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Science Fiction as a Travelling Genre: Incorporating Translated Texts to Expand the Multiverse

Throughout human history, storytelling has been one of the strategies by which we have tried to understand the world, and to communicate our understanding of others…factual works, realistic fictions, and speculative fictions all lie along a continuum of meaning, each fulfilling a function

the others cannot, each adding to the total of human understanding – Marie Jakober

Science fiction has always been a genre set toward universality in its scope and scale. The

genre has opened itself to more diverse world circulation in the past decade moving it a step

closer to its aspiration of being universal by leaving behind the confines of Anglo-centered

science fiction. The genre is growing to accommodate more diverse authors of science fiction,

progressing into a new era of style and speculation. Science fiction is developing and circulating

across the world in a way that offers a more well-rounded view of world culture, an exigency in

the globalized world-system. Translated science fiction is changing how we talk about the genre

as whole. These texts see science fiction from different angles and provide insight into other

cultural and social literacy. Marie Jakober explains, “we walk with our emotions and our

imaginations. We walk in their stories” (28). Speculative fiction adds to the “continuum of

meaning”, using universal science fiction tropes as a common ground for communication on the

complexities of human life (29). World science fiction can be used to examine our societal

structure from perspectives that reinstate understanding and truth in place of discrimination that

has been normalized by an Anglo-centric circulation of texts. In this way, science fiction can be

seen as immersive and distinct rather than escapist or formulaic.

As authors present their ideas through language across time and space, the visual

elements derived from their syntax change how we view science fiction. How authors portray

intelligence and innovation in science fiction directly correlates with the innovations that are

taking place in history. This makes science fiction a chronicle of the various shapes forward-

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thinking has taken throughout history and can lead us to understand where we place our values

now and in the future. New alterative universes and social experiments are created using action

points from discussions in other texts to create new questions, solutions, and concepts. This

relationship to other texts in called intertextuality. Modern international authors are refurbishing

what many Americans consider as normalized science fiction. As science fiction develops and

circulates across the world integrating different perspectives on the nebulous nature of

technological advancement and social progress, translations grant science fiction more wide-

reaching means of approaching anxieties of the future from as many different angles of human

life as possible. In this way, science fiction can be used to break down national tropes to provide

a better view of social impact. Science fiction can address places of positive mutuality while also

noting sources of corrosion in the global sphere. It becomes a modern study on war, privacy, and

the mass media– subjects that escape borders through globalization.

This analysis will not try to capture an all-in-one interpretation of globalized science

fiction. Instead, my purpose is to use Sino-science fiction as in indicator of change in the genre

and the world-system, focusing specifically on the changing paradigm in China and American

literature. I offer science fiction readings on a limited sample of contemporary translated work

coming from China. The two authors, Xia Jia and Liu Cixin, offer a diverse view on how the

science fiction genre is currently manifesting in Chinese writing and how it circulates out to

other parts of the world through different mediums of publication. The genre travels through

international publishing houses, pulp magazines, online magazines and journals, and

underground online forums that work to expand the science fiction landscape to create an

immense, intertextual universe. Patricia Monk argues that wide readership and fan-bases of the

same shared universe result from “idiosyncrasies of the genre that lead to in-group bonding…

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peculiarities of the intra-fictional universe (the mega-text) …the popularity of collaboration”

(7).1 As the term mega-text still feels limiting because it insinuates there is a border or boundary

keeping some texts in and others out, I will use the less restrictive “multiverse” or “universe

considered as lacking order or a single ruling and guiding power” (OED) in order to talk about

this shared space. This travelling genre is one that moves and adapts to different mediums,

histories, and cultures to create an ever-changing multiverse. In this paper, science fiction travels

throughout China and across the Pacific Ocean to reach new Anglo-American audiences whose

exposure to recent ideas and language being formed in Sino-science fiction work to expand the

multiverse. I apply intertextual theory to exhibit what is lost when publishers and readers limit

science fiction to definitive textual features and negate the complexity brought on by converging

cultures. More importantly, intertextuality is used to consider what can be achieved by

incorporating diverse works of fiction into the science fiction multiverse.

First, I will offer a reading of Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem which is marketed as hard

science fiction on the international market since winning the Hugo Award for Best Novel. Then,

I will focus on Xia Jia’s short stories or “porridge science fiction” that is being circulated

primarily through online science fiction magazines. Her work will be used to underline how

narratives using mythology and folklore can engage the science fiction genre without being

confined by so-called truisms and rules of Anglo science fiction. My purpose for establishing

science fiction as a travelling genre is to show its fluidity across time and place.

In order for fans to consider themselves vigilant to the world of science fiction, one must

be cognizant of the transitional period that is materializing. China’s approach to science fiction

needs to be considered in the contemporary multiverse; this could be said for all international

1 Texts that make up the science fiction canon. Authors who share common science conventions, backgrounds, and images in their stories.

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science fiction writers. To come to terms with this transition means acknowledging the

inequitable distribution that has led to an unevenly developed genre. I ultimately propose a wider

acceptance of translated science fiction that can offer readers a more authentic understanding of

the way the science fiction multiverse is being shaped through world-wide integration in

anticipation that this may lead to more diversity in world literature publishing. The diversity of

Sino-science fiction can help Americans to decrease the concept of China as a monolithic and

isolated country and reframe it as a nation of diverse, dynamic and communicative people.

To address Chinese science fiction means first understanding what we mean when we use

science fiction to categorize texts. Copious attempts at defining science fiction have led to

decades of wrestling with various tentacles of the genre. Co-editors of the Science Fiction Film

and Television Journal Sherryl Vint and Mark Bould view science fiction as highly subjective.

They show its malleability and relativity by providing two readings of Tom Godwin’s “The Cold

Equations”; one as a claim for colonialism by law of nature and the other as “social construction

of science…and the ways in which cold equations of physical science are deployed” (50). Just as

in any science field, accepting any idea as pure, factual truth creates a stagnation within the

study, a block that stops the process of change and progress. Vint and Bould emphasize the

dangers in making science fiction definite by constructing preconceptions of “pure” science

fiction that overpower all other possibilities for reading. This also highlights the ways in which

the passing of time and readers’ own understanding of the world changes how we define science

fiction. This concept is a more fruitful, expanding way to consider science fiction that differs

from the limiting definitions of the past.2 If the genre is transformative, who gets to decide what

science fiction is? Is it any more than a generic label for publishers? As an alternative to Darko

2 For a list of some science fiction’s most famous authors’ definitions of science fiction, Charlie Jane Anders’s “How Many Definitions of Science Fiction Are There” displays the way the importance and defining factors of science fiction change from person to person.

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Suvin’s popular contemporary definition: “SF as the literature of cognitive estrangement”3 ,

author of Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction John Rieder argues that boundaries

and definitions placed on science fiction are historical indicators, not abiding rules. Instead of

asking what science fiction is he asks how and why science fiction exists at different times. He

suggests:

1) sf is historical and mutable; 2) sf has no essence, no single unifying characteristic, and

no point of origin; 3) sf is not a set of texts, but rather a way of using texts and of drawing

relationships among them; 4) sf’s identity is a differentially articulated position in an

historical and mutable field of genres; 5) attribution of the identity of sf to a text

constitutes an active intervention in its distribution and reception (193)

This historical approach takes into consideration how time periods like the Industrial Revolution

effected the way progressing capitalism and manufacturing changed the way humans viewed

value. For example, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein contained no robotics or space travel (common

tropes of today), but her monster’s uncanny body and the anxieties of creation reflected the way

the 18th century newly formed middle-class was being immersed in new technologies in a

changing social system. In later years, the introduction of cybernetics in science technology

fused to late 20th century and 21st century science fiction through the contemporary idea of

cognitive sciences—a term George A. Miller uses to connect linguistics, neuroscience, computer

science, philosophy, anthropology, and psychology (a forging of quantifying and qualifying

3 In “Estrangement and Cognition” Suvin compares science fiction to the myth genre in order to show

the unique cognitive view of science fiction: “SF sees the norms of any age, including emphatically its own, as unique, changeable, and therefore subject to a cognitive view. The myth is diametrically opposed to the cognitive approach since it conceives human relationships as fixed and supernaturally determined”

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studies of human nature).4 Historically approaching science fiction also marks a space for

considering “soft science fiction” that delves into metaphorical uses of science fiction tropes to

extrapolate on societal concerns, using more of a psychological or anthropological approach.

As a fluid and travelling genre, this breaks the need to pinpoint “patient zero” or the

moment of inception. Past efforts to define science fiction typically accredit the Golden Age of

science fiction to the popularized American, hard science fiction of the the 1940’s. However, this

fails to consider growth and transformation of science fiction that happens in the rest of the

world and at different times. “Studying the beginning of the genre is not at all a matter of finding

its points of origin,” Rieder explains, “but rather of observing an accretion of repetitions, echoes,

imitations, allusions, identifications, and distinctions that testifies to an emerging sense of a

conventional web of resemblances” (196). Linearity pigeon-holes American readers into thinking

of science fiction from an American standpoint i.e. believing that science fiction developing in

China will resemble past Anglo-science fiction during America’s various stages and markers of

modernization. But this is not true. Chinese science fiction is developing at a more rapid pace

than American science fiction, taking tropes from the science fiction multiverse and creating a

new definition for modern science fiction: one that now involves Chinese language and

perceptions in the approach to science and social change.

