Dis-Orienting Planets

Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction

Isiah Lavender III

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781496811530
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik in Science-Fiction

Contributions by Suparno Banerjee, Cait Coker, Jeshua Enriquez, Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Malisa Kurtz, Stephanie Li, Bradford Lyau, Uppinder Mehan, Graham J. Murphy, Baryon Tensor Posadas, Amy J. Ransom, Robin Anne Reid, Haerin Shin, Stephen Hong Sohn, Takayuki Tatsumi, and Timothy J. Yamamura Isiah Lavender III's Dis-Orienting Planets amplifies critical issues surrounding the racial and ethnic dimensions of science fiction. This edited volume explores depictions of Asia and Asians in science fiction literature, film, and fandom with particular regard to China, Japan, India, and Korea. Dis-Orienting Planets highlights so-called yellow and brown peoples from the constellation of a historically white genre. The collection launches into political representations of Asian identity in science fiction's imagination, from fear of the Yellow Peril and its racist stereotypes to techno-Orientalism and the remains of a postcolonial heritage. Thus the essays, by contributors such as Takayuki Tatsumi, Veronica Hollinger, Uppinder Mehan, and Stephen Hong Sohn, reconfigure the very study of race in science fiction. A follow-up to Lavender's Black and Brown Planets, this collection expands the racial politics governing the renewed visibility of Asia in science fiction. One of the few on this subject, the volume probes Gary Shteyngart's novel Super Sad True Love Story, the acclaimed film Cloud Atlas, and Guillermo del Toro's monster film Pacific Rim, among others. Dis-Orienting Planets embarks on a wide-ranging assessment of Asian representations in science fiction, upon the determination that our visions of the future must include all people of color.

PART ONE

First Encounters

“GREAT WALL PLANET”

Estrangements of Chinese Science Fiction

VERONICA HOLLINGER

The history of sf reflects the changing positions of different national audiences as they imagine themselves in a developing world-system constructed out of technology’s second nature.

—Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., “Science Fiction and Empire” (236)

In 2013 I co-edited a special issue of the journal Science Fiction Studies (SFS) on Chinese science fiction (SF). This project was first proposed by Professor Wu Yan of Beijing Normal University, one of the leading figures in the development and reception of SF in China today. I had the privilege of working with Wu Yan on this special issue, which is one of the most comprehensive English-language critical overviews of Chinese SF published to date. In his guest-editor’s introduction, Wu provides a detailed chronology of science fiction’s fortunes in China since the beginning of the twentieth century. The issue includes essays by Han Song and Liu Cixin, two of China’s most popular contemporary SF authors (I will discuss stories by these authors later in this essay). Other contributions include two studies of early science fiction written in the late Qing period; a discussion of Lao She’s 1932 dystopian fiction, Cat Country; a study of utopian influences on contemporary science fiction; an analysis of the image of “gloomy China” in Han Song’s writing; a detailed history of the crucial function of translation in the development of the genre in China; and an analysis of science fiction tropes in recent films from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

In a happy coincidence, in 2012 the Hong Kong-based journal Renditions published a special issue of Chinese science fiction in English translation, “Chinese Science Fiction: Late Qing and the Contemporary.” This was edited by Mingwei Song, who also contributed an essay to SFS’s special issue. This is the first substantial collection of Chinese science fiction to appear in English since 1989, when Wu Dingbo and Patrick D. Murphy edited Science Fiction from China, a collection of eight stories published between 1978 and 1987. The Renditions issue opens with four excerpts and stories from the early twentieth century—including an excerpt from Wu Jianren’s New Story of the Stone (1908)—and then follows these with nine stories, available in English for the first time, representing early twenty-first century science fiction in China. These include Liu Cixin’s “The Poetry Cloud” (2003), Wang Jinkang’s “The Reincarnated Giant” (2006), and Fei Dao’s “The Demon’s Head” (2007).

I want to offer a few observations about Chinese science fiction specifically in terms of its potential to defamiliarize—to help us to gain some critical perspective on—what scholars have begun to refer to as “global science fiction.”¹ I will suggest five ways in which Chinese SF can estrange a taken-for-granted Anglo-American mainstream: (1) as an “alien” cultural product; (2) as a product of China’s “rise” as a global superpower; (3) as the product of an “alternate” cultural history; (4) as representative of something called “global science fiction”; and (5) as a kind of “second-language” version of the discourse of Anglo-American globalization. Needless to say, my own perspective is necessarily very partial. As a long-time co-editor of Science Fiction Studies, I am firmly situated at the Anglo-American center of what Andrew Milner, in his recent study Locating Science Fiction, refers to as SF’s “selective tradition” (3). In Milner’s terms, Chinese SF lies on the periphery of this tradition, barely registering as part of “the cultural geography of the genre” (155). But, as Milner also reminds us, the selective tradition remains “essentially and necessarily a site of contestation” (40).

