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1

GENRE TROUBLE

DEFINING SCIENCE FICTION

The following chapter presents a summary of recent trends in the field of SF studies and offers some initial observations on their germaneness to early Chinese SF. These observations are developed more thoroughly in the close readings and historical accounts that follow in chapters 2 through 6. I do not intend to force Chinese SF at the turn of the twentieth century into a universalizing theoretical framework, nor am I making an Orientalist argument positing the exceptionality of “SF with Chinese characteristics.” Rather, what follows is meant to demonstrate that Chinese cultural studies and SF studies have much to offer each other. Though the readings of Chinese SF that emerge from these theoretical foundations often deviate from them in significant ways, I find these areas of disciplinary convergence and divergence to be useful points of departure both in coming to terms with the local emergence of Chinese SF and in contributing to the understanding of SF as a global phenomenon.

In the words of James Gunn, “The most important, and most divisive, issue in SF is definition” (Gunn and Candelaria, 5), an opinion reflected in a number of recent studies of the genre (Vint and Bould; Milner 2012; Latham 2014; Gunn, Barr, and Candelaria; Luckhurst). Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (1979) remains one of the most repeated and widely accepted definitions of the genre. Suvin’s linear history of the genre and its constituent elements, and his definition of SF as “a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment” (Suvin, 7), have been fundamental in part because they served as the conceptual framework for the journal Science Fiction Studies, which he helped to cofound in 1973 (Luckhurst, 7). Andrew Milner notes that Suvin’s work is the “core critical approach specific to the genre, against which almost everything else has been obliged to define itself,” and that Suvin’s work plays a significant role in theoretical interventions on the genre written by Carl Freedman (2000) and Fredric Jameson (2005) (Milner 2012, 1–2). John Rieder’s history of the study of the genre, “On Defining SF, or Not: Genre Theory, SF and History,” indicates this as well (Rieder 2010, 192).

Many Chinese-language studies of SF follow in making recourse to Suvin’s definition, occasionally pointing to premodern utopias or fables of technology as local predecessors of the genre (Lin Jianqun; Rao Zhonghua; Wu Yan; Wang Jianyun and Chen Jieshi). In practical terms, if one were to ask a store clerk to point to the SF section in a bookstore in Shanghai, she would be likely to find herself in familiar but not entirely identical territory, owing to the contingencies of local historical and social conditions. SF works in China are often sandwiched in the children’s section, and this is reflected in the ages of those browsing the shelves. Implicit in the suggestion that they are for children is that they are marginalia—horror, fantasy, and mystery are often nearby, but SF rarely finds its way onto “literature” (wenxue) shelves. Chinese SF marketing, like that of its Western counterpart, often emphasizes newness: one is unlikely to find a reprint of a Qing-era SF novel, save for commemorative editions.¹ The SF shelves in a bookstore in China are also very likely to emphasize translated works. This is a reflection both of the perceived exoticism of the genre and of the market forces that push many forms of contemporary genre fiction off bookshelves and onto the Internet. The apparent familiarity of the above generalizations regarding critical trends and market forces influencing the study of Chinese SF makes it all the more important to be cognizant of what is at stake when—to mangle Damon Knight—we point to a work and say, “This is Chinese science fiction.”²

The Cultural Field

Recent reformulations of genre theory have turned to an understanding of SF as a historically and culturally contingent category: a “selective tradition” (Milner 2012, 202) characterized by shifting and contentious formulations resulting from various critical claims and modes. These studies have in various ways moved away from attempts to define a fixed object of study, in favor of framing SF as a mutable category acknowledging a wide range of media and practices of production and consumption (Vint and Bould; Gunn, Barr, and Candelaria; Milner 2012; Rieder 2010). These definitions draw particularly on Rick Altman’s “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre” (1984, 1999) and Raymond Williams’s sociological analysis of cultural production (1979, 1980) in understanding SF as a historically situated and socially conditioned constellation of forces of production and consumption. Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture (2006), which demonstrates how narrative content pollinates “across multiple media platforms,” and Marc Steinberg’s development of this concept as “media convergence,” similarly contribute to an understanding of the ways in which narrative topoi function as the product of global networks of production and distribution. Reading literature in general and SF in particular as a conglomeration of socially embedded media, modes, and practices centered on a thematic core has two advantages. First, it strikes a balance between close and distant reading, allowing the critic to see specific texts in terms of their cultural milieu. Second, it allows critics to elucidate connections between narrative conventions that appear throughout a variety of media.