Translations have worked to create the science fiction genre: French author of the

adventure novel 2,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne, is argued by Isaac Asimov as the

world’s first science fiction writer; Karel Čapek first used the word “robot” in his Czech play

script R.U.R (Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti) (1920); and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s Russian We

(1924) is considered a predecessor to the futuristic dystopia subgenre; Katsuhiro Otomo’s

4 Refer to Miller’s “The Cognitive Revolution: A Historical Perspective” and Anthony G. Francis Jr and Jim Davies’s “The Role of Artificial Intelligence Research Methods in Cognitive Science”for more on the introduction of artificial intelligence to cognitive processes.

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Japanese manga series Akira (1982) helped to form a new version of cyberpunk. 5 Science fiction

embodies how we get where we’re going, the same antigenealogy, “neither beginning nor end

but always middle” that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari use in their rhizomatic structure (qtd.

in Rieder 196). This situates science fiction motifs as travel ways that connect an expansive

network of texts.6 Science fiction’s collaborative and intertextual nature means the genre is

sustained and supported by its transnational authors and readers. According to Graham Allen,

intertextuality “foregrounds notions of rationality, interconnectedness, and interdependence in

modern cultural life” (6). This is essential in understanding how authors have used science

fiction tropes and labels as a common language.

As Umberto Eco states, “books always speak of other books” (qtd. in Allen 189). The

multiverse is supported through Liu Cixin and Jia Xia’s texts in unconventional ways. Classic

science fiction authors such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke are interwoven into Liu Cixin

and Xia Jia’s work utilizing the multiverse to show audiences their own approach to science

fiction. According to Cixin, The Three Body Problem was heavily influenced by Arthur C.

Clarke, drawing on the macrovision of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The result is the monolithic

Sophon, a one-proton supercomputer used to stop technological progress for mankind, the exact

opposite use of Clarke’s monolith that progresses human innovation and space travel. The

Sophon is used to terrify scientists by embedding a countdown with an unknown outcome into

their retinas. The Sophon also causes instability in high-end physics. This leaves humans unable

to establish order through what was previously considered as fundamental laws of science. The

5 This is a small list of impactful works that have moved the genre forward through history, missing from this list is translated female sf authors, who have notably been overlooked in most historical sf canons and anthologies and neglected as dynamic additions to the genre, which is why I chose to focus the second half of this essay on Chinese translated author Xia Jia, as a step toward acknowledging the way female authors are impacting science fiction. 6 A visual representation of this can be found in Ward Shelly’s graphic chronology “The History of Science Fiction”

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alien Trisolarian species influences humans to believe there is no future, that we’ve reached a

dead-end resulting in a mass suicide of some of the world’s best scientists. This plot’s bleak

consequence resembles Harlan Ellison’s “The Sky is Burning” in which superior aliens reach

Earth’s solar system and perform a mass suicide when they learn they’ve reached the dead end of

the universe. Cixin elicits the same concept Ellen Well and Gary K. Wolfe gained through

Ellison’s work: “the idea of the Unwanted thus expands to include the entire human race” (61).

Cixin sets up a discussion on the Theory of General Relativity through Isaac Asimov’s “The

Billiard Ball” in which a perpetual motion machine is used to complicate a match between

experts. Three Body’s hero Wang Miao uses the instability of physics in Asimov’s story to allude

to the ways in which all three high-energy particle accelerators of Cixin’s universe are yielding

different results, leading to discrepancies in the laws of physics as we know it.

Xia Jia’s approach to the multiverse differs from Cixin’s. Her stories alter the shape of

the multiverse by using Chinese myth and folklore to open dialogue on science, contact, and

modernity. After she successfully tried her hand as a translated author in the American science

fiction magazine Clarkesworld, Jia set her sights on writing in English as mode of conversation

with Anglophone readers through the international weekly science journal Nature. Her story

“Let’s Have a Talk” is a meta-narrative on Jia’s own quest to connect to new audiences. Her use

of intertextuality does not assimilate to old versions of science fiction tropes but changes them

and makes them Chinese while breaking down ideas of the Other.

The story revolves around a linguist who enters a room full of the robotic seals that have

created their own language. She reminds herself of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics: “A

ROBOT MAY NOT INJURE A HUMAN BEING, ALTHOUGH IT MUST PROTECT ITS

OWN EXISTENCE”. This statement is alluding to the laws created in Asimov’s 1942 short story

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“Runaround”, written for the “Handbook of Robotics, 56th Edition, 2058 A.D.” suggesting as we

near the future date of 2058 the written rules are still the same, but how we choose to employ

these ideas are always changing. The Three Laws have been used to explore Singularity and the

spectrum of consciousness in robots, but in the instance of Jia’s story the laws are used to

explore cultural exchange. Her character finds comfort in the rules upon first contact. While the

story is written in English, Jia makes it a point to speak in her native tongue during the encounter

with the Other: “让我们说说话?” I asked gently. Let's have a talk, shall we?”. Here American

readers can witness Jia extending her invitation for exchange. She also quotes American science

fiction writer Vernor Vinge’s Deepness in the Sky— “So high, so low, so many things to know”.

Vinge’s story follows the discovery of “Spiders”, the alien species who inhabit a planet that two

human groups, the Qeng Ho and the Emergence, want to claim for very different reasons: the

former to explore, and latter to oppress and dominate. This brings on a central theme of the

varying ways exchange occurs. Using the marriage of Chinese and American intertextuality

shows she is hopeful for a healthy, mutual exploration that isn’t dominated by one side.

She explores first contact questions: “How can we achieve any knowledge of the

unknown, as well as the understanding and empathy of the Other? If our languages are created

by different social and cultural constructs, how can we possibly have a real talk with strangers?”

(“The Story Behind the Story’”). The short story becomes an example of and for applied science

fiction and is written for Nature’s shared community of readers looking to expand their scientific

knowledge. In ‘Let’s Have a Talk”, robotic seals activate and create their own language when

they are supposed to be turned off and constricted to beginner’s English. Jia warns of the danger

in too much theory and speculation from a distance as the humans in her story debate on how to

approach the seals. The narrator prevents further apprehension, “All linguists know that the only

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way to learn an unknown language is to communicate with a native speaker, to point at objects

and ask questions, and to answer their questions as well. We certainly will never understand

what they are talking about if we don't knock on the door of that sealed container and say hello

first.” She places value at the contact point of communication and immersion into the culture

using the science fiction elements of her story as a conversation with readers. As the short story

ends in a cliffhanger, she thematizes her own conditions of production in addressing her

Anglophone audience directly. Later, I will draw on more examples of Jia’s creative take on the

science fiction multiverse as a contact point. In order to understand the significance of this space

for open exchange, one must have some background on the relationship between China and

America.

The long and complicated history of China and America’s relationship is beyond the

scope of this paper, so I will offer a brief background to underline a new potentiality for China in

science fiction. Globalization is slowly (but surely) changing the types of stories and

entertainment that readers are looking for. Technology and changing politics have provided new

outlets for cultural exchange between China and the rest of the world offering a peek inside its

borders through tourism, literature, education programs, and media. Now, modern China is

making itself heard, fulfilling Napoleon Bonaparte’s promise: “Let China sleep. For when she

wakes, she will shake the world” (Qtd. in Joseph 33).7 Gordon Hsiao-shu Chang, the director of

the Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford University, discusses the turbulent alliance

between China and America. In “Old/New Visions” he calls attention to John Adam’s Nixon in

7 For more information on how modern China has risen to world power, William A Joseph’s Politics in

China: An Introduction explains the fast growing economy and global influence China has successfully structured in contemporary history. To understand the strange relationship, the United States has forged with China, consider Gordon Hsiao-shu Chang’s Fateful Ties: A History of America's Preoccupation with China. Chang draws on a variety of text, artifacts and personal accounts that chart Americas “long and varied” preoccupation with China in allied and adverse times, from the colonial period to the uncertain era within which we now reside.

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China (1987), which ends with the first Premier of the People's Republic of China, Zhou Enlai,

having an existential moment after Nixon’s visit. Enlai wonders, “What can be controlled or

determined? Are we captured by our outsized ambitions, our hubris? Are we giants in command

of our destiny or only minor actors in an inexorable current of history beyond human control?”

(238). The conflicting political ideals of communism and capitalism have inevitably complicated

China and America’s exchanges continually making the future of their relationship unclear. The

rhetoric of China and America’s history is unavailingly economic and political. As Chang states,

“Washington’s China policy over the last quarter-century appears extraordinarily volatile,

uncertain, emotionally fraught, contentious, and divided along highly ideological and partisan

lines” (247). The choice for civilized communication and understanding begins at an individual

level and is guided forward outside of government policies.