In this regard, the English-language publication by Tor Books in 2014 of the first volume of Liu Cixin’s massively popular Three Body trilogy—The Three-Body Problem (2008)—is particularly significant. In the December 2014 issue of the influential monthly magazine, Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field, The Three-Body Problem was repeatedly cited as one of the best new novels of the year. According to the very positive Locus review,

The Three-Body Problem is the first case of a hard SF novel in the modern sense [translated from Chinese into English], informed by genuinely speculative physics and by a shrewd engagement with some of the major tropes of the genre.…Cixin Liu knows his way around Western SF, apparently, but this isn’t quite a Western-style SF novel, and it’s no imitation. (Wolfe 14)

The reviewer concludes: “If Tor (or someone) doesn’t follow up with the next two volumes in this series, it will be a crime against trilogies (a line I never thought I would write)” (Wolfe 15).² The Three-Body Problem went on to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2014, the first time this SF award, established over sixty years ago, has been won by an Asian writer.³

Liu’s Hugo Award makes it all the more likely that some of his fiction will be adapted for film. China Film Group Corporation is already considering some stories from The Wandering Earth (2013), and there are at least rumors of plans to film the Three Body novels (Anders). All of this has the potential vastly to increase Liu’s profile in the Anglo-American market, and thus the profile of Chinese science fiction as a whole, supporting Milner’s suggestion that SF’s selective tradition is “a site of contestation.”

First Estrangement: “Great Wall Planet”

In his introduction to the special issue of Science Fiction Studies, Wu Yan refers to China as “Great Wall Planet,” a phrase he borrows from British writer Brian Aldiss. Expanding on this image, Wu concludes by observing that “Every nation with a distinctive culture and history is like an alien planet, and visitors can stand on this planet and look up at its sky. What will visitors from the west discover in the unfamiliar sky of Planet China?” (7). Deliberately invoking the image of China as ineluctably “foreign” in the West’s collective imaginary, Wu claims the iconic image of the alien planet in a self-conscious statement of difference and alterity, acknowledging that, for the Western reader, Chinese SF is always already an estrangement, an “other” to the Anglo-American selective tradition. The Great Wall simultaneously maintains the boundary between East and West and challenges Western visitors to explore what lies behind it. Chinese SF is at once foreign to the traditions and conventions of Anglo-American SF and familiar—it is, after all, science fiction. Arguably, this dialectical play of difference and sameness also marks the intersections between Chinese culture in particular and the increasingly globalized culture of technoscientific modernization with which it must now contend.

According to Wu Yan, several features have served to distinguish Chinese SF from its Western “other.” First is its focus on “themes of liberation and release from old cultural, political, and institutional systems” (Wu 5). Second is “the reactions of Chinese writers to Western science and culture in their pursuit of themes of liberation” (Wu 5–6). As Wu notes, “This raises a series of key questions: what is science? is science specifically Western or is it a universal human pursuit? how can writers integrate scientific and local cultural traditions into new and vital forms?” (6). A third feature is “its concern for the future of China and of Chinese culture, which is among the oldest surviving human cultures…. Whereas Western SF is focused on the opportunities and losses of technoscientific development, Chinese SF, although it examines similar ideas, is more focused on anxieties about cultural decline and the potential for revitalization” (Wu 4–5).

As Wu’s description suggests, Chinese writers find themselves in a contradictory relationship with the discourses of Western technoculture. Writer Han Song, for instance, insists that “Science, technology, and modernization are not characteristic of Chinese culture. They are like alien entities. If we buy into them, we turn ourselves into monsters, and that is the only way we can get along with Western notions of progress” (“Chinese Science Fiction” 20). In ironic appropriation, both Wu Yan and Han Song invoke metaphors of the alien to represent Chinese science fiction’s self-conscious sense of difference from the Anglo-American tradition.

Second Estrangement: The “Rise” of Global China

I want to look briefly at two twenty-first-century stories that evoke for me a sense of China’s complicated position in this period of rapid globalization. The first is Liu Cixin’s “The Village Schoolteacher” (2001) and the second is Han Song’s “The Passengers and the Creator” (2005), both of which are included in the recent Renditions collection.

In “The Village Schoolteacher,” Liu Cixin juxtaposes the moving story of a dying teacher in an impoverished rural village and the events of a galactic war between unimaginably powerful alien civilizations: “Fifty thousand light years from Earth, near the centre of the Milky Way, an intergalactic war that had raged for 20,000 years was near its conclusion” (121). Meanwhile, the teacher looks back on a wasted life, his ambitions for his students all but overcome by the twin spectres of poverty and ignorance: “He had spent his entire life lighting the fires of science and civilization in their hearts but he knew that in a remote mountain village shrouded in ignorance, the fires he lit were small in comparison to the fires of superstition ‥” (117). Tellingly, the teacher remembers the great writer Lu Xun’s well-known early-twentieth-century image of China as an “iron room”:

It has no windows and is nearly impossible to destroy. Inside there are a great number of people, all of them sound asleep. They will soon suffocate and die. But they will die in their sleep, feeling no pain or sorrow. Suppose you were to shout, waking a number of them who are a bit more clear-headed, thereby bringing this unfortunate minority to an awareness of their irremediable predicament. Wouldn’t you owe them an apology? (qtd. in Liu, “The Village Schoolteacher” 127)

In a last futile effort before his death, the teacher insists that his uncomprehending students memorize Newton’s three laws of physics. The victors of the galactic war, meanwhile, are in the process of destroying vast areas of the galaxy to create “a 500-light-year-wide quarantine zone” (124) that will effectively immobilize their erstwhile enemies. Earth is spared destruction, however, because these same students, able to recite Newton’s physical laws, are a convincing proof to the aliens of humanity’s status as an intelligent “carbon-based civilization” (140).