Veronica Hollinger historicizes the emergent understanding of SF as a “mode” rather than a genre, offering that “mode implies not a kind but a method, a way of getting something done. In [the case of William Gibson], in a way of thinking and speaking about contemporary reality so that SF becomes integrated with other discourses about late-capitalist global-techno-culture” (Hollinger 2014, 140). Borrowing Raymond Williams’s concept of a “structure of feeling” and analysis of the cultural apparatus, Andrew Milner argues that SF should be understood as (a) a form conditioned by relations between social modes, and (b) specifiable material practices within which those relations are enacted (Milner 2012). In a similar vein, John Rieder has argued that SF might be understood in terms of Wittgenstein’s concept of “family resemblance” and Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizomatic assemblage to describe genres in general and SF in particular as a gradually articulated, nebulous assemblage of texts that cannot be reduced to a single historical progenitor or formal type (Rieder 2010). This and other rubrics understand SF variously as a convergence of media, genres, forms, or modes, emphasizing its diffusion and diversity of the objects and modes of cultural production. These works span literary production, fan clubs and other practices of audience participation, film, radio, music, poetry, role-playing games, newspaper comic strips, comic books, and toys. These cultural apparatuses bleed over into political culture at the level of space programs and military defense, emerging religious practices (e.g., scientology), and practices of display evident in museums and world expos (Luckhurst, 10; Telotte, 162–182; Milner 2012, 7). Alongside the expansion of media practices included under the umbrella of SF is an expansion of the analytical frame beyond national borders in recognition of the intensification of global exchange in the culture industry.

Milner argues that SF can be visualized as a distribution of tropes across the media landscape using Bourdieu’s notion of the field of literary and cultural production (Bourdieu 1993). Bourdieu maps literary production as a continuum of profitability vs. artistic license on its horizontal axis, high vs. low cultural status on its vertical axis, and diagonally in terms of its political conservatism. Milner suggests that SF in various media can be identified throughout the field. Having placed SF within the cultural field in general, Milner goes on to argue that a more or less isomorphic map may be used more specifically to illustrate the relationships between various mediated iterations of SF narratives and subgenres (e.g., cyberpunk fiction, art-house cinema, SF criticism) (2011, 394–396; 2012, 42–47).

Critics of modern Chinese literature (see edited collection, Hockx 1999) have shown how Bourdieu’s cultural field can also be used productively in understanding modern Chinese literary production, leading Michel Hockx to suggest that a map of the Chinese field of cultural production include a third axis that accounts for the political capital of a work. Hockx also notes that a China-specific map of mutual relations between “institutions of material and symbolic production” would necessarily entail certain reconfigurations given the different cultural landscape and different historical trajectories (17–19). In like manner, Paola Iovene’s Tales of Futures Past (2014) understands modern Chinese literature as an assemblage of texts, social practices, editorial strategies, and experiences of reading (13–14). In sum, recent reconfigurations of genre theory have led to an approach regarding SF as a selective tradition best understood as a mode of reading and interpretation. At the same time, scholars of modern Chinese culture have applied these same observations of cultural production and genre to understanding their area of research. Without attempting to completely reconfigure the above observations in service of constructing a “cultural SF field with Chinese characteristics,” it should be noted that late Qing literature was in many ways distinguished by an increasingly central role for fiction (as opposed to poetry) and a contestation of whether the classical language or the modern vernacular best suited the mode. To borrow a scientific (or SF) metaphor, we might add to our three-dimensional figure—depicting symbolic, political, and economic capital—a fourth dimension, permitting us to see the ways that individual elements of the cultural field shifted over time.