As Chang points out, when looking at this relationship on an expanded timeline of

history, what is made clear is that despite government discourse the relationship has been

comparatively stable (240). “The economic dreams of both sides clearly are propelling the

relationship in a way that seeks to avert confrontation that would lead to financial catastrophe”

(248) explains Chang. However, with such high priority on the tightly running ship of

commerce, the temperate of both governments often overrides moments of genuine cultural

exchange. A steady relationship built on “China as customers” (240) is missing appropriate

cultural links in literature and documented history that reflect friendly engagements between

China and America’s people. The racial stereotypes and alarmist language that has permeated the

American millennium market are what Chang uses to stress the need for a more well-rounded

partnership:

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The Coming Conflict with China (1997) …Red Dragon Rising: Communist China’s

Military Threat to the United States (1999); The China Threat: How the People’s

Republic Targets America (2000); Hegemon: China’s Plan to Dominate Asia and the

World (2002); China: The Gathering Threat (2005); America’s Coming War with China

(2006); Death By China (2005); Showdown: Why China Wants War with the United

States (2006); The Coming China Wars: Where They Will Be Fought and How They Can

Be Won (2007); and In The Jaws of the Dragon: America’s Fate in the Coming Era of

Chinese Hegemony (2008).

Titles that look more like dystopian science fiction than reality show the importance of

understanding why an amiable relationship isn’t explored in more non-fiction publications.

Perhaps very few of us fully understand what a peaceful and reciprocal future connection

between China and America will look like. The problematic designation of China as the enemy

and the narrow representations of Chinese culture and history reveal anxieties about potential

power threats. This creates a sure conflict in pursuit of the Chinese Dream vs. the American

Dream. According to Rieder’s notion that genre does not describe “a set of texts, but rather a

way of using texts”; therefore, national literature derives possibilities for more flexible and

positive uses.

When Anglo-science fiction audiences gain access to authentic Chinese history through

fiction it becomes an alternative history text by merely containing plots that diverge from

predominant American history. According to Karen Hellekson, alternate history “asks questions

about time, linearity, determinism, and the implicit link between the past and the present. It

considers the individual’s role in making history” (53). The same can be said about prospects for

an alternative future that oppose to grim realities considered in the above American titles.

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Alternative futures and new perspectives have most commonly joined the science fiction

multiverse through translated texts.

Translation adds a new level of complexity to literature. Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystem

theory finds an exigent space for translations, “ not only as an integral system within any literary

poly-system, but as a most active system within it…no clear-cut distinction is maintained

between "original" and "translated" writings” (46).8 Qian Jiang applies a historicization of

translated texts in China’s development of its own science fiction. 1891 marks the first American

science fiction text translated into Chinese. American writer Edward Bellamy’s utopian sf novel

Looking Backward: 2000-1887 published in the Huitou Kan Jilue (116). Jiang notes the way

European utopian fantasy texts heavily influenced American science fiction, and so on, creating

a rippling effect across nations that eventually leads to what we know as the multiverse of today.

The 1990’s brought a shift from Soviet science fiction to American texts by Robert Silverberg,

Brian W. Aldiss, Philip K. Dick, and William Gibson, and articles on the genre written by

writers like Asimov and James Gunn, “with American sf accounting for at least one third of all

titles in translation” (Jiang 126). The 1990’s also brought with it a growth of Chinese science

fiction, which should have undergone changes to the rhizomatic genre structure.9 A steady

stream of science fiction has flowed into China and the genres popularity has been growing

internally through native authors since the 90’s, but the decade saw small numbers of science

fiction circulating back out of China and many other countries. Even-Zohar explains “Translated

literature that occupies a central position participates actively in shaping the center of the system

8 An example of this would be Jules Verne’s fiction in which the identity as translated texts becomes inferior to more prominent science fiction and adventure labels. 9 Qian Jiang’s “Translation and the Development of Science Fiction in Twentieth-Century China” gives an exhaustive 120-year history of works of Chinese science fiction and science fiction translated into Chinese. Jiang marks the 1997 Beijing International Science Fiction Convention as the beginning of a new era which “promot[ed] the growth of Chinese sf and its connections with the international community” (122).

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and becomes a leading factor in the formation of new models for that system, introducing new

poetics, patterns, and techniques” (46-47). This exposes a blockage in the polysystem. A

Eurocentric multiverse causes the complex network of intertextual travel ways we see in

Shelley’s The History of Science Fiction to atrophy and dissolve. Anglo-centered perspectives

destabilize science fiction as a rhizomatic structure and call attention to the uneven development

of the literary system. This calls for a redistribution of science fiction on a world scale.

With the end of the Cold War, the “Three World Model” collapsed, leaving behind what

first appeared as a more desegregated, inter-world relationship but further deliberation shows its

shortcomings. The Warwick Research Collective affirms that “the literature of the world

system… [is] of the modern capitalist world-system”, exposing the need for “alternative

modernities” (8). As modernity relates to existing or relating in present time, it begs the

question: How can countries working as individuals outside of capitalistic “modernity” be

acknowledged as present in the world system? As the WREC explains, capitalist development

does not smooth away, but rather produces unevenness systematically (12). Changing the system

of predominate modernity means “de-linking it from the idea of the ‘west’ and yoking it to the

capitalist world-system…the substrate of world-literature” (15). A prime example of this

obstacle in shown through the microcosm of science fiction. Despite the genre’s notable taste for

exploration and expansion of the universe, a historical view of the science fiction multiverse

shows it’s been notoriously driven by white male authors while women, people of color, queer

communities, and other nationalities have been pushed to the margins by science fiction

publishers, perpetuating the idea of purity and authenticity in the genre.10 Lately pushback from

this narrow ideal is redistributing science fiction to be the balanced, rhizomatic genre it claims.

10 Mary Shelley, Madeleine L’Engle, Ursula K Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, and Lois McMaster Bujold have all become famous names in science fiction, but this pales in comparison to the amount of international female authors writing in the genre.

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The yearly World Science Fiction Convention’s Hugo Awards are arguably the largest

ceremony for fan-chosen science fiction and fantasy works. This is a space where science fiction

as a means “to defend a particular way of seeing the world” (Vint and Bould 50) becomes

visible. These narrowed views fail to impact the Hugo Award verdicts when counter audiences

actively work against this pluralistic antagonism. Despite the Church of Scientology (an epitome

of capitalism worship) campaigning for L. Ron Hubbard’s Black Genes, yearly whitewashed

publishing, and now Puppygate, more diverse nominations are appearing on ballots and

prevailing as impactful literature in the genre. 11 Two groups self-named the Sad and Rapid

Puppies are Caucasian past-Hugo Award nominees who heavily campaign on the internet to

influence the outcome of the Hugo Awards in order to keep progressive political themes and

minority authors out of science fiction in favor of more classic (white) space operas and pulp

stories. However, the Puppies’ resistance to a diversified multiverse shows that there is a rise in

diverse texts and authors that refuse to be ignored. Slowly, we see a more reciprocal science

fiction multiverse becoming visible and more minority authors being recognized in a globalized

society. Despite the Puppies’ best efforts, in 2015 Liu Cixin became the first Asian author to win

the award for Best Novel at the Hugo Awards. Previously printed Sino-science fiction hasn’t had

the same lasting, simultaneous impact on both American and Chinese audiences as Cixin’s Three

Body Problem.

Though the turn of the century resulted in some Chinese science fiction translations, none

have been widely popular or known to American audiences. Chan Koonchung’s The Fat Years in

2011 was printed in the U.S by Random House but was banned in mainland China. It contains

11 For a more detailed look into why Puppygate is effecting science fiction I suggest Io9’s “The Hugo Awards Were Always Political. But Now They're Only Political”; File770’s “The Compleat Litter of Puppy Roundup Titles”, Cheryl Morgan’s “Puppygate-Winners and Losers”, and Sad Puppies own Brad Torgenson and Larry Corriea’s Monster Hunter Nation.

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less than positive views on the Chinese government and reveals that a) Chinese government’s

censorship does not make room for such criticisms, b) science fiction remains an outlet for

frustrations about this, and c) there are disparities between Chinese political ideologies and

personal, individual ideologies. Chinese citizens can perhaps see alterative, anti-capitalistic

views coming from contemporary translated American science fiction also. Therefore, the

alterative views and futures offered by science fiction can help relay universal, common fears to

reach a more mutual understanding between the two countries.  Most of China’s most famous

science fiction authors such as Yang Dan Tao Zhu and Wang Jinkang have not been translated

into English. However, 1989 brought the anthology Science Fiction from China by Wu Dingbo

and Patrick Murphy which translated the famous author Zheng Wenguang’s “The Mirror-Image

of Earth” (1980), a short story written after his experiences in a labor camp during Mao’s era.

The 2010’s brought in a small influx of Chinese translated works. An English-version of literary

magazine Pathlight: New Chinese Writing published by China’s Paper Republic and People’s

Literature, released the issue “The Future” featuring nine stories from contemporary science

fiction authors including female writers like Can Xue, Ling Chen, and Hao Jingfang. Cat

Country by Lao She, an author who drowned himself during the Cultural Revolution in Beijing’s

Lake of Great Peace, was published in a new translated edition. The past five years have also

marked Science Fiction Studies’ 40th Volume dedicated to Chinese science fiction,

Clarkesworld’s implementation of the Chinese Science Fiction Translation Project, and Xia Jia’s

publication in the international journal Nature. The unprecedented success of the Three Body

Problem with American science fiction readers may lead to more publishing privileges and

awareness of other popular Chinese authors.

