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SFRA Review is the flagship publication of the Science Fiction Research Association since 1971.

Images of Alternative Chinese Futures: Critical Reflections on the “China Dream” in Chen Qiufan’s “The Flower of Shazui”

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 50, no. 2-3

Special Issue: Alternative Sinofuturisms (中华未来主义)

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Images of Alternative Chinese Futures: Critical Reflections on the “China Dream” in Chen Qiufan’s “The Flower of Shazui”

Frederike Schneider-Vielsäcker
Freie Universität Berlin / Germany

Since the late Qing dynasty (1644–1911), Chinese science fiction (SF) literature has been a reflection of intellectuals’ expectations, dreams and, lately, also fears of the Chinese future. Contemporary Chinese SF authors not only explore the complex reality of twenty-first century China, but also critically comment on official visions and policy guidelines such as the “China Dream” (Zhongguo meng 中国梦). Consequently, they have taken the genre to the next level which is, according to Song Mingwei, “more sophisticated, reflective, and subversive in terms of mixed representations of hope and despair, utopianism and its dystopian reflection, and nationalism and cosmopolitanism” (“After 1989” 8). David Der-wei Wang describes this hybrid form of narration as “heterotopia,” thus adapting Foucault’s concept to Chinese SF (“Utopia”). Based on the literary quality and narrative techniques of contemporary Chinese SF authors which, in a way, resemble the Anglo-American SF tradition of the 1960s, Song has termed this new generation of SF writers the Chinese “new wave” (8).

This paper discusses the short story “The Flower of Shazui” (Shazui zhi hua 沙嘴之花, 2012) by Chen Qiufan (陈楸帆, b. 1981) which can be linked to president Xi Jinping’s (习近平, b. 1953) political program and his vision of realizing the “China Dream.” I argue that, in consequence of a recent increase in domestic and international readership as well as large-scale media attention, SF literature extensively circulates challenging alternative images of the Chinese future that are demystifying the state’s grand narrative of a flourishing China.

Since his inauguration in 2012, president Xi Jinping has defined the “China Dream” as the generic national dream. His great vision includes every Chinese individual, since he regards it as “the shared hope and expectation of every Chinese” (Lin)1—thus making it a collective dream. Xi further emphasized that the “China Dream” is to “achieve the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” and has given assurances that a more just distribution of wealth could be achieved by 2021, the 100th anniversary of the CCP (Lin). In so doing, he has employed a powerful political metaphor for China’s future as a global superpower that had already been on people’s minds since at least the 2008 Beijing Olympics, which campaigned under the slogan, “One World One Dream” (Tong yige shijie tong yige mengxiang 同一个世界同一个梦想) (Barmé 7–8). The nation-wide propagation of the “China Dream” has generated a controversial public dialogue among Chinese netizens calling for political reform and media freedom (Barmé 9–12; Bandurski).

Contemporary Chinese SF authors are expanding this discussion of the dream’s potential risks. For example, Chen Qiufan states that “[b]etween the feeling of individual failure and the conspicuous display of national prosperity lies an unbridgeable chasm” (“The Torn” 373). Most of his narrations are set in the near future and focus on China in an era of economic and social transition. For illustrating everyday life in a realistic way and getting to the bottom of people’s complex innermost being, his writing style is regarded as “Science Fiction Realism” (Kehuan xianshi zhuyi 科幻现实主义) (He). By criticizing global capitalism and social issues (e.g. income inequalities), Chen’s images of alternative Chinese futures send out a warning to his readers. His unique and sophisticated aesthetics satirically visualize China’s rapid modernization as something that is already leaving irreversible marks on the bodies and souls of the Chinese people—the metaphor of body modifications is used to address society’s corruption caused by increasing commercialization. Hence, Chen’s works are characteristic of the Chinese “new wave” writers.

Recent scholarship highlights the fact that contemporary Chinese SF stories reveal a hidden reality and can be interpreted in the context of the “China Dream” (Conn; Rojas, 39; Song, “Representations” 560; Schneider-Vielsäcker 59–60). In addition, scholars have emphasized the cultural and political implications of contemporary Chinese SF (Healey; Li; Luo; Song, “After 1989”, “Variations”; Y. Wang). Building on this research, I seek to answer how Chen’s SF writings assess the “China Dream” and what kinds of alternative images they provide. By reading his short story “The Flower of Shazui” (2012) in comparison to the state’s official vision, I demonstrate the existing tensions between the grand narrative of the “China Dream” and Chen’s alternative.

Living in an Illusion of Social Happiness

The downsides of China’s large-scale urbanization are disclosed in the short story “The Flower of Shazui” (Shazui zhi hua 沙嘴之花, 2012)2 by Chen Qiufan. This story critically reflects urban life in the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) of Shenzhen and the gap between rich and poor that is omnipresent in post-reform Chinese society. Focusing on low-income earners, Chen gives a voice to those unheard by the official narrative. The main characters are mostly ordinary people living in Shazui, a former village which today is part of Shenzhen’s urban area. The unnamed first person narrator is a former engineer with a secret past who sells the latest technology. We become acquainted with his landlady Miss Shen (沈) who, like many people in Shazui, depends on working multiple jobs to be able to afford the basic standard of living. Finally, we are also introduced to the narrator’s neighbor and love interest, Snow Lotus (Xuelian 雪莲), who is a sex worker.