Almost immediately after the first Sino-Japanese War, fiction came to be understood as a key battleground in the quest for reform (Huters 1988, 262). For a number of late Qing intellectuals, the vernacular novel was a new form that incorporated a wide variety of new ideas and narrative techniques, a form that could reach a broader audience and make that audience aware of the severity of the crisis China faced (Huters 2005, 100–120).³ SF was understood as one of a number of genres that, through the literary form of the new novel, could help to espouse lasting social change. This was in part a consequence of the wide range of issues that authors sought to address in their work. Characters travel both domestically and abroad, encounter natural, supernatural, and technological anomalies, have extended dialogues on political thought (that more closely resemble manifestos than fiction), meet great philosophers of Eastern and Western traditions, and often participate in any of the above activities in a dream. Fiction monthlies often included extended treatises on the history of civilization, or the rise of the Western world. Many instances of these works were loose translations of unattributed Western and Japanese works. The generic and epistemological pluralism seen in the pages of late Qing fiction is a reflection of the social and cultural hybridity of China’s burgeoning urban, semicolonial centers, and of the multitudinous problems and solutions that late Qing intellectuals grappled with in their writings.

The turmoil engendered by the presence of foreign material and intellectual culture widened the cracks in the foundations of Chinese society through which new ideas flooded in. Culturally hybrid spaces such as Shanghai gave birth to a new worldview that attempted to reconcile radically different approaches to the pursuit of knowledge and government. Literature was no exception. The late Qing intellectual “atmosphere of crisis and utopian hope” (Huters 2005, 132) heralded the introduction of new literary forms and genres. The enthusiasm for the “new novel” represents a rare point of unity in the otherwise politically fractious intellectual atmosphere of early twentieth-century China. Probably the clearest justification for the new focus of the novel was the idea that the form could accommodate two urgent requirements: a larger audience for writing, and the potential to effectively represent to this larger audience the full dimensions of the crisis China faced (Huters 2005, 24–25; 1988, 261). This vision of literary purpose would be adopted by May Fourth literati, and its echoes continue to reverberate in the contemporary period.

Geographically, Milner also considers the applicability of world systems theory in understanding the development of SF, applying Franco Moretti’s concept of core, periphery, and semi-periphery developed in “Conjectures on World Literature” and Atlas of the European Novel to the development of SF. Milner argues that “what is true for the novel in general is also true for SF. Conceived in England and France, at the core of the nineteenth-century world literary system (Shelley, Bulwer-Lytton and, above all, Verne and Wells), it continued in both countries throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries” (Milner 2012, 165). Milner describes a largely European semi-periphery, arguing that the United States and Japan transformed from semi-peripheral to core SF countries during the twentieth century. The global periphery of Milner’s selective tradition consists of those countries that predominately translated works from core countries into their target languages, and which did not contribute to the global tradition. This parallels the emergence of Sinophone studies, a mode of analysis that understands Chinese-language cultural production as the product of core-periphery relationships betwixt and between a number of local and global empires (Shih 2007; Shih, Bernards, and Tsai 2013).

These approaches help demonstrate that SF is much more than any single Platonic prototype, neatly bound within the borders of a national literary tradition. All reflect a turn toward a historical approach to genre that understands the literary field as the product of global relations of economic and political power. John Rieder observes that “sf’s identity is a differentially articulated position in an historical and mutable field of genres,” and that furthermore SF fits into an “economy of genres.” In other words, SF is a gradual accretion of texts that make use of, rather than belong to, a genre (Rieder 2010, 197–199). In this light, it is most useful to ask what SF was at a given historical moment and geographical location, and what critical, social, or political purposes it served, rather than to seek universalizing definitions.

Milner identifies imperialism as one of the constituent elements of SF but ultimately concludes that social transformations wrought by technological innovation and the dialectic of enlightenment and romanticism are the most salient topoi of SF as a global genre. However, in the case of late Qing China, I argue that Orientalism and imperialism were indeed the most conspicuous themes. For this reason, before we are able to move on to an examination of the ways in which China’s semicolonial status shaped the emergence and thematic content of early Chinese SF, the various media and narrative modes that were particular to the emergence of the genre in China, and an analysis of the texts themselves, it is necessary to explicate the relationship between SF and imperialism.

