It was a moment that changed the field.
July 13, 2010, 3:30 p.m.
Two days earlier, I introduced myself to Han Song and Fei Dao. We had a pleasant conversation. Before meeting with them, I had read all their publications I could find. Three years earlier, my friend Yan Feng (a Fudan professor) sent me a manuscript called Santi (later rendered into English as The Three-Body Problem). He highly recommended that I read it. But I was busy with something else at that time; I didn’t even read through the second chapter (the chapters were in the same order as they appeared in the English translation by Ken Liu). It was not until 2008 that I picked it up again, felt awed, and was soon obsessed with this new wave of Chinese science fiction: Liu Cixin, Han Song, Wang Jinkang, He Xi, La La, Zhao Haihong, Chen Qiufan, Xia Jia, Fei Dao, Hao Jingfang, Chi Hui, etc. I read every piece I could find written by them, and I strongly suggested to the Shanghai conference organizers that we invite Liu Cixin to the conference. However, Liu Cixin couldn’t come due to a schedule conflict. But Han Song and Fei Dao did not fail their mission; in a very humble and yet powerful way, they succeeded in making science fiction the hot topic for the conference. By the time Han Song and Fei Dao finished speaking, I felt that I had come to an epiphany: Chinese science fiction had already experienced a decade of its own golden age, 1999 to 2010. Unfortunately, it was almost unknown to people outside the circle of SF fans. The mainstream literary scholars knew nothing.
During his presentation, Fei Dao compared this new wave of Chinese science fiction to a lonely hidden army. Perhaps it would have perished without anyone paying attention to it. Indeed, if no one from the literary establishment bothered to pick up a copy of Santi, or had the patience to read the labyrinthine narrative of Han Song’s bizarre story about China’s invisible reality, the new wave of Chinese SF could perhaps only serve as self-entertainment for SF authors and fans. But in July 2010, thanks to Han Song and Fei Dao, this lonely hidden army was brought to the center stage of a convention of literary elites.
Right after the roundtable, Theodore Huters (UCLA), a professor I respect tremendously, began to think about doing an anthology to introduce these new Chinese SF authors. He commissioned me to edit a special double issue for Renditions, a literary magazine that introduced some of China’s most famous authors to the world. It took me two years, with the support of dozens of writers and translators, to complete this job. In 2012, the Renditions special issue was published, featuring ten stories by contemporary Chinese SF authors. It’s about the same time that Ken Liu, the most devoted translator of Chinese science fiction, began to enter the field. Other publications, such as Pathlight, also ran special issues featuring translations of Chinese science fiction. In other countries, such as Italy and Japan, Chinese science fiction has also gained new life in new languages.
When Ken Liu’s translation of The Three-Body Problem appeared in 2014 and won the Hugo Award in 2015, this new wave of Chinese science fiction became an international sensation. What happened later is perhaps familiar to most of the readers: Obama and Mark Zuckerberg both praised the novel; its sequel, Death’s End, was on the bestseller list of the New York Times.
Scholars are usually a little late to trends. But this time, the tremendous popularity of Chinese science fiction is impossible to ignore. Within only three to four years, Chinese science fiction has quickly become one of the most prosperous subfields for China scholars. Major academic conferences such as MLA, AAS, ACLA, ACCL, and the like all feature panels, roundtables, workshops devoted to Chinese science fiction. As one of the first Chinese American scholars paying attention to this new development of the genre, I was frequently commissioned to contribute to academic journals/volumes in both the US and China (and France and Germany as well), edit special issues, and even organize conferences and workshops. I am not alone in this campaign. I have such comrades-in-arms as Hua Li, who wrote several articles on contemporary SF, and Nathaniel Isaacson, who recently published Celestial Empire: Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction, the first monograph completely devoted to the study of early Chinese science fiction. More importantly, an entire new generation of younger scholars engaged the topic seriously, producing more systematic research and presenting more provocative arguments. It was almost like a miracle: a new continent for scholarly adventure emerged in front of our eyes.
Still, I need to emphasize that the field has its own history. Its current momentum is new, but it still has a heritage that set up some framework for the contemporary research, just like this new wave that also has its precedents—at least a few short-lived booms that took place in the first decade of the twentieth century: the 1950s to 1960s as children’s literature in China, 1970s to 1980s in Taiwan, and a major revival on the mainland during the early Reform Era. However, the history of Chinese science fiction has never been a continuous one. It is full of gaps and interruptions caused by politics or the change of cultural paradigms. Each generation of new authors had to reestablish the paradigm. Only on a few occasions could they get access to earlier authors’ work, but they rarely received obvious, substantial influences from them.
But for literary scholars, the task is not just to test how earlier generations influenced later ones, or to try to create a literary history that pretends to be coherent and consistent. Literary scholars put more emphasis on texts and contexts. I need to pay homage to three scholars who made major research on the genre before its recent revival. In the early 1980s, German sinologist Rudolf Wagner published a lengthy article “Lobby Literature: Archeology and Present Functions of Science Fiction in China.” It mainly discusses science fiction of the early Reform Era. Wagner defined it as lobby literature without labeling it as propaganda, but gave a subtle and sympathetic analysis of the genre’s rich meanings at the turning point of China’s political situation. His article is an inspiring piece that connects the future-oriented SF to past history and present challenges.
By the end of the 1980s, Wu Dingbo collaborated with Patrick Murphy to publish the first translated anthology of Chinese science fiction from the 1980s, titled Science Fiction from China (New York: Praeger, 1989). Wu wrote an introduction that serves as a concise history of Chinese science fiction, presenting most of the important authors and advocates for the genre from the early twentieth century to the early 1980s. He spent more time introducing the rise and decline of Chinese SF during the early Reform Era. Wu’s introduction was the most complete discussion on the genre published in English by that time.