This near-future story portrays the real development of Shenzhen since the 1980s. However, it is enriched with fictional elements to create an image showing the negative developments that reality could possibly lead to. In the wake of economic reforms and the opening up of China, the SEZ of Shenzhen was established in 1980 (Yuan et al. 55). Urbanization brought construction sites everywhere, thus the former fishing village expanded to one of the fastest growing global cities in China and functioned as its first “open door” to the international market (Morssink). Over the years, Shenzhen has developed into a hub for China’s high-tech industries (Yuan et al. 62). This transformation attracted many migrant workers. In order to relieve border controls between Hong Kong and mainland China, a 2.8 meter high fence was built and divided the city into two worlds: “the inside” (guannei 关内, i.e. the SEZ) and “the outside” (guanwai 关外). The latter is described by the protagonist as “wilderness” (manhuang 蛮荒)—a part of Shenzhen that is not only characterized by its low-income population but also by criminals who rule the streets (Chen, “Shazui” 29). The fictional fence can be understood as a literary trope for the gap between rich and poor in Chinese society.

A negative perception of urbanization is expressed by employing the trope of cancer cells and by means of exaggeration. Living within the enclosed area himself, the narrator describes the rapid development from his point of view: “I imagine these buildings growing as fast as cancer cells into the form they have today” (25). The skyscrapers leave so little space in between that neighbors are able to shake hands (25). Moreover, the real estate market grows rapidly, leading to a daily rent increase of even small and dark apartments (26). The negative effects of urbanization are strongly emphasized by comparing urbanization processes with invasive cancer, where the malignant tumor rapidly spreads into neighboring healthy tissues, which eventually could cause death. Since cancer is a disease (involving the abnormal growth of endogenous cells) that destroys the body from the inside, the trope implies that it is a home-grown problem that can be traced back to the period of “reform and opening-up” (gaige kaifang 改革开放), and that China’s continuous striving for economic development will eventually have fatal consequences.

As the location of Shenzhen is a symbol of China’s rise, the strongest trope in this story is that of the “Shenzhen Dream,” which is “high-tech, high salary, high-resolution, high life, high Shenzhen” (25). The “Shenzhen Dream” can be directly linked to the “China Dream,” providing an example where this dream is already lived. Everywhere in the city, the protagonist sees an “illusory sense of satisfaction” on people’s faces and calls it the “Shenzhen expression“—even politicians appearing on TV have it (28). In the story, society experiences the dream through everything money can buy: high-end luxury goods such as Louis Vuitton bags, sex with beautiful women, consumption of aphrodisiacs, or seeing the fortune-teller. In addition, the metaphor of body modifications is used to visualize society’s moral degeneration caused by the increasing commercialization. The residents of Shenzhen all aspire to earn a lot of money, and the display of social status has become street culture. Using the latest technology of “body films” applied to their skin, the wearers are able to show off their personality, daring, and sex appeal to others (26). The protagonist was once just like them, but the disenchantment of reality made him wake up from the dream, leaving him with a feeling of emptiness: “my heart is like a dead pool of water“ (32). This metaphor suggests that Xi Jinping’s maxim is nothing but a hollow promise to legitimize the country’s communist leadership and that in the long run there will be no decisive changes towards social equality. Like the “China Dream,” the “Shenzhen Dream” is supposed to give people satisfaction, but in fact, Chen’s narrative reveals it to be a mere distraction from the dark truth. The dream—be it the “Shenzhen Dream” or the “China Dream”—turns out to be a placebo effect as both the city’s residents and Chinese politicians all live in an illusion of happiness: “In this city, everyone needs some placebo” (28).

Ultimately, the story gives an example of what might happen when Chinese people wake from the “China Dream” and, upon realizing that the leadership only uses empty rhetoric, feel a sense of deep sadness. Death is presented as the only option to escape “reality’s battlefield,” since the ostensible joy of living the dream actually fades after a short while (26). This manifests in Snow Lotus’ bitter fate. The protagonist’s neighbor is afraid to tell her husband that she is pregnant because he might beat her like he did in the past. However, after being encouraged by both Miss Shen and the narrator, she tells him anyway (32). Not believing that the child is his, he threatens her with a knife. As a result of lifelong unhappiness, Snow Lotus eventually kills her furious husband in an act of despair and attempts suicide. According to Luo Xiaoming, descriptions of the city in contemporary Chinese SF, in this case Shenzhen, “bring to light harbored feelings of helplessness, cynicism and even self-justification upon realization that their ideas and/or opinions cannot be realized and that, ultimately, they cannot change the status-quo” (595). “Death is the best placebo,” the narrator concludes sarcastically, while the police are arresting Snow Lotus, regretting that he was not able to help her (35). By associating the “China Dream” with death—as “China Dream” equals placebo and placebo equals death—the text highlights the potential risks of the CCP’s political tool.

In summary, this story depicts the losers of China’s rapid development and the alternative image shows how these individuals struggle at the margins of society in Shenzhen. In contrast to the state’s grand narratives, “The Flower of Shazui” does not present a typical success story as dreams turn out to be dangerous illusions.

Coda: From State Utopia to Nightmarish Alternatives

Contrary to the determined future that is controlled by the government, “The Flower of Shazui” provides an alternative look into a possible Chinese future. The story points out the negative consequences of China’s rapid urbanization on society and highlights the helplessness of ordinary Chinese individuals as the main characters are permeated with unhappiness. The central motifs of the story are the gap between rich and poor and death as a consequence of China’s rapid urbanization or as an escape out of reality’s misery. According to an interview, Chen draws his inspiration from his own experiences and environment (Liu). When observing the people from his generation, he senses “a feeling of exhaustion about life and anxiety for success” (“The Torn” 373). Instead of a “shared hope” for the future propagated by the “China Dream,” Chen perceives that “the burdens on their shoulders grow heavier year after year and their dreams and hopes are fading” (373).