Imperialism and SF

The historical conditions outlined in the introduction apply equally to the literary field of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Fictional depictions of exploration in the work of authors like H. Rider Haggard brought the imaginary horizons of imperial expansion home for readers, inspiring new generations of young imperial subjects to join in the effort (Katz, 1–3, 108–112). Romantic genres like adventure and SF were central to this self-reinforcing impetus to expansion, catalysts fueled by and that in turn helped to fuel the growing sphere of imperial influence. Dreams of material and intellectual rewards of conquest provided ample source material for authors of a number of genres. In turn, this imagination paved the way for and fueled the desire for continued efforts of exploration and conquest. The imaginary horizons of the twentieth century were heavily influenced by the exchanges between Europe and Asia. These exchanges were source material for early European SF, which in turn helped to broaden the literary and intellectual horizons of East Asian countries like China and Japan.

Quoting William Blake in Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said noted that “empire follows art, and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose” (Said 1993, 13).⁴ Empire is as dependent on the intellectual rationalization that sustains its mission as it is upon the military force necessary to carry out the act of physical conquest. Framed in terms of enlightenment, emancipation, and benevolent paternalism, the justifications for going to war and for continued occupation are as involved as the actual moment of conquest itself. Indeed, this rationalization, however untenable, is dependent on masking military conquest with the façade of moral good and humanitarian aid. Or, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri put it, “Empire is formed not on the basis of force itself, but on the capacity to present force as being in the service of right and peace” (Hardt and Negri, 15).

Recent work in the vein of Said’s critique of Orientalism has shown that SF was one of many genres that paved the way for empire by creating the conditions for its popular imagination. The wish-fulfillment narratives of science and adventure fiction served as primers describing how young men of ambition might contribute to and partake in the spoils of conquest. The imaginary horizons of imperial expansion were brought to the minds of readers of romantic genres of adventure and SF in the work of authors like H. Rider Haggard and Daniel Defoe, inspiring new generations of young imperial subjects to join in the effort. Images of men of action—explorers, engineers, soldiers, and sailors—were intended to be the role models of a new generation of imperial actors (Richards, 1–6; Mathison, 173–174). In Meiji Japan, translations of science fiction and adventure novels served as tools for establishing an imaginary horizon that valorized the mission of exploration and conquest, priming young men for their participation in what would eventually become Japan’s own effort at imperial expansion, the “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere.”

The global relations that led to the emergence of SF mirror those that swung late nineteenth-century China from an empire at the center of Asian trade and tribute to a semicolonial outpost at the margins of European empire. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay suggests that three factors were critical to the emergence of SF: “the technological expansion that drove real imperialism, the need felt by national audiences for literary-cultural mediation as their societies were transformed from historical nations into hegemons, and the fantastic model of achieved techno-scientific Empire” (Csicsery-Ronay 2003, 231).

These three factors reiterate Said’s vision of the novel writ large as a literary form functionally tied to the comprehension of expanding networks of global trade and domination, spurred on and enabled by industrial production in the context of the genre of SF in particular. Csicsery-Ronay identifies a positive correlation between SF and imperialism, recognizing Britain, France, Germany, the former Soviet Union, Japan, and the United States as the primary producers and consumers of SF, arguing that SF has been driven by a desire for “transformation of imperialism into Empire” (232). The geopolitical imagination of SF is intimately concerned with the imagination of a historical teleology leading to an all-encompassing world order.⁵ As empire is the imaginary political horizon of SF, Orientalism is a major influence on its discursive content. John Rieder’s Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (2008) adds to this critique an explanation of the historical conditions that tied Orientalism to SF. Colonial expansion and the simultaneous establishment of European capitalism on a global scale were driving forces in the emergence of the genre. Orientalist discourse strove to define inequalities often produced by the colonial project as the natural outcome of preexisting difference; SF served at turns to reinforce these notions, and at others to subvert them.

