Celestial Empire. Nathaniel Isaacson
questions asked in the chapter headings of Andrew Milner’s Locating Science Fiction (2012) to be particularly useful in coming to terms with the emergence of SF in late Qing China. In brief, I find Milner’s work arguing that SF is a selective tradition, defining a whole field of cultural products best defined by their shared tropes and topoi rather than their formal qualities, to be useful in understanding the constituent elements of early Chinese SF.25 The question “Where Was Science Fiction?” is answered, as in Milner, in turning toward world systems theory and the work of Immanuel Wallerstein and Franco Moretti; but I also find Tani Barlow, Meng Yue, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and a number of others who have oriented China’s recent history in terms of a dynamic global political economy to be informative in specifying where Chinese science fiction originated. I find Milner’s response to the question “When Was Science Fiction?”—that in the nineteenth century “the Industrial Revolution decisively and definitively redefined science into an intensely practical activity inextricably productive of new technologies, in the everyday rather than the Heideggerian sense” (Milner 2012, 139)—and John Rieder’s analysis of the relationship between industrial modernity, colonialism, and early science fiction to be similarly applicable to the emergence of the genre in China, even though attitudes toward science and technology were markedly different. Finally, I also follow Milner’s “The Uses of Science Fiction” as it examines the ways in which SF has been “politically or morally effective” and, to this end, how it is “socially useful” (Milner 2012, 18) in the Chinese case. The features, functions, and forms identified in sketching the limits of a genre are subject to shifting ideological and aesthetic trends. Exploring the intersections between genres and the material and social circumstances that produced them has the potential to contribute to the question of canon formation in the national and transnational perspective.
In their essay “There Is No Such Thing as Science Fiction,” Sheryl Vint and Mark Bould likewise argue that SF has never been a single, clearly delineated body of work but is instead the result of various cultural forces by which the meaning of SF is constantly subject to negotiation. However, they trenchantly note that it is impossible to come to a full understanding of SF “without simultaneously acknowledging its erasures of women and indigenous people and its suppression of the human costs of colonization” (Vint and Bould, 48). Recent work by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay (2003), Patricia Kerslake (2007), and John Rieder (2008) elucidates the relationship between SF and imperial discourse, and these works are especially informative when applied to the case of early Chinese SF, given its emergence in the context of colonial modernity. SF is one of many genres for which specific definitions are elusive, despite readers’ and critics’ certitude that they know it when they see it. SF encompasses a wide range of literary forms; while features such as technology as a central device to the development and resolution of plot are common, I contend that they are not necessary and sufficient conditions. It is for this reason that I argue in favor of a functional definition of the genre, one that reads SF as intimately concerned with the ideologies and discourses of empire. Drawing upon this work, I propose that Chinese SF be examined through the same lens. In so doing, this work contributes to the critique of colonial modernity writ large, adds nuance to a promising avenue of inquiry for SF studies, and seeks to understand how Orientalist discourse is apprehended from the perspective of the other.
Chapter 2, “Lu Xun, Science, Fiction,” demonstrates how Lu Xun’s essays on science and SF, and his translations of Jules Verne, serve as a useful point of departure in understanding intellectual approaches to scientific knowledge, the written word, and the role of SF in the wide spectrum of experimental genres popularized during the late Qing. I argue that Lu Xun’s early work can be understood in part in terms of the “knowledge industry,” as an effort to write an encyclopedic history of Western thought. Historical developments in the knowledge industry that soon followed illustrate the ways in which Lu Xun was representative of China’s cultural zeitgeist. Like previous literary historians, I share the attitude that Lu Xun is one of the most significant Chinese authors of the twentieth century, if not the most important, and that his work is representative of a number of key transitions and literary themes of modern Chinese literature. However, it is imperative that this understanding of Lu Xun expand its focus in two principal ways. First, I demonstrate that Lu Xun’s critique of China’s national character, and many of the most vivid metaphors of this critique, can be identified as already prevalent in the work of other prominent late Qing writers. This is by no means intended to diminish the status of Lu Xun; rather, in understanding the ways in which he was working with a set of tropes that could already be seen in wide circulation in popular media, we may come to view Lu Xun as having aggregated and articulated a series of concerns that were already prominent in the popular imagination. As such, Lu Xun’s status as the representative of a generation is reinforced, rather than diminished. Second, I show that Lu Xun’s work prior to the publication of “Diary of a Madman” (Kuangren riji) in 1918, especially his early essays on science and evolution, is also vitally important and deserves greater attention. This body of work helps us both to uncover the labor pains associated with the emergence of vernacular literature, and to understand more clearly the relationship between science and the intellectual formulations of twentieth-century China.
Chapter 3, “Wu Jianren and Late Qing SF,” presents an extended, close reading of Wu Jianren’s New Story of the Stone (Xin shitou ji). While this work was not the first work of SF to be produced by a Chinese author, it is both one of the most comprehensive visions of late Qing society and one of the most complete visions of a Chinese utopia. Furthermore, as it is one of the most widely read and analyzed texts of the late Qing, a rereading of New Stone permits me to frame my analysis of the thematic content of late Qing SF in the context of a familiar work. I argue that both the first half of the novel, which takes place in Shanghai at the turn of the century, and the second half of the novel are marked by a sense of estrangement that has been identified as a key component of SF. One prominent theme of the novel is the pervasive sense of crisis and the inability to imagine lasting solutions to China’s semicolonial subjugation. Another leitmotif is a confrontation with China’s own past and its mythical tradition, and I examine the implications of an encounter with the alien other when that beast is one’s own tradition. The tropes relevant to Lu Xun’s work both before and after the publication of A Call to Arms (Nahan, 1922) and those that appear in New Stone serve as the critical and theoretical foundation that I deploy in my analysis of subsequent works of Chinese SF throughout the twentieth century. This sense of crisis, the confrontation with the past, and the prefiguration of many of Lu Xun’s most damning images of Chinese society are features of New Stone that appear regularly throughout the entire body of early twentieth-century SF from China.
Chapter 4, “SF for the Nation,” examines the leitmotif of colonial incursion in Huangjiang Diaosou’s Tales of the Moon Colony (Yueqiu zhimindi xiaoshuo), and the relationship between early Chinese SF and canonical modern Chinese literature. The anxieties associated with utopianism, nationalism, and Occidentalism visible in early Chinese SF prefigure a number of tropes of canonical Chinese fiction and Lu Xun’s metaphors of a sick national body and a cannibalistic society. The most prominent tropes of this early work remain relevant to the modern literary canon, demonstrating that while SF has waxed and waned in popularity, its thematic concerns and imagery remain central to modern Chinese literature.
In chapter 5, “Making Room for Science,” through an examination of Xu Nianci’s “New Tales of Mr. Braggadocio” (“Xin faluo xiansheng tan,” 1904), I demonstrate how late Qing intellectuals envisioned the usurpation of scientific knowledge, and what limitations on overturning Western epistemologies emerged in his work. As a sequel to a translation of a translation, the story is a case study in the linguistic negotiations central to Lydia Liu’s Translingual Practice. The story depicts the contested intellectual ground of the late Qing as a case of double consciousness through which the narrator’s body and soul explore alternate versions of evolution and scientific knowledge. Thematically and linguistically, the text offers up a number of potential points of resistance to