My analysis suggests that, in the shadow of the optimistic “China Dream” narrative, a social discourse nurtured by critical voices, one that includes Chen Qiufan, exists. “The Flower of Shazui” challenges the state’s grand narrative by deconstructing the collective dreamscape. The story further dismantles the myth around economic growth which is, according to Song (“Variations” 91), a characteristic of contemporary Chinese SF. Through Chen’s narrative, representations of Chinese dreams are transformed from official utopian visions to nightmarish alternatives. The alerting message is further highlighted by employing a cynical language, giving his narrator an angry voice, and by using powerful literary tropes that convey its political implications—the located dream as Shenzhen, the trope of death, and the dream as a placebo for social happiness. The story can therefore be read as a satire of Xi Jinping’s maxim. Positive notions of the official “China Dream” narrative such as the hope of an ever-bright Chinese future are clearly undermined by the alternative images Chen creates. Like malignant cancer cells, China’s unbalanced model of economic growth equals a death sentence for many people. In the meantime, they are sedated with a placebo to sustain the harmonious society.

NOTES

1. All translations of Chinese primary texts are my own. When translating the cited passages from “The Flower of Shazui,” the English translation of Ken Liu has been considered. I honor his literary translations; however, I decided to do my own translation. Please note that my aim is rather to analyze the original texts and therefore to provide a literal translation instead of a literary translation.

2. Ken Liu’s English translation first appeared in Interzone in 2012 and was later included in his anthology Invisible Planets (2016), see Chen (“The Flower”). A bilingual reprint was issued online in Strange Horizons (2017).

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Chinese Science Fiction: A Genre of Adversity

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 50, no. 2-3

Special Issue: Alternative Sinofuturisms (中华未来主义)

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Chinese Science Fiction: A Genre of Adversity

Yen Ooi
Royal Holloway, University of London / UK

Most, if not all Chinese science fiction scholars will agree on two things; that the current form of science fiction from China can be traced back to a starting point in 1989 that “signaled the arrival of a new wave in Chinese science fiction” (Song 8); and that the science fiction genre is originally a Western genre,1 in that “Science, technology, and modernization are not characteristic of Chinese culture” (Han 20). In accepting these two points, we can start to recognise that Chinese science fiction is a genre that was born in crisis and continues to grow through hardship—it is a genre of adversity.

In China, science fiction isn’t a mainstream genre, but is growing, and getting recognition in part due to the international limelight that it has received over the last few years. The relationship between the Western genre and its Chinese writers have inadvertently brought science fiction from China together with science fiction by Chinese diaspora writers, led by Asian-American writers.

The culmination of Chinese science fiction by writers from China and diaspora writers created a genre that highlights a duality, of “Chinese-ness” and the (Western) science fiction genre itself. All writers who delve into this form of cultural literature must navigate both, and both come with their own baggage. 

Chinese science fiction started to receive notable attention in the West, especially in the United Kingdom and America, when Liu Cixin, “The most prominent and popular SF writer of the recent renaissance” (Han 17) won the Hugo Award in 2015 for The Three-Body Problem. It was the first translated novel to do so, and it is crucial to note that the translator was the Chinese-American writer Ken Liu, who, a few years before, had earned his own Hugo Award (2012) and a Nebula Award (2011) for his short story, “The Paper Menagerie.” Ken Liu’s achievements are important to note here because with them, he rallied his fans in China by being “the second Chinese-American after Ted Chiang to win major SF awards in the United States” (Han 15). Both these writers created a desire for more Chinese science fiction in China, Europe and America. They had set the stage for their colleagues to follow.

This new wave in Chinese science fiction as described by Professor Song, “is more sophisticated, reflective, and subversive in terms of mixed representation of hope and despair, utopianism and its dystopian reflection, and nationalism and cosmopolitanism” (8) making the genre the “cultural currency of contemporary Chinese literature as the most accurate lens through which to view and truly understand China” (Chau 113).

However, despite this cultural currency, Chinese science fiction isn’t a natural development in Chinese literature. Han Song sees the values of science fiction (which he characterises as: science, technology, and modernization) to be alien entities to writers from China. “If we [writers from China] buy into them, we turn ourselves into monsters, and that is the only way we can get along with Western notions of progress” (Han 20). He also suggests that “science fiction is perceived as inconsequential [in China] because it is unable to solve real-life problems. And the government can step in if it seems that the genre has gone too far conceptually” (Han 21). This means that science fiction writers in China are outsiders to the genre, dabbling in a Western concept only so far as it is not seen as a threat by their own government.

This duality that writers in China have to work with isn’t new to Chinese diaspora writers internationally. They have been writing with this duality, by choosing to include their personal cultural experiences in stories that still fit the expectations of the science fiction genre. Whether the works are written in English, or translated from Chinese to English, writers and translators alike are aware of the cultural imbalance global literature presents, where “Educated Chinese readers are expected not only to know about all the Chinese references—history, language, culture, all this stuff—but to be well-versed in Western references as well. A Chinese reader can decode an American work with far greater facility than an American reader can decode a Chinese work, on average” (Pandell).