Two aspects of the construction of a world-embracing capitalist economy are particularly relevant to the relation between colonialism and the emergence of science fiction. The first is the realignment of local identities that accompanied the restructuring of the world economy…. What the dominant ideology recognized as the relation between civilization and savagery, and between modernity and its past, can be read at least in part as a misrecognition of the corrosive effects of capitalist social relations on the traditional cultures of colonized populations and territories. Understanding the non-Western world as an earlier stage of Western social development, in this line of interpretation, serves the apologetic function of naturalizing the relation of the industrialized economic core to the colonial periphery and rendering its effects as the working out of an inexorable, inevitable historical process. But the scientific study of other cultures—what Derrida calls the decentering of Europe as the culture of reference—is intimately bound up with the same economic process. I therefore will be arguing both that the ideological misrecognition of the effects of economic and political inequality has a strong presence in the ideas about progress and modernity that circulate throughout early science fiction, and also that early science fiction often works against such ethnocentrism. (Rieder 2008, 26)

In many cases, colonialism did not merely recognize inequalities in technological, economic, or social development; it actively produced and benefited from those inequalities.⁶ The visibility of these inequalities in turn led to the establishment of both discourses that naturalized and discourses that called into question the centrality of European cultural systems.

Second, in the creation of a “world-embracing capitalist economy,” Rieder emphasizes the emergence of a reading public interested in the “vicarious enjoyment of colonial spoils, as attested to in Victorian England by the popularity of travel accounts and adventure stories…. The early science fiction reading audience—middle class, educated, and provided with leisure—seems to be one well placed to put into action the consumerism at the heart of modern mass culture” (2008, 27–28). The material transformations of the industrial revolution heralded a new age of mass production and mass consumption and helped to create an audience for SF. Roger Luckhurst enumerates a similar set of conditions to those identified by Rieder: a growing population of readers with at least a primary education; the replacement of popular literary forms like the penny dreadful and the dime novel with new serial formats that demanded formal innovation; a growing class of individuals who had received technical education and training, whose education made them more likely to “confront traditional loci of cultural authority”; and the immediate visibility of cultural transformations brought about by the increasing role of mechanical production in daily life (Luckhurst, 16–17). The industrial economy demanded a segment of the workforce endowed with some level of scientific and technological proficiency. These individuals would have made an apt audience for SF, with its strong emphasis on technological innovation. The industrial revolution also saw a shift away from extensive labor and toward intensive, more productive labor and limited work hours, creating spaces of leisure time to be filled in part by reading. The birth of a consumer industry seeking to capitalize on the free time of individuals with disposable income presents a convergence of market forces productive of both a readership and a widening array of genres for their consumption.

Finally, Rieder argues that the economic boom of the 1850s–1870s, followed by an economic downturn during the latter part of the same century, represented the establishment of capitalism as the global economic system, and increasing competition for land, labor, and capital between industrialized nations. This resulted in “the imperial competition that gave birth to the first modern arms race” (Rieder 2008, 28). “Three masses of modernity” converge in SF—mass production, mass consumption, and mass annihilation. If mass production and mass consumption are productive of readership of SF, mass annihilation and imperialism are among the anxieties at its narrative core. Again, in Istvan Csicsery-Ronay’s history of the relationship between SF and other genres, he argues that “SF’s characteristic mutations of the adventure forms reflect the discourse of a transnational global regime of technoscientific rationalization that followed the collapse of the European imperialist project. SF narrative accordingly has become the leading mediating institution for the utopian construction of technoscientific Empire. And for resistance to it” (Csicsery-Ronay 2003, 8).

In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said demonstrates the degree to which even narratives that were critical of the excesses and abuses of the imperial mission were marked by a failure to imagine a world free of imperial expansion and domination. As tragic as were the incursion, extraterritorial governance, and virtual (and real) enslavement of indigenous peoples, together with the extraction of native resources for the benefit of the metropole, the discourse of social Darwinism and of the native incapacity for autonomy nevertheless went hand in hand with the assumption that self-governance was an impossibility. In his reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Said writes, “As a creature of his time, Conrad could not grant the natives their freedom, despite his severe critique of the imperialism that enslaved them” (Said 1993, 30). The imperial imagination proved to be such a compelling notion that many authors were not able to conceive of the absence of empire, despite growing awareness of its abuses.

