationship between heterotopic “other spaces” of Taiwanese sf and Taiwan itself as a heterotopia. The history, aesthetics, and sociopolitical implications of Chinese sf have reoriented the field of Chinese literary studies through new paradigms and research methods for good reason. Sf represents a significant contribution to modern Chinese cultural production, both in terms of its value, speaking powerfully to our modern condition, and its sheer volume in terms of production and consumption. A form of speculative literature, science fiction speaks to China’s rapidly shifting reality, its political multiplicity, and its formless future, voicing the anticipations and anxieties of a new epoch filled with accelerating alterations and increasing uncertainty. The genre unfolds invisible and hidden dimensions of and beyond China’s reality and weaves together new trends in sciences and technologies, ethics and aesthetics, and public and private lives. References Broderick, Damien. “New Wave and Backwash: 1960–1980.” The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, Cambridge UP, 2006, pp. 48–63. Chen, Duxiu. “Jinggao qingnian” 敬告青年 [Admonition to the Youth]. Xin qingnian 新青年 [New Youth], vol.1, no.1, 1915, pp.1–6. Geng, O. “Chinese Sci-Fi Novel, ‘The Three-Body Problem,’ Touches Down in US.” Wall Street Journal, 4 November, 2014, https://www.wsj.com/ articles/chinese-­sci-­fi-­novel-­the-­three-­body-­problem-­touches-­down-­in-­u-­s-­ 1415122369. Hollinger, Virginia. “Genre vs. Mode.” The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction, edited by Rob Latham, Oxford UP, 2014, pp. 139–154. Isaacson, Nathaniel. Celestial Empire: the Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2017. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 1 INTRODUCTION 31 ———. “Locating Kexue Xiangsheng (Science Crosstalk) in Relation to the Selective Tradition of Chinese Science Fiction.” Osiris, vol. 34, no.1, Spring 2019, pp.139–157. Li, Hua. Chinese Science Fiction During the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw (1978–1983). Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2021. Lovene, Paola. Tales of Future Past: Anticipation and the End of Literature in Contemporary China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. Jia, Liyuan. “Soul-stealing Sand”: War and Time in Xin jiyuan [The New Era]” translated and edited by Nathaniel Isaacson. Science Fiction Studies, vol. 45, no. 1, 2018, pp.1–23. Jiang, Jing. Found in Translation: “New People” in Twentieth-Century Chinese Science Fiction. Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies, 2021. Jones, Andrew. Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Kerslake, Patricia. Science Fiction and Empire. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007. Milner, Andrew. Locating Science Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012. Qu Nan 曲楠. “Xiyou youli er qunao: wan Qing “fanxin xiaoshuo” zhong de Xiyouji” 西游有理而取闹 [A rational, riotous journey West: late Qing re-writes of Journey to the West]. Hanyu wenxue yanjiu, vol. 7, no.1, 2016, pp. 16–25. Rieder, John. Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Ren Dongmei 任冬梅. “Minguo ‘kexue xiaoshuo’ chutan” 民国‘科学小说’初探 [A preliminary investigation of Republican-era ‘science fiction’]. Liyun xuekan 励耘学刊, no. 2, 2019, pp. 278–291. Song, Mingwei and Theodore Huters, editors. The Reincarnated Giant: An Anthology of Twenty-First-Century Chinese Science Fiction. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2018. ———. The New Wave of Chinese Science Fiction: History, Poetics, Text 中国科幻新 浪潮:历史，诗学，文本. Shanghai: Shanghai Literature & Arts Publishing House, 2020. ———. Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2023. Wu, Dingbo. “Fandom in China.” Science Fiction Fandom, edited by Sanders, Joseph L, Greenwood Press, 1994, pp. 133–136. ———. “Looking Backward: An Introduction to Chinese Science Fiction.” Wu and Murphy, Science Fiction from China, edited by Patrick Dennis Murphy and Dingbo Wu, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 1989, pp. xi–xli. Wu Yan 吴岩. Kehuan wenxue lungang 科幻文学论纲 [Science Fiction Studies Reader]. Chongqing: Chongqing chubanshe, 2011. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 32 N. ISAACSON ET AL. Zhang, Feng. “Shei shi xia yige Yao Haijun: zhongguo huanxiang lei Fanzine huigu” 谁是下一个姚海军:中国幻想类 Fanzine 回顾 [Who will be the next Yao Haijun: a review of Chinese speculative fiction fanzines]. Xin huan jie 新幻 界 [World of new fantasy] no.1, 2009, pp. 37–40. Zhang, Jie. “Death Ray on a Coral Island as China’s First Science Fiction Film.” Fritzsche, S. ed., The Liverpool Companion to World Science Fiction Film, edited by Fritesche Sonja, Liverpool UP, 2014, pp.39–55. Zheng, Wenguang. “Kexue wenyi zatan” 科学文艺杂谈 [A miscellany on literature and art about science]. Zuojia lun kexue wenyi, Zuojia lun kexue wenyi 作 家论科学文艺 [Writers on literature and art about science], vol. 1, edited by Huang Yi, Jiangsu kexue jishu chubanshe, 1980, pp. 80–95. ———. “Tantan kexue huanxiang xiaoshuo” 谈谈科学幻想小说 [On science fiction]. Dushu yuebao 读书月报 [Reading monthly], no. 3, 1956, pp. 21–22. Zhongguo hongyang dangshi yanjiu shi 中共中央党史研究室, ed. “Zhongguo gongchandang dashi ji 1963” 中国共产党大事记 1963 [Chronology of major events of the Chinese Communist Party: 1963]. Zhongguo gongchandang xinwen 中国共产党新闻 [News about the Chinese Communist Party]. http:// cpc.people.com.cn/GB/64162/64164/4416060.html. Accessed 12, August 2022. ———. “Zhongguo gongchandang dashi ji 1978” 中国共产党大事记 1978 [Chronology of major events of the Chinese Communist Party: 1978]. Zhongguo gongchandang xinwen [News about the Chinese Communist Party]. http://cpc.people.com.cn/GB/64162/64164/4416109.html. Accessed 12, August, 2022. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com PART I Contesting Science and Fiction Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download. Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at etutorsource@gmail.com You can also order by WhatsApp https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph one_number&app_absent=0 Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and Author Name.