Han Song’s comment above came from a paper published in 2013, since when “in 2016, China’s State Council announced a four-year plan for promoting scientific literacy among its citizens, including a step-by-step process for popularizing science through the production of SF.” Writers in China are encouraged to inspire teenagers with their quality writing, and “to popularize scientific learning and to contribute to China’s status as a world technology power” (Chau 115). This doesn’t remove the problem that Han Song had noted. However, it constituted an official endorsement of the need for China to participate in the production of science fiction, of ‘Western progress.’ Looking back, the four-year plan can probably be deemed successful, as Chinese science fiction (notably through works by Liu Cixin and Ken Liu) began to attract new and more influential readers internationally, not least Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg both of whom endorsed Liu Cixin’s trilogy in 2017 (Frank). This coincided with a time when China started to be more active in cultural exportation (Sun). According to some critics, genre fiction (including science fiction), finds itself at a considerable advantage in reshaping cultural mediascape after all. (Chau 123)

This exportation of Chinese science fiction, a modern genre reflecting China’s growing role in the world economy, is best viewed in conjunction with a broader process of cultural commodification, or as modern Chinese literature scholar Angie Chau sees it, a process of cultural deterioration (113) in Chinese literature, where “the Chinese had suddenly discovered that books, even literary works, could be treated as commodities to be mass produced, advertised, and sold for profit” (Kong 4). As the world started to get to know China more through Chinese science fiction, China started to experience a change in their own cultural production, as literary journals—a crucial cog to the publishing industry in China in the past—moved from being socialist state-sponsored institutions to market-oriented cultural enterprises. As the older journals learn to grapple with the market economy (locally and then internationally), they also meet new competition from popular and genre fiction journals, triggering the contention between high and low art in Chinese literature production. And typically, science fiction—as genre fiction—is considered a popular, low art.

The drastic turns in Chinese literature reflect what writer Chen Qiufan calls the “drastic transformation and fracture between different social forms.” Chen explains that in a hundred years, China’s progression rate outmatched any of the progress from the West that took over centuries to complete. “From the late Qing dynasty to the Republic of China, to the founding of the People’s Republic of China, to learning from the Soviet Union, to the reform and opening up, every stage lasted only about a few decades” (Sun).

The West, with American media at its forefront responded to this whirlwind progress by presenting their anxieties through “techno-Orientalism”: “the phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo- or hyper-technological terms in cultural productions and political discourse” —of “an ‘Orient’ undergoing rapid economic and cultural transformations” (Roh et al. 2 & 3). As Chinese writers, from mainland China and internationally, continue to grapple with the duality of writing Chinese-ness with (Western) science fiction, they’re also, unknowingly, having to tackle concepts of techno-Orientalism in their own writing, a “danger that Asian and Asian American creators might internalize techno-Orientalist patterns and uncritically replicate the same dehumanizing model” (Roh et al. 7).

Chen Qiufan has also argued that “There is something very science fictional and fantastic about this very drastic social transformation. At the foundation, the soil of rural China is still there, not thoroughly washed away. This has led to the co-existence of many different layers of society, which science fiction is best suited to present” (Sun). Though the larger situation in which China finds itself can be reflected within Chinese science fiction, it remains the case (as with Han Song’s comment about Western progress and concepts, noted above), the lens in which we look at China and Chinese science fiction, is unfortunately, Western-tinted. This creates the inevitable encounter with techno-Orientalist aesthetics.

Though this will not be discussed in detail in this paper, it can be noted that this discourse is problematic in itself, for it assumes that concepts of science, technology, and modernization belongs wholly to the West, and that any contact it has with East Asia are Orientalist in nature (whether Orientalist, post-Orientalist, or techno-Orientalist). Here, the techno-Orientalist discourse falls into the same postcolonial rhetoric from which it declares itself attempting to break out, by assuming that because Chinese is the ethnic culture in the equation, that when it comes in contact with the West, it loses its nativism, while the Western body gains in knowledge. Rey Chow describes this post-colonialist attribute as one where “the values involved are hierarchically determined and tend to work in one direction only: the original, so to speak, exists as the sole, primary standard by which the copy is judged, but not vice versa; the white man, and the white man alone, is authentic” (Chow 104).

However, going back to the opening statement of this paper: since most Chinese science fiction writers and scholars agree with the fact that science fiction, at least, is a Western genre, it can be argued that Chinese science fiction, in struggling with techno-Orientalist developments in the (Western) science fiction genre, begins to develop techno-Occidentalist tendencies to compensate. In this scenario techno-Occidentalism becomes Chinese science fiction’s strategy to decolonise its use of the Western genre and concepts. While techno-Orientalism “serve to both express and assuage Western anxieties about Asia’s growing cultural influence and economic dominance” (Roh et al. Summary), techno-Occidentalism is Asia’s response to these anxieties through demonstrating a rich diversity in its membership.

Liu Cixin and Ken Liu, as writers, prefer to project a non-political image. While they are invested in promoting the genre of SF, they have been known to attempt to dissuade readers from the notion that there is something inherently ‘Chinese’ about their writing (Chau 127). Liu Cixin says he prefers “Anglophone science fiction fans to read his books ‘because it’s science fiction, not because it’s ‘Chinese’ science fiction’” (Chau 126), and in the introduction in his 2016 anthology, Invisible Planets, Ken Liu questions what kind of meaningful purpose the label of ‘Chinese science fiction’ can serve, given the incredible diversity of the works and their authors” (Liu 16). This precisely emphasizes the fact that Chinese science fiction’s image is a problem when other writers, like Han Song, are happy to affirm Chinese science fiction’s position, noting that “Present-day sf authors have touched on a wide variety of subjects and added noticeable Chinese colors to the genre” (Han 17). Ken Liu’s anthology also includes a paper by Xia Jia entitled “What Makes Chinese Science Fiction Chinese?” a curious book-end to his opening remark that draws readers’ attention to the issue of ‘China and Chinese-ness’ in Chinese science fiction.

Interestingly, what Ken Liu, Liu Cixin, Han Song, Xia Jia, and other Chinese science fiction writers are trying to grasp in their tug-of-war on the term Chinese is precisely the impossible notion that Chinese-ness can be understood on its own, or that China can be represented clearly as a nation apolitically and without involving its diaspora. The word ‘Chinese’ has too many meanings—nationality, culture, language, ethnicity, even food. And when we consider that “retention of Chinese cultural heritage is important” (Wei 177) to life in the diaspora, we start to see how problematic this question of ‘Chinese-ness’ can become. If we consider as well that the duality Chinese science fiction writers have to manage is similar to that of the diaspora, are they then trying to simply justify their own fixations of Chinese culture, whatever that may be?