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The novel’s relevancy to current issues allowed the book to first travel underground

through web forums first, where Cixin has pointed out that information technology workers were

using the language and motifs of Three Body as metaphors for the current competitive nature in

IT (“The Worst of All Possible Universes”). Cixin’s ability to approach modernity and futurism

in multiple ways allowed the novel to use its internet appeal to reach a mass audience. The

science fiction label attached to the Three Body franchise has allowed “departure for exploration

and argument” (Rieder 205). The Chinese government is not trying to ignore or stifle Three

Body and they did not try to stop its translation despite Cixin’s use of the Cultural Revolution as

a plotline, which means China sees opportunity in his approach to science fiction. Rieder

explains that genre helps to complete the “needs and goals of a specific project” (206).

Therefore, the publication of Three Body to reach Sinophone and Anglophone audiences serves a

modern need for both audiences. Even if publishers cannot see past the novel as a money-making

opportunity, Cixin’s franchise works to include itself in the multiverse of science history at an

international level, which helps to erase past exoticisms of “The Orient” and replace it with more

tangible, pragmatic representations of Chinese society through translation.

Translator of Three Body Ken Liu warns, “If one’s knowledge of China is limited to

Western media reports or the experience of being a tourist or expat, claiming to “understand”

China is akin to a man who has caught a glimpse of a fuzzy spot through a drinking straw

claiming to know what a leopard is” (“China Dreams”). Understanding modern China requires

American readers to look past stereotypical definitions and standards of China. Translated

Chinese texts that explore the modernization of China in the Information Age can be expected to

look much different from the modernization of America in the Atomic Age, which in turn

changes our ideas on modernity itself. As André Neuman’s Traveller of the Century concludes,

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“A work doesn’t begin and end with its author, it forms a part of a much broader group…a

further push to something already in motion” (qtd. in WREC 28). Recognizing China’s

contributions to science fiction allows for a better understanding of where China is situating

itself in the world-system.

Liu Cixin uses fiction to address the Mao Era, China’s most violent historical period, then

works his way out to a reality that resembles modern China before implementing a universal

disaster that is both caused and saved by Chinese innovation, a new experience for Anglophone

science fiction readers. The novel also follows a converging plot of two characters: Wang Miao a

man who must use his scientific ingenuity to save the world, and Ye Wenji, a disheartened

woman who uses her ingenuity to send aliens to the Earth to end humanity. This creates a

suspenseful, informational, and provocative reading experience. The success of the adaptation

requires more than translation; it requires insight into Chinese culture and a historical context.

Mingwei Song indicates, “[Cixin] has obviously outgrown the formulas of a space odyssey set

for adventure and conquest…[his] writing style is at the same time sublime and uncanny, with

rich references to cybernetic or post-human images against the grandiose canvas of the universe”

(8). This results in an unfamiliar approach to science fiction conventions of alien contact and

technology.

Resembling the stylized ultraviolence of the late 1980’s and early 1990 action films,

Chapter One: “The Madness Years” enters Anglophone readers into a universe where “madness

drowned the city and seeped into every nook and cranny” (Cixin 11). 12 Ken Liu’s footnotes

closely follow below Cixin’s brutal, hyperrealistic depictions which makes the reality of Chinese

12 The Chinese edition of Three Body Problem includes “The Madness Years” as Chapter Six. Tor Publishing, Liu Cixin, and Ken Liu have chosen not to discuss this change, keeping political discourse low from media surrounding the book.

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civilians suffering during struggle sessions in the Cultural Revolution unquestionably clear. 13 Liu

lists intellectuals that committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution to end the torture acted

upon them and explains changes to the school system that led to children joining Chairman

Mao's Red Guards: a mass militarized student movement.14

Cixin’s story of Ye Zhetai, a professor at Tsinghua University15, works to further explain

the way scientific and philosophical thought was demonized and persecuted during this time

period. His daughter Ye Wenjie develops a haunting futility after her father and the science he

embodies are destroyed by the hands of her mother and former classmates. China’s history is

used to move the plot forward without debasing or compromising the realism of the anxieties of

the Cultural Revolution. In adulthood when Ye deliberates over her decision to call out to the

universe via radio waves aimed at the sun, her idea is checked by Commissioner Lei who asks:

“Have you thought about the political symbolism of such experiment?” (264). Liu reveals in the

footnotes the deeper meaning behind Ye’s plan to create an “energy mirror”. Mao’s deep

association with the sun was used in most propaganda for the Cultural Revolution and black was

the color of counter revolution. Because of this, words like sun spot became taboo (264).

Therefore, shooting the beam could be interpreted as mutiny toward the government. The

Cultural Revolution left little opportunity for Chinese citizens to collaborate outside of China or

use ideas that countered Mao’s own ideologies leading to the fear of alternative views. This

information instills much higher suspense in Anglophone readers as they can now begin to walk

in Cixin’s story and understand the risks that come along with Ye’s life-changing experiment 13 Mao Era public humiliation and torture techniques used on “Monsters and Demons”, or those accused of breaking Communist law 14 Zing Lu’s Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: The Impact on Chinese Thought, Culture, and Communication analyzes the “ten years of chaos” caused by persuasive political rhetoric, sharing close readings of speeches and propaganda and interviews with Chinese and U.S citizens who experienced the Cultural Revolution first-hand in order to gain a better understanding of how the movement became so deadly. 15 A top ranking research university in Beijing

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while also coming to terms with the authentic avoidance of scientific development during the

mid- 20th century in China.

Ye’s experiences during the Cold War present to readers some of the worst

characteristics of humanity; deceit, irrationality, surveillance, environmental destruction, and

nuclear missiles surround Radar Peak, a secret government military base. The radio transmission

she sends is returned by a pacifist of the alien planet Trisolaris who pleas: “Do not answer!! Do

not answer!!!...if you do answer, the source will be located. Your planet will be invaded. Your

world will be conquered” (273). Without much consideration, Ye goes into action, “The

crosshair of the Red Coast positioning system was aimed…The transmission system was ready…

The Transmit button was long and rectangle– very similar to the Space key on the computer

keyboard, except it was red…Ye’s hand hovered two centimeters above it…Without hesitation,

Ye pressed the button” (275). Despite the juxtaposing impulse to cheer on Wang Miao, the hero

who is using his scientific prowess to try to save the world, Cixin’s prose style evokes desire for

Ye to press the big red button. It’s been a metaphorical scratch to the itches of automation,

curiosity, or self-destruction in science fiction stories throughout history. The premise of the Big

Red Button was popularized during the Cold War and has become a science fiction trope in

stories of annihilation. According to David Seed’s American Science Fiction and the Cold War,

William Sambrot’s “Deadly Decision” (1958) popularized the idea of “the button” (120) in

which sun spots cause a radio outage during a key moment while a bunker attendee awaits orders

to launch nuclear missiles. Cixin’s passage alludes to authentic nuclear anxieties. What lays

beyond the red button at Radar Peak is the relief brought on by Ye’s decision to flatten the

complex tangle of carnage and war and end humanities suffering. Just as the tension eases Cixin

keeps the reader from getting too comfortable by directing the last words of the chapter towards

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Ye: “You are pregnant” (276). The anxiety of bringing new generations into impending world

catastrophe is a universal fear, one that a globalized society must consider when navigating

governmental and economic adversity.

When Ye allies with American oil tycoon Mike Evans, The Earth-Trisolaris

Organization (ETO) is created, assembling those who have abandoned hope for humans. The

ETO follows a dystopian design that often occurs in narratives written during times of war and

hostility, when humans and technology seem most dangerous. The dystopian plotline works

through the anxieties of literally destroying the earth through capitalism using figurative

language that calls attention to the flaws of global humanity and the dangers of technological and

political power. Author of the dystopian novel Resistance Tobias S. Buckwell admits dystopia

“allows writers to hold up a mirror to our world and say “if this goes on…”. That’s one of the

classic reasons for writing it: to warn about trajectories within society” (qtd. in John Joseph

Adams “Dystopian Round Table”). While alien colonization isn’t necessarily the doomed future

of humanity, there is still tension in the idea of ever-impending war and ethnocide that makes us

ask: If financial security or environmental concerns are not able to stop another World War or

heightening violence against humanity, then what? Like Ye, it’s hard for readers to imagine a

bright future for the earth with the destruction of nature by way of deadly chemicals and forest

destroying machines. Though Ye’s storyline uses the language of alien contact, Cixin merges

fiction with reality by calling attention to political and economic discourse that resemble

universal calamities of current society rather than the speculated future. The way the world is

sectioned by those who are ready to submit to imminent extinction and those who are still willing

to look for solutions becomes highly relatable. Cixin’s unravelling of modern day physics also

adds realism to Three Body.