“The Village Schoolteacher” is at once deeply sympathetic to and deeply ironic about the value of human endeavor in a universe of overwhelming contingency. The narration moves between the dismal insignificance of village life in China and an intergalactic history of unimaginable scale that evokes sublime vistas and vast distances. China’s children are responsible for saving the Earth, but this is an accidental salvation in the face of incomprehensible cosmic events. The teacher is buried by his students in an unmarked grave, while “a whole universe of dazzling stars look[s] silently at them” (140).

Mingwei Song suggests that Liu Cixin’s “master plot” is humanity’s “encounter with the unknown dimensions of the universe, a place that remains largely alien to human understanding” (“Preface” 11). The immensity of scale in stories such as “The Village Schoolteacher” radically reduces the significance of human action in the world even as it encourages the reader’s science-fictional sense of wonder. At the same time, Liu’s story remains firmly embedded in the everyday, dramatizing in “The Village Schoolteacher” his frustration at the impoverished lives of so many people in rural China. Driven by his own sense of wonder at the beauty of the physical universe, as he writes in his Afterword to The Three-Body Problem,

I’ve always felt that the greatest and most beautiful stories in the history of humanity were … told by science. The stories of science are more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional.…Only, these wonderful stories are locked in cold equations that most do not know how to read.

The creation myths of the various peoples and religions of the world pale when compared to the glory of the big bang. (Liu, Three-Body Problem)

In contrast to Liu Cixin’s wide-angle science fiction, Han Song’s “The Passengers and the Creator” is a bizarre tale of China’s future told in stifling close-up, strangely reminiscent of Western generation-starship stories in which all memory of the original purpose of the voyage has been lost. In Han’s story, which includes incidents of cannibalism and “perverse” sexuality, the Chinese people are confined to airplanes that endlessly circle the earth—thousands upon thousands of planes—and the people themselves have been reduced to programmed zombies, indoctrinated with false memories and “specialized education” (147) so that they have forgotten who they are: “We spend most of our time sitting still like potted plants, our countenances facing the same direction, expressionless as if carved from wood” (148). This is eerily like a technologically updated version of Lu Xun’s image of the Chinese people trapped and sleeping in an iron room: “in this World nothing matters” (Han 146).

The passengers on one of the planes begin to question their situation and eventually realize that the machine “has a limited lifespan…. The end will be upon us any day now” (166). In desperation, the narrator and protagonist causes the plane to crash. He is the only survivor. And, finally, both narrator and reader discover the truth of this strange dystopian existence:

I spy a group of black metal carapaces like cockroaches riding on four spinning wheels speeding toward me. They stop and surround me.…From inside the metal carapaces, a number of golden-haired, tin-white-skinned men leap out, speaking in a garbled tongue I cannot understand…. They raise some sort of metal sticks, aiming the ends at me. (172)

This is the story’s disorienting finale, this image of “white-skinned” soldiers, members of the nation, we are to assume, that has imprisoned the Chinese people and destroyed their history. The truth of the future is here the destruction of China by its Western “others.” The shock is double for Western readers who find themselves identified with the profoundly alien villains responsible for China’s ironically destructive “rise” in this future world.

“The rise of China” is commonly identified as a particular focus of contemporary Chinese science fiction. The entry on Han Song in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, for example, points out that his “recurring theme is the rise and possible supremacy of China in contention with the West, which Han often treats with an ambiguity of tone sure to confuse the authorities” (Clements). More broadly, in a recent overview published in the Global Times, Xuyang Jingjing notes that “The rise of China and the problems caused by its rapid development provide ample materials for science fiction writers to feed their imaginations.” Song’s “The Passengers and the Creators” presents readers with a particularly ironic and enigmatic story of China’s “rise.” Radically different from the sublime perspectives of Liu’s “The Village Schoolteacher,” Song firmly situates his aesthetic in the grotesque. Nevertheless, like Liu’s fiction it powerfully evokes the sense of wonder that is at the heart of science fiction as a narrative genre.

Third Estrangement: Chinese SF as Alternate History

In his essay for Science Fiction Studies on contemporary Chinese science fiction, Mingwei Song concludes that SF in China has found itself both speaking for and being silenced by “China’s century-long program of national development, social revolution, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Coloring outside Science Fiction’s Lines
• Part One. First Encounters
• Part Two. Fear of a Yellow Planet
• Part Three. Dis-Orienting Planets
• Contributors
• Index