This assertion of culture is the techno-Occidentalist impulse that Xia Jia describes, where: “the Chinese had to wake up from their five-thousand-year-old dream of being an ancient civilization and start to dream of becoming a democratic, independent, prosperous modern nation-state” (Xia 378). It is the realisation that the shape of what ‘Chinese’ means is different today, despite an unbroken history of five millennia, and requires advocacy.

In Chen Qiufan’s novel, The Waste Tide (originally published 2013; published in English, in Ken Liu’s translation, in 2019), the monster, Mimi, and the book itself, were both born in and of China. They both reveal characteristics of techno-Orientalism, where the country—China, and Mimi are seen as inventions of information capitalism. Except, this is no longer just in imagination and is actually reflective of China’s current position. As the consumption of information technology increases in the world, the constantly-ignored process of e-waste management gets delegated to East Asia. And as China itself replaces America as the largest producer of e-waste (Chen), China’s struggle to stay ahead in the world of information capitalism, sees itself exploiting its own people through cheap labour, now not only in production, but also in waste management. This is the techno-Occidentalist drive that is China’s response to the rapid economic and cultural transformations that Chen calls ‘condensed urbanisation’ of the last four decades.

Techno-Occidentalist elements do not only manifest through nationalist or ecopolitical writing and can be experienced through more basic storytelling components like character development too. In Maggie Shen-King, another Asian-American writer’s debut novel, An Excess Male (2017), the consequences of China’s introduction and management of the one-child policy provides the backdrop through the entire premise of the book that is set in a near-future Beijing. The people are managed by the government as commodities that need to be controlled, where the one-child policy has created a community of ‘leftover men’ who can now find love and marriage as a third husband, the maximum required by law. This commodification of people is part of the discourse of techno-Orientalism, with the State—the government—being the main protagonist that sees its people made of “Asian body as a form of expendable technology” (Roh et al. 11). However, in Shen-King’s attempt to develop a more diverse perspective of the story, two of her main characters are from backgrounds that would usually be ostracized—a gay man, and an autistic man. In giving them vital roles to the story, Shen-King humanises them to counter the techno-Orientalist discourse through techno-Occidentalism.

In Chinese science fiction, from the stories that negotiate “between verisimilitude and universality” (Chau 124) to those that reimagine the past, like Silk Punk—“a blend of science fiction and fantasy…[that] draws inspiration from classical East Asian antiquity” (Misra)—they are just trying to glean some sort of position in which to operate in an extremely fecund and chaotic space, where, “The failure of Communism as an alternative for overcoming the crises of capitalism means that the crises of capitalist culture, accompanied by the process of globalization, are manifesting in the daily lives of the Chinese people…[While] China, after a series of traumas from the economic reforms and paying a heavy price for development, has managed to take off economically and resurge globally” (Xia 381).

Chinese science fiction writers internationally find themselves working at a moment of contradiction, of failure (in politics) and success (in economy) through the literature they produce, that tries to commentate on extremely polarised events through cultural grounding (Chinese-ness) and repurposing a genre (science fiction) that has had its own rich history. This constant negotiation roots Chinese science fiction in a position of adversity. Some writers predict that this prosperous phase of Chinese science fiction’s popularity will wither away, while others continue to invest in its growth, as an instrument to promote diversity in science fiction (Xia & Chen).

Whatever the outcome, Chinese science fiction writers will continue to demand their positions in this Western genre by asserting their culture and developing new techno-Occidentalist ways to decolonise.

NOTES

1. References to the Western genre of science fiction generally concerns British, American, French, and Soviet science fiction.

WORKS CITED

Chau, Angie. “Nobel to Hugo.” Chinese Literature as World Literature, special issue of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 30, no. 1, Spring 2018, pp. 110-135.

Chen, Qiufan. “Waste is Changing our Society and Living.” Domus, 17 May 2019, http://www.domusweb.it/en/opinion/2019/05/17/chen-qiufan-waste-is-changing-our-society-and-living.html.

Chow, Rey. The Protestant Ethnic & The Spirit of Capitalism. Columbia University Press, 2002. 

Frank, J. E. “When Obama and Zuckerberg are your Fan Boys: On Cixin Liu’s ‘Remembrance of Earth’s Past’ Trilogy.” Medium.com, 22 June 2018,: medium.com/@jafrank09/when-obama-and-zuckerberg-are-your-fan-boys-on-cixin-lius-remembrance-of-earth-s-past-trilogy-97944ac11c0e. Accessed 21 June 2020.

Han, Song. “A Response to Modernization.” Chinese Science Fiction, special issue of Science Fiction Studies, vol. 40, no. 1, March 2013, pp. 15-21.

Kong, Shuyu. Consuming Literature: Best Sellers and the Commercialization of Literary Production in Contemporary China. Stanford University Press, 2005.

Misra, Ria. “Author Ken Liu Explains ‘Silkpunk’ to Us.” io9 Gizmodo, 14 July 2015. io9.gizmodo.com/author-ken-liu-explains-silkpunk-to-us-1717812714.

Liu, Ken. “Introduction: China Dreams.” Invisible Planets. Head of Zeus, 2016, pp. 13-18.

Pandell, Lexi. “WIRED Book Club: Is Three-Body Problem’s Translation Better than the Original?” Wired, 6 October 2016. http://www.wired.com/2016/10/wired-book-club-ken-liu-interview/.

Roh, David S., Huang, Betsy, and Niu, Greta A. Techno-Orientalism Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media. Rutgers University Press, 2015.