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The science fiction multiverse shares intertext with actual science and technology

language. Three Body speaks in the language of some of the most prominent experiments

happening in science today. The name of the novel is based on the classical mechanics problem

that tries to determine the motions of three bodies in accordance with the Newton’s Laws of

Motion and universal gravitation. Between the publishing of the Chinese edition of Three Body

and the American edition of the third book of Cixin’s trilogy, Death’s End, scientists have

broken new ground in the Theories of Relativity and Classical Mechanics. In 2013, physicists

Milovan Šuvakov and Veljko Dmitrašinovi made the discovery of thirteen new possible

solutions to the three-body problem, adding many alternatives to the three that have existed since

1993.16 In February of 2016, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)

in Washington and Louisiana labs detected gravitational waves created by the collision of two

black holes that were causing ripples the fabric of time, reinforcing Einstein’s theory.17 This

historically places the publishing of Three Body in a coinciding era of developing astrophysics

making the novel a marker of science fiction modernity by its “realistic speculation about

possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world” (Rieder 194).

Three Body establishes discourse with the transnational network of science. Cixin has helped

forge a stronger relationship with science fiction and the scientific community of China. He

explains the scientific Three Body phenomenon in China:

Li Miao, a cosmologist and string theorist, wrote a book titled The Physics of Three Body.

Many aerospace engineers became fans, and China’s aerospace agency even asked me to

consult with them (despite the fact that in my novel, China’s aerospace establishment was

16 Jon Cartwright, “Physicists Discover a Whopping 13 New Solutions to Three-Body problem.” Science Magazine 17 NASA, “NSF’S LIGO Has Detected Gravitational Waves.”

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described as so conservative and hidebound that an extremist officer had to engage in

mass assassinations to allow new ideas to flourish). (“The Worst of All Possible

Universes”)

This makes a gateway for science fiction because the CNSA, a sector of the Chinese

government, now recognizes science fiction as a genre. This indicates a new era for Chinese

science fiction as respectable literature in its country, something the Sino-genre has struggled

with throughout most of its history. Tor and NASA’s collaborative series of accurate NASA-

themed science fiction novels reveals the potential for a new relationship between the CNSA and

Sino-science fiction authors. Cooperation in the shared, intertextual universe of science increases

a collective and productive planetary store of scientific knowledge.

Amy Elias and Christian Moraru describe this planetarity as “‘worlding’–or more

precisely, from globe as financial-technocratic system toward planet as world-ecology (xvi).

Elias and Christian Moraru align this idea to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s solution of

“revaluation of place, familiarization with other languages, and thought paradigms, and…

genuine contact with alterity” (xvii). Genuine contact through planetarity acknowledges the

fictionality of borders. It changes the ways in which the world-literary system structures how we

talk about Earth. Three Body’s alien crisis moves Earth’s value beyond the humans who inhabit

it. The Trisolarian’s set their sights on Earth as a safer alternative to their home planet with three

suns; they place value on the planet’s stable resources with little regard for the human populators

(often referring to them as bugs). As the book trilogy moves forward, the sense of proportion

and vastness increases. Cixin explains, “I wrote about the worst of all possible universes in

Three Body out of hope that we can strive for the best of all possible Earths (“Worst of All

Possible Universes”). In the Author’s Postscript of the translated edition of Three Body, Cixin

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shows how the ideologies of science can be used as a connector: “Let’s turn the kindness we

show toward the stars to members of the human race on Earth and build up the trust and

understanding between the different peoples and civilizations that make up humanity” (395).

This supplements a new level of intertextuality in the science fiction multiverse that includes

Cixin’s world scope, along with innovative Chinese science and technology concepts.18 His

optimism is reflected in the planetary plotline that contains a world political force with the

consensus to utilize Chinese ingenuity to save the world.

Wang Miao defends Earth using science to counter earth-threatening disasters, a nod at

Golden Age hard science fiction. These tropes are remodeled to build a narrative that addresses

science’s more recent developments and a more globalized society from a Chinese point-of-

view. While Wang’s idea to use billiards to understand physics comes off as a conventional

model of the genre, the Three Body video game that mixes virtual reality, quantum mechanics,

history, and philosophy is just a sample of Cixin’s formative use of the science fiction genre. The

complexity of the game is explained by Wang using the analogy of comparing the painting

Along the River during the Qingming Festival to a photograph of the open blue sky: “the

photographs information content…exceeded the painting’s…Three Body was the same. Its

enormous information content was hidden deep…designers worked to compress the information

content to disguise a more complex reality (112). The ETO attracts intellectuals to sympathize

with the Trisolarians to assemble a society of supporters for the alien race whose three suns give

their planet unstable living conditions. Before the players know the truth behind the game, the

game itself must be alluring enough to captivate its consumers.

Wang first logs in as Hairen (Chinese for “Man of the Sea”) and is placed in a virtual

world that uses technology of China’s Warring Period and then progresses to the Eastern Han

18 William Forstchen’s Pillar to the Sky is the first novel in these experimental relationship.

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Period. When Wang changes his name to Copernicus in an attempt to hone in new energy to find

the game’s hidden meaning, he finds a completely changed Gothic-style landscape. The ETO

created the virtual reality with distinct ethnographic worlds for each player based on the player’s

user ID (182), showing the ETO’s disunited sense of existence. When the player Galileo laughs

at Eastern scholarship based on “meditation, epiphany, and even dreams” in favor of observation

and experimentation, Wang is quick to remind him that Mozi, a philosopher during the Warring

Period, was also an experimenter (183). The three-body problem is played out by Wang and

other intellectuals who use avatars of the most famous philosophers of world history to predict

the suns’ movements using the scientific innovations of the given time period before being wiped

out and ending the session. In the ever-changing layout of the game based on the assumed

ethnicities of users, they work from their different perspectives and available science information

from the past Eras. Although the avatars change accordingly, the players are respected by what

they bring to the table in terms of solving the problem and not based on where they are located

physically in the real world.

The game moves through time and ideas converge, the identifying factors of which part

of the world the game is set in gets harder for Wang to guess. Technologies, ethnicities, and

architecture become anachronistic, making the location of Three Body a fluid, abstract location

set in science modernity itself. Wang, another Chinese player using the avatar of Hungarian-

American John von Neumann, and Sir Isaac Newton build a human operating system out of Qin

Shi Huang’s army. After much bickering on Western and Eastern philosophy, they conquer the

Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Period with a merger of ideas. When Wang goes to a

public meeting with the players behind the avatars, Cixin reveals a variety of knowledge behind

the video game’s successful missions.

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The Chinese elite is represented by a scholar who combines Eastern philosophy with

modern science, an avant-garde novelist, two business executives, a reporter, and a science

doctoral student. When Wang asks why the game exists, a member of the ETO’s makes it clear:

“The goal of Three Body if very simple and pure: gather those of us who have common ideals”

(229) but Wang is off put by the futile rhetoric towards Earth coming from the other players. The

meeting place in Wang’s version of three body virtual reality comes to resemble the architecture

of the United Nations Headquarters. The population is multinational and living in a modern

Information Age. Wang stares up at a wildly swinging Pendulum Monument in the shifting

gravity of Trisolaris asks, “Does it represent the yearning for order, or the surrender to chaos?”

(240). Just then, the objective of the game changes: “head for the stars; find a new home” (241).

This alludes back to Nixon in China when Zhou Enlai asks: “Are we giants in command of our

destiny or only minor actors in an inexorable current of history beyond human control?” It

seems Cixin is reimagining China’s role in the big picture.

Much like Trisolaris, the Earth can reach unstable conditions that make human life

impossible. Before Earth reaches its own “Chaotic Era”, the effects of climate change can be

minimized through human action. The civilians of Trisolaris are left in the Information Age but

are in a hopeless position to change their environment. China and the U.S combined make up for

44% of carbon emissions to the atmosphere.19 Perhaps Cixin recognizes his audiences as those

who should be considering the negative effects of rapid technology. He leaves the virtual

Trisolaris with smart technology and a dying planet. What happens after the Information Age

and what do we have to offer ourselves with the immense amount of power technology has given

us? As the Trisolarians send a ship toward “western sky… not know[ing] the outcome of the

launch in their lifetimes” (145), Cixin may be addressing the anxieties Chinese citizens are

19 This is according to latest EPA’s Global Greenhouse Emission’s Data collected in 2014

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feeling as it globalizes and modernizes its culture and responds to the capitalist world-system

much in the way American citizens are considering the effects of their contributions to

globalization. Another of China’s leading science fiction authors, Han Song, is more direct in his

cynicism of capitalism and technological advancement. His novel Subway uses futurity as a

warning to rapid technological advancement by way of capitalistic modernization. Though most

of his novels are not available in translation, Han Song has stated in an interview with China

Daily’s Chitralekha Basu, “The subway offers a mirage of a shelter as the train is heading toward

"an unknowable, uncontrollable future” (“The Future is Now”).20 There is an intertextual nature

between Cixin’s spaceship and Song’s subway that take on the ternary tension of “technology vs.

environment vs. culture” using science fiction spaces to air them. However, Song’s work focuses

on the dangers of a capitalistic relationship with America, while Cixin tries to navigate beyond

national politics with a world-view on rapid technological advances.