Another facet of the universalizing impulse of imperial discourse, Said’s “universalizing historicism”—the Orientalist notion that history possessed a “coherent unity” and that spatial difference was equivalent to temporal difference—has been used to explain the widely held impression that different places occupied different points in a universal time line, and that Europe was at the vanguard of history’s inexorable forward march. This mode of historiographical thinking also serves to freeze oriental societies in time, substituting culture for history (Said 1986, 211, 230–234; Dirlik, 96–98). Couched in terms of empirically observable truth and mathematical predictability, time asserts itself as a measuring stick of evolution, and Europe as the geographical vanguard of evolutionary progress. Hegelian Asiatic despotism marks China and the East as spatial and temporal laggards. For authors of Chinese SF, a crucial concern was the question of whether identifying cultural equivalencies, asserting cultural superiority, or arriving at cultural compromise could be possible in the context of a universal historical trajectory defined by Western civilization.

Rieder’s “world-embracing capitalist economy” came into being in concert with what we might call the “three masses of modernity”—mass consumption, mass production, and mass destruction. These were precisely the material conditions that produced Tani Barlow’s colonial modernity, and that led to the polyphonous responses emergent in late Qing society and letters. The naturalization of inequity, an emerging culture of leisure and entertainment spurred on by mass production and mass consumption, and the threat of mass annihilation brought on by an emerging arms race in the competition to seize colonial holdings are as central to the development of Chinese SF and to its thematic concerns as they were to the development of European SF. SF and translations of Western science emerged in the popular presses of early twentieth-century Shanghai and in the publishing ventures that were undertaken in Japan.⁷ This publication was one aspect of a vibrant, burgeoning publishing industry, often alongside other more canonically recognized genres and discourses. As an instance of translingual practice, social Darwinism was unmoored from Thomas Huxley’s critical reading of its implications (perhaps not surprisingly, given China’s semicolonial plight), transmogrified into a system of moral and social valuation, and understood as a road map to emergent global relations of power.

Patricia Kerslake identifies a parallel between the function of the other as delineated in Said’s critique of colonial epistemologies and the function of the other in SF’s visions of the alien. A leitmotif of SF is the exoticism of the unknown and the expansionist drive, in part for its own sake, but also in the interest of defining the self in opposition to the other: “Where postcolonial theory challenges the silencing and marginalization of the Other, SF takes the stance that such marginalization is a key element of self-identification” (Kerslake, 10–11). Self-identification in SF comes alongside the triumph over and silencing of the alien other, an affirmation of the superiority of humanity. Kerslake identifies an evolution of SF from a genre in which “marginalization is a key element of self-identification,” into a “legitimate cultural discourse that has brought “serious social expositions of contemporary society” (11, 14–15). To this end, Kerslake suggests that Said’s work offers academic legitimacy to SF studies, through which the relationship between extraterrestrials can be explored in a familiar critical vocabulary, stating that “given a residual academic reluctance to engage with SF, it is necessary to extrapolate certain contemporary theories and exchange the term ‘East’ for ‘extraterrestrial,’ so that the principles thus debated become productive in a genre which in itself has been marginalized” (14–15).

Kerslake notes that in canonical SF, the silencing of an alien antagonist is often deployed as a means of subverting the legitimacy of European civilization/humanism as the universal subject. Rieder, Kerslake, and Milner all argue that SF does indeed have the potential to subvert ethnocentrism. Kerslake frames the duality of ethnocentrism and subversion in terms of a forbidden “political pornography” or an increasingly meaningful, if ironic, literary experiment (Kerslake, 29). Milner argues that Said’s relatively terse analysis of Jules Verne (Said 1993, 187), Gayatri Spivak’s more detailed deconstruction of the function of colonial consciousness in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Spivak 1988, 1999), and Rieder and Csicsery-Ronay’s analyses of SF and empire all overstate the thematic centrality of Orientalism in the genre. Milner contends that “the genre was at once ideological, in the pejorative sense, and yet also critical” (Milner 2012, 159). This approach understands genre in terms of its contradictions—identifying in SF the potential to subvert Orientalist discourse despite the fact that it borrows the same language and is embedded in its cultural milieu. In warning against seeing Orientalism as the single necessary and sufficient condition of SF, Milner goes on to argue that “the novel in general and SF in particular are equally unthinkable without capitalist relations of production, or without patriarchal gender relations, or without systematic heterosexism. Which is why Marxist, feminist, and queer readings are readily available, not only for Frankenstein, but for SF texts more generally” (Milner 2012, 160). Acknowledging the pitfalls of identifying industrial modernity or Orientalism as the sole identifying feature of the genre on a global scale, I argue that the emergence of Chinese SF cannot be adequately understood without coming to terms with the degree to which late Qing authors framed their predicament in exactly those terms. In the words of Wu Yan, “Colonialism is not the only problem for SF, but it is the most important question.”⁸