Song, Mingwei. “After 1989: The New Wave of Chinese Science Fiction.” China Perspectives, no. 1, 2015, pp. 7-14.

Sun, Mengtian. “China and Chinese SF: Interview with Chen Qiufan.” MCLC Resource Center Publication, April 2017. u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/sunmengtian/.

Wei, Djao, Being Chinese: Voices from the Diaspora. The University of Arizona Press, 2001.

Xia, Jia. “What Makes Chinese Science Fiction Chinese?” Invisible Planets. Head of Zeus, 2016, pp. 377-383.

Xia, Jia, and Chen Qiufan. Personal discussion. Manchester, 12 October 2019.

The Wandering Earth: A Device for the Propagation of the Chinese Regime’s Desired Space Narratives?

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 50, no. 2-3

Special Issue: Alternative Sinofuturisms (中华未来主义)

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The Wandering Earth: A Device for the Propagation of the Chinese Regime’s Desired Space Narratives?

Molly Silk
University of Manchester / UK

Introduction

The anticipated film adaptation of Liu Cixin’s short story The Wandering Earth [流浪地球] was released in Chinese and American cinemas at the beginning of last year, and quickly became one of China’s highest grossing movies of all time. In order to allow for a smoother adaptation to the big screen, the plotline and characters of the film greatly differ from those in Liu’s original story. Additionally, the Earth’s political state is only lightly touched upon in Liu’s story, whereas a more detailed account of international relations and cooperation is weaved into the film. Recognising the “soft power” potential of Chinese science fiction as it grows in popularity around the world, the Chinese government have encouraged authors of the genre to include elements that assist in propagandizing the rejuvenation of the Chinese state as a global power. The acquisition of soft power, or the ability to achieve foreign policy goals through attractive and persuasive means, was adopted under the leadership of Hu Jintao as a long-term national strategy. Tools used to gain soft power traditionally include attractive cultural products and the construction of compelling and credible narratives that present the nation in a positive light (The Soft Power 30). Science fiction, acting as both a cultural product and a vehicle for the proliferation of constructed narratives, presents itself as ideal device for assisting in the achievement of national soft power objectives.

This paper argues that the world constructed for China’s science fiction hit The Wandering Earth was greatly influenced by the regime’s call for science fiction to benefit the country’s rejuvenation aims, particularly to portray the Chinese space programme as a peaceful and cooperative venture that has the potential to benefit all of humanity. Through an examination of the production choices made during the creation of the film, this paper shows that The Wandering Earth’s promotion of transnational cooperation in space works as a device aiming to create a positive international perception of its space capacities. This in turn has made the science fiction adaptation favourable with the Chinese government and exemplary of what the regime seeks to find in China’s science fiction creations.

This paper shall first outline the issues that China faces in regard to the reputation of its space endeavours, and how the state is seeking to replace the prevalent threat narrative around its space programme with a more positive one. Based on these contextual foundations, this paper shall discuss elements of The Wandering Earth film in relation to China’s political aims surrounding the perception of its space programme.

Conflicting Narratives: The Chinese Space Threat vs. A Tool for Humankind

The focus placed on national rejuvenation and economic development by the government since the start of the century has proven sufficient in generating support for the Chinese Communist Party at home. However, many people and governments of the world believe that the China’s unceasing growth should be feared by all who seek to uphold the values of the world’s longstanding political superpower: the United States (Chen and Garcia; Halper). The China Threat narrative maintains that the nation’s authoritarian regime of antihumanitarian policies and expansionist ambitions cannot peacefully co-exist with the democratic ideals purported by the United States government (Broomfield). The narrative is primarily propagated by the US and its allies, who state that China’s re-emergence represents a threat to both US security and to the survival of democracy worldwide. In recent years, the China Threat criticism has extended to one of the country’s most treasured projects: its national space programme.

The significance of China’s latest outer space achievements cannot be understated. Yet since its conception, observers and critics of China’s political regime have suspected that the Chinese space programme may endanger the freedom of the US and allied nations to operate in outer space. Concerns have ranged from China’s potential militarization of space, to the assertion of resource nationalism over celestial objects, to the fear that China could overtake the US as the world’s dominant space force (Johnson-Freese; Vasani; Erwin; Goswami; Thompson).

The US government asserts that China’s activities in space pose a very real threat to its national security. Less than a year before the Eastern giant landed its rover on the far side of the Moon at the beginning of 2019, President Trump declared that the US would not allow itself to be surpassed by China as the world’s dominant space force (“Trump Vows”). A few month later, Vice President Pence named China’s space activities as one of the main threats to US security (“Pence Unveils Plans”). The China space threat narrative has been used by Trump’s administration to justify the creation of the US Space Force, and due to fears of espionage, China remains the only country with whom NASA is not permitted to collaborate.

The proliferation of such a narrative may lead to its widespread acceptance, which in turn may cause damage to China’s aims of repositioning itself as a global leader. Should the international community accept the narrative that China’s space programme is a threat to the status quo, there will be less support for it. Instead of financing space-based projects in partnership with China, countries will instead side with nations that they perceive to be more accountable, transparent, and reliable technological powers (Flagg). Furthermore, should China’s space aims continue to be portrayed as a tool for enhancing the regime’s grip on the world stage, feelings of distrust for China’s technological development may hinder transnational relations.

Recognising these challenges, China’s central government have made attempts to demonstrate that its space programme is not a threat to those values shared by the US and its allies, nor is the programme an attempt to grab power in the space arena away from the US. To counter fears that China’s technological rise will threaten the autonomy and interests of other nations, the Chinese government are actively attempting to change the prevalent threat narrative to one that asserts its space programme as a tool for the benefit of humankind.

