Celestial Empire. Nathaniel Isaacson
prominent in “Mr. Braggadocio” is the degree to which the narrator’s resistance of Western science contrasts with his ready appropriation of the tenets of capitalist accumulation of wealth, as his success in perfecting the techniques of “brain electricity” ultimately lead to a global economic collapse and to the author’s own demise.
In chapter 6, “Lao She’s City of Cats,” I examine the ways in which the concerns of late Qing SF authors continued to be relevant in SF writing of the Republican period. In the wake of World War I and in the buildup to the second Sino-Japanese War, Lao She’s allegory for Chinese society set on a Martian landscape reiterates many of the themes explored in earlier chapters but with an even greater sense of urgency and futility. Lao She addressed a now decades-long sense of crisis with the familiar metaphors of physical illness and failed cures. Like its late Qing counterparts, Lao She’s narrative is an allegorical presentation of China’s tradition and attempts to come to terms with Western epistemology. This allegorical vision is enabled through the device of the (crashed) spaceship, allowing the narrator to see China at an estranged distance. Paralleling Wu Jianren, the story paints Chinese tradition with a revealing and deeply critical ethnographic brush, depicting almost every cultural institution as a resounding failure. At the same time, the story presents attempts to adapt new ideas and technologies as an equally resounding failure.
Chapter 7, “Whither SF / Wither SF,” diverges from the analysis of works of fiction in earlier chapters in order to argue that adequately periodizing and theorizing Chinese SF necessitates accounting for the relationship between the genre and preexisting literary forms. A vexing problem for scholars of Chinese SF is the fact that the genre has weathered a number of high and low tides, and that many of the lowest tides for Chinese SF have come during moments of revolutionary utopian political change. Previous studies have attempted to show the relationship between SF and premodern fantastic tropes but have largely ignored the question of literary form. In my examination of scientific images appearing in the late Qing pictorial Dianshizhai huabao, I argue that accounts of science both real and fictional drew on premodern genres from the biji and zhiguai tradition. I examine the ways in which left-wing intellectuals of the May Fourth and New Culture Movements were engaged in a reassessment of the goals, means, and content of scientific popularization. In the popular science publications of the period, and in contemporaneous critical examinations of such writing, emphasis shifted from natural to social sciences, and from the production and publication of specialized expertise to the dissemination of more readily accessible explanations of the science of everyday life. Just like their late Qing predecessors, writers of the twenties and thirties were ambivalent about the resurrection of old forms and literary styles. Leftist advocates of popular education in the social sciences championed repurposing the xiaopin essay, arguing that a formerly elite genre of private appreciation could be adopted to serve the purpose of popular education. The utopian focus of nonfiction popular science writing from this period stands in stark contrast to Lao She’s Cat Country.
1
GENRE TROUBLE
DEFINING SCIENCE FICTION
The following chapter presents a summary of recent trends in the field of SF studies and offers some initial observations on their germaneness to early Chinese SF. These observations are developed more thoroughly in the close readings and historical accounts that follow in chapters 2 through 6. I do not intend to force Chinese SF at the turn of the twentieth century into a universalizing theoretical framework, nor am I making an Orientalist argument positing the exceptionality of “SF with Chinese characteristics.” Rather, what follows is meant to demonstrate that Chinese cultural studies and SF studies have much to offer each other. Though the readings of Chinese SF that emerge from these theoretical foundations often deviate from them in significant ways, I find these areas of disciplinary convergence and divergence to be useful points of departure both in coming to terms with the local emergence of Chinese SF and in contributing to the understanding of SF as a global phenomenon.
In the words of James Gunn, “The most important, and most divisive, issue in SF is definition” (Gunn and Candelaria, 5), an opinion reflected in a number of recent studies of the genre (Vint and Bould; Milner 2012; Latham 2014; Gunn, Barr, and Candelaria; Luckhurst). Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (1979) remains one of the most repeated and widely accepted definitions of the genre. Suvin’s linear history of the genre and its constituent elements, and his definition of SF as “a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment” (Suvin, 7), have been fundamental in part because they served as the conceptual framework for the journal Science Fiction Studies, which he helped to cofound in 1973 (Luckhurst, 7). Andrew Milner notes that Suvin’s work is the “core critical approach specific to the genre, against which almost everything else has been obliged to define itself,” and that Suvin’s work plays a significant role in theoretical interventions on the genre written by Carl Freedman (2000) and Fredric Jameson (2005) (Milner 2012, 1–2). John Rieder’s history of the study of the genre, “On Defining SF, or Not: Genre Theory, SF and History,” indicates this as well (Rieder 2010, 192).
Many Chinese-language studies of SF follow in making recourse to Suvin’s definition, occasionally pointing to premodern utopias or fables of technology as local predecessors of the genre (Lin Jianqun; Rao Zhonghua; Wu Yan; Wang Jianyun and Chen Jieshi). In practical terms, if one were to ask a store clerk to point to the SF section in a bookstore in Shanghai, she would be likely to find herself in familiar but not entirely identical territory, owing to the contingencies of local historical and social conditions. SF works in China are often sandwiched in the children’s section, and this is reflected in the ages of those browsing the shelves. Implicit in the suggestion that they are for children is that they are marginalia—horror, fantasy, and mystery are often nearby, but SF rarely finds its way onto “literature” (wenxue) shelves. Chinese SF marketing, like that of its Western counterpart, often emphasizes newness: one is unlikely to find a reprint of a Qing-era SF novel, save for commemorative editions.1 The SF shelves in a bookstore in China are also very likely to emphasize translated works. This is a reflection both of the perceived exoticism of the genre and of the market forces that push many forms of contemporary genre fiction off bookshelves and onto the Internet. The apparent familiarity of the above generalizations regarding critical trends and market forces influencing the study of Chinese SF makes it all the more important to be cognizant of what is at stake when—to mangle Damon Knight—we point to a work and say, “This is Chinese science fiction.”2
The Cultural Field
Recent reformulations of genre theory have turned to an understanding of SF as a historically and culturally contingent category: a “selective tradition” (Milner 2012, 202) characterized by shifting and contentious formulations resulting from various critical claims and modes. These studies have in various ways moved away from attempts to define a fixed object of study, in favor of framing SF as a mutable category acknowledging a wide range of media and practices of production and consumption (Vint and Bould; Gunn, Barr, and Candelaria; Milner 2012; Rieder 2010). These definitions draw particularly on Rick Altman’s “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre” (1984, 1999) and Raymond Williams’s sociological analysis of cultural production (1979, 1980) in understanding SF as a historically situated and socially conditioned constellation of forces of production and consumption. Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture (2006), which demonstrates how narrative content pollinates “across multiple media platforms,” and Marc Steinberg’s development of this concept as “media convergence,” similarly contribute to an understanding of the ways in