Colonial modernity, Shanghai’s semi-peripheral position in the world economy, and the peripheral role of Chinese SF at the turn of the twentieth century meant that the contradictions of Chinese SF developed differently from the American and European counterparts at the heart of Milner’s and Kerslake’s analyses. In their approach to science and to science fiction, Chinese intellectuals were faced with a very different contradiction: even if SF’s ideological proximity to Orientalism could be subverted at the discursive level, how could these narrative turns undo the political realities that Orientalism had created? I demonstrate that in the case of Chinese SF, the other that must be silenced is as often China’s own indigenous tradition as it is an alien invader. In the same moment that Chinese SF authors attempted to assert the imperial strengths of embattled antiquity, they also struggled to bring other aspects of Chinese antiquity into the interpretive framework of scientific explanation. The impulse to resuscitate antiquity also necessitated choosing which version of antiquity would be restored or reinterpreted, and which would be silenced. Such a response also engendered competing impulses between explanations of science in the context of Chinese tradition and explanations of Chinese tradition in the context of science. This is part and parcel of the schizophrenic response to foreign incursion wherein the binaries of traditional/modern and native/foreign appeared equally nonviable. In Chinese SF, the other is a hydra whose heads are competing versions of tradition and modernity. Time is one aspect through which this study examines the question of narrative and empire from the other side of the colonial equation that the Chinese authors grappled with in attempting to answer the question of whether they themselves could overturn the epistemological realities born of European empire and Western science. Chinese authors were conscious of the contradictions and pitfalls inherent in attempting to use an imperialist genre in the effort to overturn such discourses. As with many Western works of SF that enact critiques of empire, it can be argued that even those authors whose work was highly critical of the world system that empire strove for were unable to envision its absence. At the same time, Chinese SF evinces a competing and contradictory impulse in the often-unconscious desire to expand China’s own empire beyond its late Qing borders. Turn-of-the-century Chinese intellectuals often wrote through the lens of a false dichotomy of besieged nation and foreign empire.

Rieder’s definition of the functions and emergence of SF has profound implications for the intellectual and literary ground of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Shanghai. Shanghai was one of the locations where the artificial line between civilization and savagery, and between tradition and modernity, was drawn, and where the deleterious effects of colonial capitalism naturalized the difference between conquerors and conquered. It was also a city where the decentering of Europe appeared not as a side effect of an evolving vision of the world, but as an imperative project in the mission of China’s own national salvation. Rieder’s contention that misrepresentation and misunderstanding of the causes and effects of global disparities in wealth and power are plainly visible in early SF and that SF has the potential to work against such ethnocentrism is of central concern to this study as well. Global disparities in wealth and power, the relations that produced them and the veracity of scientific theories that explain them, are a salient concern of early Chinese SF. The line between civilization and barbarity, and whether this line is drawn by might or right, is a leitmotif in the writing of a number of late Qing SF novels. Furthermore, an explicit point of contention in Chinese discourses on science and in SF was not the question of whether ethnocentrism was a tenable notion, but which ethnic/cultural system deserved to be at the center, and how one could come to be there.

SF against the Empire

In order to assess the particularities of SF in the Chinese context, this study takes late Qing authors such as Lu Xun and Wu Jianren as models for the construction of a local poetics of the tradition. These two authors demonstrate the unique ways in which Kerslake and Rieder’s theories of colonialism and imperialism are reflected in Chinese SF. An understanding of the local inflections of these discourses that emerge in analysis of Lu Xun and Wu Jianren will in turn serve as a theoretical springboard for the rest of this work. Lu Xun, positioned between the worlds of medicine and literature, and firmly ensconced in canonical literary historiography as the father of modern Chinese literature, serves as a theoretical linchpin both for understanding attitudes toward science in early twentieth-century China and for understanding the form and function of SF. Wu Jianren, whose multi-genre New Story of the Stone contains many of the hallmarks of SF, serves as a second example of local iterations of SF in the late Qing and of the matrix of anxieties that I intend to explore throughout the modern period. In their SF works, both authors evince the utopian “sense of wonder” that Suvin identifies as a hallmark of the genre. This sense of wonder is expressed as a focus on scientific advancement and a deep faith in the transcendental possibilities of technology. This utopian wonder is tempered by a profound ambivalence, which I understand in terms of Lu Xun’s iconic iron house metaphor—while both men produced fiction aimed at awakening China’s benighted populace, inky shadows of doubt loom large in their work. Both express concern with China’s incorporation of Western epistemologies and the process of reconciling these fields of knowledge with Chinese philosophical and political traditions. In many cases, this incorporation is an out-and-out physical confrontation, reflective of the influence of colonialism and imperialism.