In the face of criticism, China’s chief administrative authorities continue to maintain that it is opposed to the weaponization of outer space, and that its space programme is for the benefit of the international community (“China’s Military Strategy”). Every five years, China’s State Council releases a White Paper outlining the nation’s space activities in order “to enable the world community to better understand China’s space industry” (“Full Text of White Paper”). A large part of the Paper is dedicated to summarizing China’s transnational space cooperation, and continuously states that the purpose of the programme is “to utilize space for peaceful purposes” and to “benefit the whole of mankind” (“China’s Military Strategy”). China is an active member of the UN Office of Outer Space Affairs, asserting the nation’s adherence and dedication to the peaceful uses of outer space as outlined by the various treaties adopted by the General Assembly. China has also extended an invitation to all UN member states to use its forthcoming space station for the purposes of scientific experimentation, demonstrating that Chinese diplomacy in space extends further than that of the US, who do not allow China to participate in the ISS project.

While the Chinese government have taken great efforts to sponsor and coordinate space research and technical programmes with multiple international institutions, such diplomacy only affects government officials and researchers working in the area of space technology. Where China’s space science diplomacy has been lacking is in its access to international populations at large, whose trust often remains in the China threat narratives purported by their own governments and national media (Sun).

The rising popularity of Chinese science fiction worldwide was soon recognised by the government as a potential ideological mouthpiece. As a genre that strongly showcases the imaginative visions of the future of Chinese technologies, government agencies devoted to promoting China’s image sought to utilise science fiction as a vehicle to more artfully promote its own desired narratives and ideologies to the international public. Should creators insert into their stories representations of China’s technological endeavours that are in line with the state’s narrative aims, these notions would be propagated to a wider international audience that the state has been less successful in reaching through direct government publications and higher level dialogues.

The Wandering Earth as an Incorporation of State Space Narratives

According to Gwennaël Gaffric and Will Peyton, Chinese science fiction literature and film has been “placed at the forefront of a nationalist project both inside and outside China,” where Party members have encouraged science fiction authors to inspire the nation’s youth through their stories to fulfil the Chinese dream of renewed global leadership. China’s state media has continued to hail the international success of Chinese science fiction as representative of “the rebirth of a great nation,” and has already taken steps to establish science fiction authors as representative and supportive of China’ scientific developments (Gaffric and Peyton). For instance, following the increasing international popularity of Liu Cixin’s work, particularly his science fiction epic The Three-Body Problem [三体], the author was invited to act as a consultant for the China National Space Programme (Liu), as well as an official ambassador of China’s Mars exploration programme (Gaffric and Peyton). Liu has also been invited to be involved in a number of high-profile national space events, including giving a speech at the unveiling of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST).

However, the increased connection between science fiction creators and state organs gives rise to conditions in which new works are expected to promote elements of the regime’s official narrative on China’s technological developments and capabilities. China’s publishing industry has been recognised as a tool that will allow the political regime to appropriate the science fiction genre (Gaffric and Peyton). This means that government agencies have an important role to play in the in selecting narratives that align with China’s foreign policy agenda. Sociotechnical imaginaries, or visions of society centred on the realisation of certain technological developments, that do not fit with the government’s technological development narrative may therefore be discounted or suppressed by these agencies. However, those imaginaries that fit with the regime’s political narrative may also be promoted and held up as exemplary sinofuturistic stories and models.

The argument presented here is that the success of The Wandering Earth and its promotion by state organs can be considered to comprise elements that are representative of the narrative that the regime seeks to propagate. Specifically, it is those elements surrounding the portrayal of its space capabilities and the role of the Chinese astronauts in global affairs that are favoured by Chinese officials.

The worldbuilding choices in The Wandering Earth film incorporate the government’s own purported narrative that its space endeavours are based on ideals of international cooperation and the enrichment of humankind.

While a Coalition government is mentioned in Liu’s original short story, details of the internationality of the Earth’s new government or its space forces do not feature heavily in the story. However, within the context of the film, while individual nations and nationalities are still recognised, there are no national space forces. Instead, all nations of the world have combined their space technological expertise under a United Earth Government for the purpose of saving the planet.

According to director Guo Fan, political aspects of the film were strongly considered, and the choice was made to incorporate a peaceful coalition government with a unified space force into the story (Li). Within the production notes for the film, one of the foundational ideologies of the world in which the film is set is that humanity exists as “one big family” and the astronauts of Earth’s various nations work together as a team for the good of humanity (Shuo). The global society shown in the film was not an arbitrary choice, but a carefully considered and purposeful decision on the part of the production team, which allowed for the portrayal of China as an important actor within a global community.

Equally, the decision to ensure that the Earth is eventually saved from the clutches of Jupiter thanks to the sacrifices ultimately made by Chinese protagonists further demonstrates that the power of the Chinese people is not self-interested. Instead, it tells the audience that the Chinese people see themselves as part of a collective humankind, that its capabilities will be used to protect this collective, not to challenge or compete with it for survival.

While it is ultimately Chinese characters who save the world, as Song explains, The Wandering Earth did not separate China from the rest of the world, but allowed China to be representative of humanity (Song). The heroism displayed by the Chinese protagonists was not led by nationalist interests, but by the widely supported value of protecting humankind. While such principles are represented here in a fictional future, they are the principles that the Chinese regime desire to be associated with their space programme in reality. Given the real political context in which the film was created, such key production choices were likely included in the film in order to align with state purported narratives that would show the Chinese nation in a positive light.