Cixin uses the smallest building block of the universe to show the powerful effects of

dangerous technology and warfare by creating an aesthetic representation of the manipulation of

subatomic particles. The alien Trisolarians unfold a proton to create the supercomputer weapon

that stops technological progress for mankind. Cixin uses Arthur C. Clarke’s monolith storyline

to initiate a new conversation on technology. Clarke’s 2001 monolith uses pure energy

technology to advance humans across vast distances of space. As 2001 ends and David Bowman

the astronaut reaches a new beginning. The renewal is evolutionary and open to possibilities.

Three Body happens when Clarke’s technology falls into the wrong hands. The connection

between the Trisolarian and human science asks how our own science, Ancient Greek’s

20 Han’s short story “The Wheels of Samsara” is now available in Lavie Tidhar’s The Apex Book of World SF

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“knowledge of nature” or physics, can be used against us when sharpened by the forward

movement of time.

Cixin’s rigor in grounding his fictive innovations in actual science highlight the

fascinating, yet terrifying side to rapid technological advancement and globalization. Wang’s

nanomaterial Flying Blade saves the world from the ETO, an indication of China’s future

contributions to science. The nanomaterial – “one-hundreth of the thickness of hair” (336)– is

nearly invisible yet it has the ability to slice through the ETO’s ship Judgment Day in a clean cut

up middle, like a knife through cake. Leaving off from the final meeting in the video game, the

military officers from all over the world gather in an undisclosed location to discuss how to save

the world from the ETO and the Trisolarians, “for the first time in history, the armed forces of

the world’s nations faced the same enemy” (331). In the postscript Cixin explains, “On Earth,

humankind can step onto another continent, and without a thought, destroy the kindred

civilizations found there through warfare and disease” (395). He goes on to say that the alien

allegory should bring out the same “universal, noble, moral constraints… as a self-evident

universal code of conduct” (395) toward each other, spreading a treat other countries on earth

how you would want an alien species to treat humanity proverb through his fiction.

The physics of the unfolding proton super computer and the nanomaterials may seem far-

fetched, but it’s prevalent enough to find a space in the scientific community and the larger

science fiction multiverse. As Rieder suggests, “attribution of the identity of sci fi to a text

constitutes an active intervention its distribution and reception” (200). Those who are apt to read

Three Body are those willing to put Cixin’s postulations to use, offering a travelling conversation

that is now available to a larger community because of its translated publication. It is more

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difficult for Anglo-readers to understand how modern Chinese science fiction is travelling on a

larger scale because it requires conceptualizing China as modern nation.

As a reciprocal exchange, more Sino-science fiction in the multiverse creates insight to

native perspectives on modern China and it allows Anglo-readers to better understand the

movement happening beneath the surface of Chinese science fiction narratives. Science fiction

writer Xia Jia explains:

Chinese science fiction writers have gradually constructed a cultural field and symbolic

space possessing a certain degree of closure and self-discipline…gradually maturing

forms have absorbed various social experiences that cannot yet be fully captured by the

symbolic order, and after a series of transformations, integrations, and re-organizations,

resulted in new vocabularies and grammars. It is in this sense that the Chinese science

fiction…can be read as a national allegory in the age of globalization. (“What Makes

Chinese Science Fiction Chinese?”)

The language of science fiction and the adoption of that language by Chinese authors reaches a

space in history where science fiction is discussing Chinese culture where the symbolic, the

imaginary, and the real are only beginning to converge through conversation between texts. The

new science fiction language that evolves out of China in the process will help to better explain

the Information Age as a whole.

Liu Cixin’s novel helped to bring Sino-science fiction to Anglo readers, but extrapolating

on where this will lead in the future is difficult. Camille Bacon-Smith’s Science Fiction Culture

explores the way science fiction moves through time and space using different mediums and

genres. She uses Gardner Dozios’s words to explain the way science fiction is revolutionized:

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The work that’s being done at the top of the book best-seller list is generally speaking not

work that’s going to have a big influence on the evolution of the field and the direction

that science fiction is going to take in the future. It’s usually the work that’s being done in

the science fiction magazines, usually at a short-fiction length that really shows you

where science fiction is going to go in the next couple of decades.” (220)

This places importance back onto science fiction magazines as a space for author/reader

exchange. When we look at storytelling as exchange, the short story is an opportunity for

experimental fabulations. The journal and magazine publishing process is more low-risk because

investors don’t have to gamble on expensive translating, marketing, and pressing like the process

in publishing novels. This allows the writer to take more risks and adds value to the authors’

words, as they are few and full of meaning; short stories are digested differently than novels.

Michael Swanwick clarifies: a short story… can be held in the mind all in one piece…every bit

of it must be cunningly made and crafted to fit together perfectly and without waste so it can

perform its task with absolute precision” (qtd. in Bacon-Smith 221). The next author that will be

discussed in this paper is currently published in American science fiction magazines and

international journals. She uses the short story to frame science in Chinese culture making

Anglo-audiences work to gain an understanding of China through science fiction.

Short story writer, actress, and professor Wang Yao, known by her pen name Xia Jia,

writes science fiction that openly address societal concerns. Jia first came into the world of

science fiction attracting controversy and critical acclaim. Her award-winning "The Demon-

Enslaving Flask” was first published in China’s largest science fiction journal Science Fiction

World then later translated by Linda Rui Fang and published in the Autumn 2012 edition of

Renditions, a journal dedicated to translation theory to internationally promote Chinese literature.

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The fabulation features the Faustian challenge between scientist James Clerk Maxwell and the

demon in “Maxwell’s Demon”, a thought experiment breaking the Second Law of

Thermodynamics. The story won her the Best New Writer Award at the 16th Galaxy Awards for

Chinese Science Fiction in 2004 and generated a dispute in the Sino-science fiction community

over the story’s genre. Jia spends considerable time in the story setting up authentic scientific

information to move the plot, describing the nature of thermodynamics in the footnotes. For

example: “the crystal lattice of silicon dioxide is a three- dimensional, beehive like structure. The

covalent bond between two silicon atoms is attached to an oxygen atom” is used to describe the

way a demon could shrink and slip through silicon dioxide molecules in order to escape the

flask. American readers receive the Anglo-centric history of science through the lens of Chinese

language and interpretation.

The fact that the story accepts a walking, talking demon who enters Maxwell’s lab with

“a shroud of smoke and a proverbial boom” (272) as a central character to the story complicates

the way we think about science fiction itself by debasing the rule of science fiction’s rigorous

adherence to reality. This caused readers to ask if this was science fiction or something else. In

the allegorical tale, the demon supports some of sciences biggest names including Archimedes,

Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Schrödinger, Faraday, and Einstein. The last footnote: “These

famous words were uttered by Archimedes: ‘Give me a point to stand on, and I can move the

earth!’ Poor demon” (282) plays a key role in understanding the message of the story. The

demon’s superpowers allow him to do anything from wrapping wire coils for Faraday to getting

into Schrödinger’s box to chasing lightening for Einstein. However, the one thing beyond the

demon’s control is to give the scientists a capacity for inventiveness, an intrinsic talent.

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This controversy seems to have ignited a dynamism in Jia to change the way readers

conceive their interpretations of science fiction. Much of her proceeding work juxtaposes

Chinese tradition with more modern or futuristic technology. The way Jia describes tradition

resembles the way scientists view astronomy. Although stars are visible to the human eye, we are

seeing them as they once were. Once we discovered this, we were better able to see how we

could learn from them. Jia explains how she is not attached to the customs themselves, but what

they say about present: “Traditions are always changing over time. It is we, the present

generation living on the frontier between tradition and modernity, present and future, who

struggle for our self-affirmation, not some ‘tradition’ that retains its own self-evident essence”

(“Exploring the Frontier”). Allusions to traditional Chinese culture in Jia’s stories magnify the

transition between old and new, a concept that may mean something different to Sinophone

readers than to Anglophone readers, but transition is a theme of science fiction that can help

readers to relate. Science fiction pursues an alienation of language, to “rephrase the quotidian to

appear strange and unfamiliar” (Liu “Gathered in Translation”). The intertextuality of Jia’s

ensuing work connects classic Anglo-science fiction tropes to stories heavily intertwined with

myths and traditions from classic Sinophone literature, adding a new kind of text to the

multiverse.

Jia explains other materials used from the multiverse in her story “A Hundred Ghosts

Parade Tonight”: “[It] includes fleeting images of other works by masters: Neil Gaiman’s The

Graveyard Book, Tsui Hark’s A Chinese Ghost Story, and Hayao Miyazaki’s films (“What

Makes Chinese Science Fiction”). Jia’s story juxtaposes a Chinese ghost story with science

fiction cyborgs. The story takes place on Ghost Street where a young orphan Ning, caretaker and

former beauty Xiao Qian, and former revered soldier Yan Chixia exist in what first appears to be

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an abandoned entertainment venue. Jia uses word play to create an ambiguous world that seems

to be run by ghosts or robots (or ghost robots): “his iron face is expressionless, just like the

statues of buddhas in the main hall”; “There are no mirrors in the house, so she always takes off

her head and puts it on her knees to comb”; “I see a crimson bar code along her naked back”.

