In any event, I was younger back then, and my courage had not yet been dulled by experience. Thus, when I attended an international academic conference meant to discuss Important And Intellectual Subjects, the inexplicable urge to bring up science fiction once again gripped me. Taking advantage of a coffee break, I walked up to a renowned German sinologist and asked him if he had ever read any Chinese science fiction.
This aged and respected scholar had once declared that after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Chinese authors had produced no work that would be considered great by the rest of the world. I did not agree with him.
At that time, Mo Yan hadn’t yet won the Nobel, but I wasn’t thinking of him anyway. The second book in Liu Cixin’s “Three-Body” series, The Dark Forest, had just been published, and every Chinese sci-fi fan was thrumming with excitement. I was certain that at least in the realm of science fiction, a contemporary Chinese author had indeed written something the equal of any of the great Western classics.
But the renowned sinologist interrupted my disquisition politely, “I don’t even read German sci-fi!”
There was nothing I could say in response to that. Heck, even Chinese readers for Chinese sci-fi were few and far between.
I wasn’t some rabid superfan who believed that my beloved genre was the best thing ever to happen to literature and anyone who couldn’t appreciate sci-fi was a philistine. In fact, I didn’t even like to argue with people. My questions were a kind of performance art: out of a desire for security or mental peace, everyone built around themselves a mental firewall that filtered the torrents of information in which modern life inundated all of us. “Sci-fi” was one of the keywords tagged by most people’s firewalls as useless information, and I simply wanted to toss it over the firewall so that they had to evaluate it anew instead of automatically ignoring it. I suppose many would think what I did was foolish and pointless, but at least I didn’t harm anyone with my questions.
Here, I have to explain to my readers in the West that for a long time, science fiction in China was like subatomic particles or radiation, undetectable to most. A student majoring in literature would find virtually no information concerning sci-fi in textbooks or academic histories of Chinese literature. (To be sure, in histories of Western literature one would occasionally find the names of writers like Margaret Atwood, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon—but the text would go on to emphasize that these writers only used the techniques of science fiction as a form of “literary experimentation,” as though it would be a terrible thing to sully the august tomes of literary history with the presence of any pure genre writer.)
Within the elegant, highly intellectual, awe-inspiring atmosphere of “serious” academic conferences, it was almost impossible to find a science fiction author or a scholar of sci-fi. It was rare to see sci-fi covered in the mainstream media. If some newspaper or magazine happened to publish a 200-word snippet about sci-fi or if a popular magazine founded by a bestselling YA author published a story by a sci-fi writer, fans celebrated the occasion and rushed to share the news with each other. Even the publisher of Doris Lessing’s Mara and Dann: An Adventure and the writer invited to provide an introduction for the book avoided mentioning the book’s obvious genre classification, fearful of harming sales.
In the face of so much apathy and ignorance from society at large, sci-fi fans in China rallied to Science Fiction World, a magazine dedicated to serving them. Through college fan clubs, Internet forums, and other grassroots activities, fans found each other and banded together, forming a distinctive subculture. Hidden in their refuge, protected by their isolation, they entertained themselves, feeling sorry for those who didn’t understand or experience the sense of wonder in gazing up at the stars.
Once, when speaking to a group of prominent Western authors and scholars who had never heard of Chinese sci-fi, I used the metaphor of a “hidden army.” Forgotten by everyone in the cultural landscape, they lay concealed in silence, alone on the desolate heath. Perhaps someday an opportunity would arise when they would burst into action and change the world, but it was also possible that such an opportunity would never come, and they would fade into oblivion. Future explorers might find the remains of their mysterious, unfinished war engines, but those who had constructed the weapons and practiced with them would be forever forgotten.
However, soon after, the third volume of Liu Cixin’s magnum opus, Death’s End, was published. An unanticipated sea change came over China’s literary scene. The isolation that had kept sci-fi out of view had also acted as a dam storing up the potential for an explosive release. As young Chinese fans grew up and entered society, they persisted in their love of genre literature. Like faithful fans at a concert, they waved their faint glow sticks to support their beloved art. As night fell, thousands of tiny lights danced with more urgency and force, and thousands of lonely voices coalesced into a powerful rhythmic chant. Finally, Liu Cixin, the star of the show, came onto the stage to perform his masterpiece, and the crescendo of wild cheers that greeted him seemed to shake the stars suspended in the sky above.
Society at large was consumed with curiosity. Literary critics, numbed by the clichéd portraits of urban life and listless middle-class affairs that filled “literary fiction,” were surprised to find that fiction written in Chinese was capable of narrating grand space epics and painting magnificent portraits of an imagined future. A fresh literary terrain materialized out of nowhere, waiting to be cultivated by page-plowing scholars and critics.
All of a sudden, literary theory became a hot topic again, and the number of dissertations and papers focused on sci-fi exploded. Established scholars gave lectures on the “meaning of sci-fi,” and even avant-garde artists enthusiastically invited sci-fi writers to collaborate with them to explore the revolutionary ideas made possible by science and the infinite potential of humanity. Agents and producers always on the lookout for the next piece of valuable IP buttonholed every sci-fi writer, demanding to know, “Do you have any stories suitable for screen adaptation?”
Within but a few years, sci-fi authors had turned from invisible and forgotten bookworms to superstars in hot demand. They took off their simple, outdated plaid shirts and became sharp dressers—no, really, some of them could even be glimpsed in the pages of fashion magazines. Everyone acted as if each sci-fi author was a walking mine of brilliant ideas.
The symbols and memes of sci-fi also injected themselves into the popular imagination. Internet CEOs interpreted the “dark forest” of the “Three-Body” series as a metaphor for the ruthless competition in their domain, while a government spokesperson employed the “dark forest” to describe the worst-case scenario for the crisis on the Korean Peninsula. Sci-fi had never touched so many in China. The vice president of China affirmed that sci-fi was a “positive force” for the development and progress of the country, and even declared himself a fan. Everyone agreed that this was the most encouraging, most supportive environment sci-fi had ever experienced in China.