For Chinese writers of SF, the question that emerged and that they openly grappled with in their writing was whether a genre that they clearly understood to be imbricated with Orientalism and scientism could be turned against its wielders. While SF was used in attempts to unmask, resist, and subvert Orientalism, such efforts often proved to be futile. On other occasions, these narratives repeated the discourse of imperial domination, finding their own fictional others to depict. Just as often, these narratives were characterized by a dialectic of native tradition and modernity, meaning that the confrontation was not between China and another civilization but between China and its own past.

Furthermore, in Chinese SF, China’s cultural totems become representatives of the totality of its history. This reappropriation of Orientalist depictions of China as frozen in history is fraught with uncertainty regarding the power of native tradition and its relationship to Western epistemology. In works like Tales of the Moon Colony, “New Tales of Mr. Braggadocio,” The New Era (Xin jiyuan, 1906), and New China (Xin zhongguo, 1910), time is central to anxieties of social and moral decay, to the reordering of the modern world and the decentering of China, and to the relationship between the power to name the year and the relationship between East and West. In other words, can we set our clocks to an hour other than Greenwich Mean Time, and can we set our calendars to a year other than the Gregorian year? If not or if so, what are the implications of both?

In the case of China, I demonstrate what fraught territory such discourse could be, as late Qing and early Republican intellectuals sought both to overturn the balance of power between China, Japan, and Europe, and to express their own desires for supranational hegemony. In most instances, Chinese SF is concerned with the confrontation between an imperial aggressor and a unified Chinese national body. While this is a false equivalency—the Qing Manchu rulers and the Republican government alike could be understood as imperial systems—the dominant perception was one of a confrontation between European empire and Chinese nation. These narratives reveal a kaleidoscopic response to empire that is seldom as simple as dialectical inversion of its discourses.

This existential crisis shared many of the traits of double consciousness as described by Frantz Fanon and W. E. B. Du Bois,⁹ causing authors and intellectuals to see themselves from the perspective of both the oppressed and the oppressor, to desire an end of imperial expansion and in the same moment seek to reclaim and reinvigorate China’s own imperial mission. However, this response was more multifaceted than the simple binary opposition of master and slave. The sum total of this series of false dichotomies—empire-nation, self-other, modernity-tradition, science-humanism, and so on—is a kaleidoscopic response, fraught with ambivalence. One dialectical encounter becomes many, and no clear synthesis emerges. Conrad’s failure of imagination was one in which he could not conceive of a world absent of empire; for late Qing writers of SF, the failure of imagination entailed the inability to imagine a world absent of European empire. The narrative failure to figure alternatives becomes a de facto assertion of the supremacy of the status quo.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, China resembled the European sphere in the material conditions that Rieder identifies as having given birth to the readership for SF. China was unique in this regard in being the subject, rather than the beneficiary, of colonial and imperial incursion. The anxieties accompanying science also took on “Chinese characteristics”—as not merely anxieties about the destructive potential of science, but also anxieties regarding the inherent foreignness of science—and also differentiate China from the European context in question in Kerslake’s and Rieder’s analyses. Finally, I would like to argue that China exhibited local specificities in its confrontation with the other—its having emerged as the one of the others of Orientalist discourse did not entail a simple inversion of the European formulation of self and other. My analysis will demonstrate that Chinese SF is as enmeshed in dealing with the country’s own indigenous traditions as it is in the confrontation with foreign powers or alien invaders. That is, the alien other that Chinese SF confronts is China itself.