These lines dance around materiality and what it means to have substance using the only human

as comparison to the ghoulish, synthetic, yet warm-hearted supernatural inhabitants of Ghost

Street. As the short story develops further it becomes more clear that old souls are inhabiting

machine bodies, an unconventional take on experimenting with the line between artificial

intelligence and consciousness than what we see in novels like Isaac Asimov’s I,Robot and

William Gibson’s Necromancer. These cyborgs represent a new concept that connects Chinese

history to A.I. The shifting between old and new in this story creates a non-linear approach to

time. The steel robots’ bodies do not signify a possible future world or build anticipation for the

future. They allegorically present China’s encounter with the acceleration into modernity by

way of tradition. Ghost Street is China, where the echoes of the ancient and promises of the

future live in one present space. In order to summon the past, Jia entombs language and relics of

faraway times in the strange capitalistic, mechanical town. Ken Liu works with Jia to make

tradition appear strange in the translated text.

While Tsui Hark’s A Chinese Ghost Story depends on visuals to create a timeless fantasy

space, Jia and Liu must depend on concise words to portray a similar visual to the reader. In

Liu’s translation of the story the four seasons are changed to: “Awakening of Insects”, “Major

Heat”, “Cold Dew”, and “Winter Solstice”. In the article “Gathered in Translation”, Ken Liu

explains:

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This choice meant that the English reader must work harder to figure out the time of year

by contextual clues, but the names also give the reader a better sense of how the Chinese

calendar is tied to the cycles and movements of the natural world, to the demands and

rhythms of the agricultural life… [a] portrayal of a (seemingly) pastoral, idealized life

constructed from elements of pre-modern Chinese village traditions.

Liu engages with the impalpable feel of Jia’s story by calling attention to tradition at the heart of

an untraditional speculative fiction. The language works to place the readers in a faraway

location. As the plot progresses with what Fredric Jameson calls the “pastiche of myth”, we must

wonder what Jia is building with this world-construction through the symbolic.

Jia embeds the strange demons and hungry ghost tropes of Tsui Hark’s A Chinese Ghost

Story into the science fiction multiverse. She actively excavates the meaning myth holds in the

future. It should be quite clear to Anglophone readers that the names and words are not creations

for the story, but reflect back to something from the past. A Dark Yaksha, the monster made from

giant scattered bones and mud, is a creation of Jia’s dark humor that may reach audiences

differently. The Yaksha holds intertextual meaning in China. Thomas Watters explains, “the first

syllable of this word [Yaksha] is represented by the character which means night…from this

circumstance the Chinese have come to regard the Yakshas as peculiar demons of the night,

haunters of tombs and cemeteries… often represented as…dwarfish human-like creatures with

horns…and pale cruel faces (397). Anglo readers can more quickly understand the presence of

the nature spirit Yakshas if they are familiar with the Yakshas from the Lotus Sutra, “Yakshas

and evil ghosts/Were eating human flesh…/ /Fighting one another to eat them/Having eaten their

fill/Their evil thoughts grew more inflamed/The sound of their quarrelling/Was dreadful to the

extreme” (730). Statues of Yakshas, ancient myth, and modern versions like Shi Zhecun’s short

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story “Yaksha”, a femme fatale, work to create a different intertextual representation of the

monster in which Jia is using. This historical intertext of the demon Dark Yaksha adds satire

when he plays the part of a bumbling, harmless ghost in a carnival ritual where he chases the

hero to eat him and but is always defeated. To derive truth from Jia language and to give the

Yaksha meaning in our physical world, one must recognize the continued production of myth to

gain the ideology behind the harmless, ceremonial Yaksha– time-honored through history but

with its former power forgotten.

The Rakshasa mask that Ning chooses to buy at the carnival also holds meaning in folk

Chinese mythology. Known for human consumption, the demon Rakshasa was brought to

ancient China by Buddhist monks from India. Jia manipulates the unchangeable base of

Rakshasa as a demon derived from history to create irony in the fact that on Ghost Street, it is a

mask being made for reproduction to be bought and worn by children. Both Sinophone and

Anglophone readers can find clues in the meaning of Ghost Street through how much they are

willing to work to understand tradition behind the objects Jia chooses to include. Ken Liu notes:

… this story is as far from the everyday experiences of the Chinese reader (that is the

point of fantastical literature, after all) as it is from the everyday experiences of the

English reader… for the former (calling up images of dynastic China and traditional

myths) and the latter (calling up images of “the mysterious Orient,” perhaps with a dash

of manga). (“Gathered in Translation”)

If the reader is willing to find meaning behind the ghosts and demons, they are rewarded with a

vital piece that can be assembled to form the full narrative in which the consumption– the

harnessing, exploitative purchasing and entertainment of folklore, the commodity of the ghosts in

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the amusement park setting, and the capitalization on the “Mysterious Orient” draw Ghost Street

as a consumer driven production of China, the way China is often perceived through tourism.

Like Hayao Miyazaki’s animated characters, Jia’s words inject genuine human behavior

in a non-human space. She focuses on the emotions of the cyborgs, their interactions, and their

movement. How the Dark Yaksha moves and feels tells more of the story: “On nights when there

are no tourists, it must go back under the earth, disappointed, to wait for the next opportunity”.

When Ning describes the former soldier hero Yan Chixia, the warrior’s flaws are exposed,

“tonight, he forgot to wear his sedge hat. His egg-shaped face is exposed to the thousands of

lanterns along Ghost Street, with just a few wisps of hair curled like question marks on a blank

page. The silly sight is such a contrast against his serious mien that I start to laugh”. The short-

comings of the ghosts mean they are no longer be revered like their former selves; they are

products and materials on display. The visual aesthetic creates atmosphere for the story, but the

true story of Ghost Street and its hollow ambience is slowly colored in by the character’s

interactions. Jia’s close attention to their behavior makes them relatable and human, an empathic

bond between audience and ghost across the fantasy setting.

Ghost Street grows unpopular because newer innovations have stolen tourists away from

its history-centered entertainment. It’s revealed that Ning is really a product of these new

innovations. He eats and breaths but is no more real than the ghosts with his own crimson bar

code hidden under his hair. The climax is when the science fiction elements of the story matter

most. They haunt the reader and question what authenticity really means. Jia uses technology to

tear away at the ancient, “Many giant mechanical spiders made of steel are crawling all over the

main hall, breaking off the dark red glass shingles and sculpted wooden molding, piece by piece,

and throwing the pieces into the snow on the ground”. The spiders are the one element of the

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story confined by the realm of science fiction. In a tormented story that blurs real with

counterfeit and old with new, Jia uses the science fiction genre to ground the story and give it

closure. Sino and Anglo science fiction readers are brought back to the science fiction multiverse

through Isaac Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. They are an ingrained element of the multiverse that

work to emphasize the climax of Jia’s story. In this fluid world of production and consumption,

Ning’s human isolation evokes the question: what is real and what is produced? The “Thunder

Calamity” summons the giant robotic spiders to rise on the day of reckoning (calling back to H.G

Well’s War of the Worlds) to consume the metal bodies and souls of the ghosts.

This raises tension in the fact that Ning doesn’t know if his life is in danger because of

the makeup of his body. If his cutting-edge technology allows him to “cry, laugh, eat, piss and

shit, fall, feel pain, ooze blood, hear my own heartbeat, grow”, is he a real enough to pass as

human? Does the make-up of his flesh matter to the metallic jowls of the spiders? When they

draw blood from Ning, they shut off: “They chewed my body and tasted flesh and saw blood.

But they aren't allowed to harm real people. If they do they must destroy themselves. That's also

part of the rules. Ghosts, spiders, it doesn't matter. Everyone has to follow the rules” (“A

Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight”). The rules of science fiction separate authenticity from

invention. The old convention of the robotic destructor can’t keep up with the innovation of the

robots who now pass as organic, breaking the precedent of the rules or at least making readers

reflect on what Ning really was. In an ironic turn, the science fiction-invented spiders can no

longer tell the differences between past and future. The robot body of Ning is taken for truth and

he dies in the way a real person would.  The last thing he sees is what he perceives as “pale pink

peach petals” but they are Xiao Qian's tears, the mourning of the past for her progeny.

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Here classic science fiction seeps into the pastoral world as fact, it’s a bloodline that

binds Jia’s concepts to the world science fiction readers have come to recognize as their own.

The tropes of the past center the story in the science fiction multiverse allowing capitalist

modernization (steel, bar codes) to exist in the same space as Chinese historic ghosts. Gail de

Vos describes this intertextuality as “perpetual rewriting of mythology in the acts of ever day

life…paying homage and recognition to the power of the story…and the importance of telling

regardless of the medium” (97). The science fictional spiders work to bring the story back to the

present and evaluate the meaning behind the myth. Jia fills these myths with memory, heritage,

experiences, and emotions. This humanizes and adds depth to the surface level story. Our own

interaction with the story paired with Jia’s updated mythical tropes make the story multi-

dimensional and modern. Jia’s next story writes back to Anglo-science fiction. It continues the

conversations and questions that have arisen in Anglo works and answers from her own

perspective as a 21st century female Chinese author.

