Celestial Empire. Nathaniel Isaacson
of texts that make use of, rather than belong to, a genre (Rieder 2010, 197–199). In this light, it is most useful to ask what SF was at a given historical moment and geographical location, and what critical, social, or political purposes it served, rather than to seek universalizing definitions.
Milner identifies imperialism as one of the constituent elements of SF but ultimately concludes that social transformations wrought by technological innovation and the dialectic of enlightenment and romanticism are the most salient topoi of SF as a global genre. However, in the case of late Qing China, I argue that Orientalism and imperialism were indeed the most conspicuous themes. For this reason, before we are able to move on to an examination of the ways in which China’s semicolonial status shaped the emergence and thematic content of early Chinese SF, the various media and narrative modes that were particular to the emergence of the genre in China, and an analysis of the texts themselves, it is necessary to explicate the relationship between SF and imperialism.
Imperialism and SF
The historical conditions outlined in the introduction apply equally to the literary field of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Fictional depictions of exploration in the work of authors like H. Rider Haggard brought the imaginary horizons of imperial expansion home for readers, inspiring new generations of young imperial subjects to join in the effort (Katz, 1–3, 108–112). Romantic genres like adventure and SF were central to this self-reinforcing impetus to expansion, catalysts fueled by and that in turn helped to fuel the growing sphere of imperial influence. Dreams of material and intellectual rewards of conquest provided ample source material for authors of a number of genres. In turn, this imagination paved the way for and fueled the desire for continued efforts of exploration and conquest. The imaginary horizons of the twentieth century were heavily influenced by the exchanges between Europe and Asia. These exchanges were source material for early European SF, which in turn helped to broaden the literary and intellectual horizons of East Asian countries like China and Japan.
Quoting William Blake in Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said noted that “empire follows art, and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose” (Said 1993, 13).4 Empire is as dependent on the intellectual rationalization that sustains its mission as it is upon the military force necessary to carry out the act of physical conquest. Framed in terms of enlightenment, emancipation, and benevolent paternalism, the justifications for going to war and for continued occupation are as involved as the actual moment of conquest itself. Indeed, this rationalization, however untenable, is dependent on masking military conquest with the façade of moral good and humanitarian aid. Or, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri put it, “Empire is formed not on the basis of force itself, but on the capacity to present force as being in the service of right and peace” (Hardt and Negri, 15).
Recent work in the vein of Said’s critique of Orientalism has shown that SF was one of many genres that paved the way for empire by creating the conditions for its popular imagination. The wish-fulfillment narratives of science and adventure fiction served as primers describing how young men of ambition might contribute to and partake in the spoils of conquest. The imaginary horizons of imperial expansion were brought to the minds of readers of romantic genres of adventure and SF in the work of authors like H. Rider Haggard and Daniel Defoe, inspiring new generations of young imperial subjects to join in the effort. Images of men of action—explorers, engineers, soldiers, and sailors—were intended to be the role models of a new generation of imperial actors (Richards, 1–6; Mathison, 173–174). In Meiji Japan, translations of science fiction and adventure novels served as tools for establishing an imaginary horizon that valorized the mission of exploration and conquest, priming young men for their participation in what would eventually become Japan’s own effort at imperial expansion, the “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere.”
The global relations that led to the emergence of SF mirror those that swung late nineteenth-century China from an empire at the center of Asian trade and tribute to a semicolonial outpost at the margins of European empire. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay suggests that three factors were critical to the emergence of SF: “the technological expansion that drove real imperialism, the need felt by national audiences for literary-cultural mediation as their societies were transformed from historical nations into hegemons, and the fantastic model of achieved techno-scientific Empire” (Csicsery-Ronay 2003, 231).
These three factors reiterate Said’s vision of the novel writ large as a literary form functionally tied to the comprehension of expanding networks of global trade and domination, spurred on and enabled by industrial production in the context of the genre of SF in particular. Csicsery-Ronay identifies a positive correlation between SF and imperialism, recognizing Britain, France, Germany, the former Soviet Union, Japan, and the United States as the primary producers and consumers of SF, arguing that SF has been driven by a desire for “transformation of imperialism into Empire” (232). The geopolitical imagination of SF is intimately concerned with the imagination of a historical teleology leading to an all-encompassing world order.5 As empire is the imaginary political horizon of SF, Orientalism is a major influence on its discursive content. John Rieder’s Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (2008) adds to this critique an explanation of the historical conditions that tied Orientalism to SF. Colonial expansion and the simultaneous establishment of European capitalism on a global scale were driving forces in the emergence of the genre. Orientalist discourse strove to define inequalities often produced by the colonial project as the natural outcome of preexisting difference; SF served at turns to reinforce these notions, and at others to subvert them.
Two aspects of the construction of a world-embracing capitalist economy are particularly relevant to the relation between colonialism and the emergence of science fiction. The first is the realignment of local identities that accompanied the restructuring of the world economy…. What the dominant ideology recognized as the relation between civilization and savagery, and between modernity and its past, can be read at least in part as a misrecognition of the corrosive effects of capitalist social relations on the traditional cultures of colonized populations and territories. Understanding the non-Western world as an earlier stage of Western social development, in this line of interpretation, serves the apologetic function of naturalizing the relation of the industrialized economic core to the colonial periphery and rendering its effects as the working out of an inexorable, inevitable historical process. But the scientific study of other cultures—what Derrida calls the decentering of Europe as the culture of reference—is intimately bound up with the same economic process. I therefore will be arguing both that the ideological misrecognition of the effects of economic and political inequality has a strong presence in the ideas about progress and modernity that circulate throughout early science fiction, and also that early science fiction often works against such ethnocentrism. (Rieder 2008, 26)
In many cases, colonialism did not merely recognize inequalities in technological, economic, or social development; it actively produced and benefited from those inequalities.6 The visibility of these inequalities in turn led to the establishment of both discourses that naturalized and discourses that called into question the centrality of European cultural systems.
Second, in the creation of a “world-embracing capitalist economy,” Rieder emphasizes the emergence of a reading public interested in the “vicarious enjoyment of colonial spoils, as attested to in Victorian England by the popularity of travel accounts and adventure stories…. The early science fiction reading audience—middle class, educated, and provided with leisure—seems to be one well placed to put into action the consumerism at the heart of modern mass culture” (2008, 27–28). The material transformations of the industrial revolution heralded a new age of mass production and mass consumption and helped to create an audience for SF. Roger Luckhurst enumerates a similar set of conditions to those identified by Rieder: a growing population of readers with at least a primary education; the replacement of popular literary forms like the penny dreadful and the dime novel with new serial formats that demanded formal innovation; a growing class of individuals who had received technical education and training, whose education made them more likely to “confront traditional loci of cultural authority”; and the immediate visibility of cultural transformations brought about by the increasing role of mechanical production in daily life (Luckhurst, 16–17). The industrial economy demanded a segment of the workforce