Science fiction has often become a medium for expressing societal concerns. As

transnational connections open around the world, societal concerns effect more of the world

population. Jia’s story “Spring Festival: Happiness, Anger, Love, Sorrow, Joy” is based on

BBC’s Black Mirror. This story takes tropes of Anglo-science fiction culture and makes them

Chinese. In this way, Chinese tradition and modernity become a part of the science fiction

multiverse. She incorporates the ideas provided by Black Mirror and the ideas that come from

her own heritage to rework the Charlie Booker’s idea to “hack into anxieties”. In Charlie

Booker’s “The Dark Side of Our Gadget Addiction”, the creator of the show explains Black

Mirror’s connection to the Twilight Zone and science fiction as a medium for change:

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[Rod] Sterling…created The Twilight Zone because he was tired of having his

provocative teleplays about contemporary issues routinely censored in order to appease

corporate sponsors. If he wrote about racism in a southern town, he had to fight the

network over every line. But if he wrote about racism in a metaphorical, quasi-fictional

world – suddenly he could say everything he wanted…Today he'd be writing about

terrorism, the economy, the media, privacy and our relationship with technology

Media, privacy, and our relationship to technology are the wide-reaching and current topics that

everyone in the multiverse can relate. Jia’s approach to these topics are anchored in Chinese

settings, showing us what global current events look like from a Chinese citizen’s point-of-view.

The black humor that keeps audiences meditating on social norms, technological factors, and

mass psychology is the same distinction that makes Xia Jia’s work accessible to Anglophone

readers. Science fiction in “Spring Festival” gives Jia a medium to address contemporary issues

without having to worry about miscommunication and censorship. The characters in the stories

are ordinary, modern Chinese citizens navigating with strange future technologies, a reminder of

how we remain much the same even as things around us change.

According to tradition: “Zhuazhou is a custom in the Jiangnan region…Then the child is

presented with various objects: bow, arrow, paper, and brush for boys; knife, ruler, needle, and

thread for girls—plus foods, jewels, clothes, and toys. Whatever the child chooses to play with is

viewed as an indication of the child’s character and abilities” (Xia). Where does a tradition such

as this fit into future? In “Spring Festival”, Zhuazhou happens on a touch screen (that the baby

easily navigates) and there are more than spoons, paint brushes, and coins to choose. The baby

chooses milk formula, schools, cram sessions, college, grad school, housing location, spouse,

car, honeymoon destination, and hospital for child birth. Jia concludes, “Finally, he picked a

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nursing home and a cemetery, and all was set.” In the end, the father is distressed because of the

money he will spend (60% of the total sum on the screen) on the commodities the infant has

chosen. “Matchmaking” features a daughter and mother who use an electronic program to choose

a husband for the girl in which an algorithm sends a miniature avatar on thousands of date

scenarios to narrow down her choices, then allows the avatars families to meet and simulates a

honeymoon until the daughter is only left with one choice. The “People’s Participatory Gala” in

the New Year’s Eve plot is a direct criticism on privacy violation. Drones in the story force Lao

Wang and Mr. Wu into the public eye as they search for a peaceful moment of solitude.

“Reunion” capitalizes on consumers of mass media and the tendency to dismiss startling truths,

to brush off and ignore grim and gruesome footage. Where the stories diverge from Anglo

culture, Jia builds suspense as American readers may not be so prepared as to where to story is

leading. Likewise, her movement out of tradition moves Chinese readers to an alternate storyline

that reimagines common culture, old and new. This helps the entire multiverse of science fiction

to become acquainted with Chinese society, culture, and history.

The conclusion of “Spring Festival” entitled “Birthday” vocalizes the value Xia places on

storytelling and cultural influence. A grandmother celebrates her birthday via advanced

technology that allows her children and grandchildren to gather by holograph or high definition

video. One of her granddaughters show up in-person and programs a hologram grandma to

satisfy the virtual guests while they go enjoy the outside. The story ends when the grandmother

joins a group of senior musicians: “Grandma slowed her breathing, thinking of fragments of

history and tradition connected with the moon and all that is old and new around her, and began

to chant: As firecrackers send away the old year, /The spring breeze feels as warm as New

Year’s wine. /All houses welcome fresh sun and good cheer, /While new couplets take the place

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of old signs.” The ancient chanted poem shows the power of oral storytelling as a practice to

pass down culture through generations. By way of myth and folklore, Jia’s translated short

science fiction stories transfer Chinese culture laterally, across the Pacific.

Jia’s contribution to science fiction is what she considers porridge science fiction: “a

story mixed with so many non-science elements (e.g. myth, legend or folklore) that it can hardly

be classified as “science fiction” anymore” (“Exploring the Frontier”). Like Black Mirror and the

Twilight Zone, most her stories exist outside of space ships, aliens, and robots and when they do

contain tropes of science fiction, one can be sure their inclusion will happen in an atypical

narrative that brings important Chinese and global societal concerns to the forefront. Jia’s Sino-

science fiction allows for consideration of critical and applicable real world questions that differ

from past generation’s science fiction speculations and also takes into consideration the complex

existence of her country—a subject new to most Anglophone readers and a subject that has

become more accessible in Chinese literature in recent years. As a young writer, Xia’s work

captures the frustrations the generations of science fiction readers who are growing up in a time

that still remembers Isolationism and the Cultural Revolution of the 1970’s (because they were

there or because their parents were) who are now immersed into the world of iPhones and

globalization. The accelerating modern China is gathering its bearings as a world power.

Though American media and China’s Isolationism has historically kept American

understanding of Chinese culture low, changing the representation of China through the literature

is important to disarm Occidentalism. Science fiction’s fast circulating, “below-the-radar”

properties allow for this enterprise to cultivate the rhizomatic network of the science fiction

multiverse. As John Rieder states, “sf is not a set of texts but rather a way of using texts and of

drawing relationships among them” (193). Wide–ranging displays of Chinese science fiction like

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Liu Cixin showing up in bookstores around the world and Xia Jia edging into international

readership through science fiction magazines and science journals allow for multiple audiences

on a transactional playing field. Conversations on subjects that cause unease and allow for

Chinese voices to be heard in America break down stereotypes and assumptions. This means that

authors do not have to re-write the same old science fiction in order to be recognized in the

multiverse.

I am not attempting to declare an American “discovery” of untapped Chinese science

fiction, because as Chinese science fiction fans know, it’s always been there for those that look;

but now, it’s been offered as an option for Anglophone readers which gives way to new

transnational opportunities. The recent interest in Chinese science fiction should not be

discounted as a “one-hit wonder” for Cixin. Instead, Three Body’s transition from Chinese to

American success should be considered as an opportunity for more wide-spread promotion of

other translated science fiction. This allows the travel ways of the multiverse of science fiction to

move more freely, giving a fuller representation of the world-system. Upon success of Three

Body, Tor is now publishing Netherlands writer Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s The Day the World

Turned Upside Down. Accumulating interest in translated science fiction can be found in small

and large publishing companies. From here, Anglophone readers can expect more works from

other countries to be available. Liz Gorinsky, the editor at Tor books responsible for publishing

Three Body Problem explains:

I’d love to get to a point where people realize… that Chinese SF is not a monolith…I

wouldn’t go so far as to proclaim that publishing translated literature will lead to world

peace…I do think that anything that helps people understand that people on the other side

of the world are as complex, interesting, sophisticated, and heterogeneous as the people

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in our own towns can potentially increase global understanding and reduce cultural

stereotyping. (“Cixin Liu the Superstar”)

Moving forward, the next step in progress is to diversify the publishing industry in terms of

translating more women authors and authors who come from various social and political

perspectives. These authors offer more diverse observations about the past, present, and future

than the Euro-centric views we’re most used to seeing on the American market. Because science

fiction can only reach those interested in reading it, it does have its limitations. However, some

healthy amount of international circulation of science fiction that addresses topics mass media

isn’t ready to address is better than none.

Anglophone readers may be waiting some time for paperbacks of talented international

authors, but translated science fiction is flourishing through e-books, online journals, fan-fiction

posts, and blogs– the redeeming factor for technology in a globalized world. The internet is a

low-risk, high-acceptance medium in which science fiction circulates most efficiently, creating

new space for international authors where Anglo-centric publishing has pushed them out. While

government censorship and capitalism suppresses many alternative ideas, the combination of

internet forums and the rhetoric of science fiction become a safe space of forward thinking and

first contact between cultures who once may have well been living on different planets. Like the

cockroach, science fiction’s quintessence isn’t centralized to the heart of production, it is spread

out like network. Science fiction can survive historic dry spells by adapting under pressure and

looking for alternate modes of reproduction to stay alive. Its resilience allows it to be a contact

point for asking questions and providing answers to one another. It keeps cultural ignorance from

continuing as the norm and works as a mode of immersive communication.

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