In addition to these narrative additions, the audience is consistently reminded of China’s role as a valued member of the united coalition through aesthetic choices. The space suits that are worn in the film were meticulously designed, involving over 1,000 separate parts (Li 2019). The decision to include the logo of the new coalition’s space force, designed to appear very similar to the UN’s well-known emblem, was again unlikely to have been an arbitrary choice. Placed on both the arms and the fronts of the suits and clothes worn by the characters, the symbol is frequently shown on screen, including during the important ending scene where a Chinese character sacrifices himself to protect the Earth. The presence of the symbol next to China’s national flag on the suits of the characters is also symbolic of China’s first space flight, when taikonaut Yang Liwei held up the flag of the UN alongside the Chinese flag to represent mutual aims and values for space exploration. The presence of the symbol in the film acts as a permanent reminder to the audience that while the main characters are of Chinese origin, the work they do is ultimately for the benefit of humanity.

While the film does not explicitly condemn any nation as the antagonist of the story, the underlying ideology of the film is favourable towards the purported Chinese values of space exploration, and hints at a rejection of common US values associated with space exploration. According to Guo, Western science fiction portrays a sense of longing to escape Earth in favour of worlds beyond our own. While the American notion of space is one of an ‘endless frontier’ waiting to be explored, the Chinese mindset conversely does not desire to leave the home that it has identified with for thousands of years. According to Guo, the US mindset is that if Earth is experiencing a crisis, it is possible to run away from it. The Chinese mindset differs from this as exemplified in The Wandering Earth (Li). Instead of running from Earth in the face of crisis, Chinese science fiction demonstrates a different ideal of remaining with and protecting the planet. While not explicitly stating so in the film, the underlying narrative of wandering with the Earth instead of from it suggests that Chinese philosophies offer a leadership style that seeks to defend the planet and the heritages of its people. Chinese do not run from crises, but will remain and help where it can. This key theme in the movie suggests that China’s technological development can only serve to further its capacities to help, and had the state not pursued the aim of advancing its space programme, the Earth’s collective space capacities would have remained underdeveloped. In turn, the world would not likely have been able to save itself from the crises presented in the film.

The film adaptation of The Wandering Earth has already proven to be a production favoured by the central government. The film has been recommended by the Ministry of Education to be shown to school students throughout China (“Sci-Fi Blockbuster”), and its financial success and award wins have been covered extensively by Party mouthpieces such as Xinhua and People’s Daily. The film has also been continuously dubbed by the state media as “China’s first homemade sci-fi blockbuster” (“First China-Made Sci-Fi Blockbuster”). The decision of the state media to promote The Wandering Earth as the nation’s “first domestic sci-fi epic” is one that does not recognize China’s history of science fiction film productions, ignoring films such as Deformity Sci-Fi [残废科幻] (2013), Reset [逆时营救] (2017), or The Secret of Immortal Code [伊阿索密码] (2018), to name only a few. Death Ray on a Coral Island [珊瑚岛上的死光] (1980) is widely considered to be China’s “first science fiction film” (Zhang), but is again overlooked by the state in favor of presenting The Wandering Earth as China’s first.

The key feature that differentiates film adaptation of The Wandering Earth from its science fiction predecessors is that it actively promotes the government-purported narrative that China’s technical capabilities are for the benefit of humanity as a whole. While Death Ray on a Coral Island sets China and Westerners as rivals, The Wandering Earth presents a more peaceful and diplomatic relationship between China and the world. Showcasing Chinese imaginaries of the nation’s space capabilities as beneficial to the international community, the film conforms to the desired narrative that the state seeks to purport.

The regime recognises that The Wandering Earth portrays “a community of a shared future for mankind,” a key quality it seeks to promote of its space ambitions (Chung). Most notably, the Wang Xiaohui, who acts as both the Executive Deputy Head of the Publicity Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the Director of the Film Bureau of National Radio and Television Administration, reportedly praised the film for its portrayal of “the Chinese people’s non-utilitarian, cosmopolitan and cooperative spirit” (“China’s Film Authority”).

Seeking to put its best foot forward on the international stage, the marketing of The Wandering Earth as China’s first science fiction film intends to send the message that the nation’s technological development has always been with the welfare of the international community in mind.

Conclusion

In the face of criticism by the US, the film adaptation of The Wandering Earth presents China as a technologically responsible, cooperative, supportive, and reliable actor in space that seeks to benefit of all of humanity. While the US has adopted more neoisolationist policies over the last few years, coupled with its assertion of dominance in space through the creation of the US Space Force, the film purports a more peaceful and cooperative narrative of China’s space activities that fall in line with official state narratives. It is likely that these narrative additions to Liu’s original short story were made with consideration given to the state’s call for science fiction creators to incorporate and reinforce the government’s real-life policy narratives.

In turn, the Chinese regime adopted the film as a state favourite, promoting it through a variety of methods and asserting it as representative of Chinese thought on the nation’s technological development. However, with the global popularity of Chinese science fiction still its infancy, it remains to be seen how effective these incorporated state-approved narratives are at swaying the opinion of the international public on China’s space affairs.

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Chen, Xi and Francisco X. Garcia. “US-China Relations: A Media Perspective.” International Journal of China Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2016, pp. 79-98.

“China’s Film Authority Hails ‘The Wandering Earth’.” Global Times, 21 February 2019, http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1139697.shtml.

“China’s Military Strategy.” The State Council, 27 May 2015, english.www.gov.cn/archive/white_paper/2015/05/27/content_281475115610833.html.

Chung, Kimmy. “Why Frant Gwo’s ‘The Wandering Earth’, feted in mainland China, is unloved in Hong Kong.” South China Morning Post, 30 Mar 2019, http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3003941/why-frant-gwos-wandering-earth-feted-mainland-china-unloved.

Erwin, Sandra. “Pentagon Space Budget Shaped by Threats from Russia, China.” SpaceNews, 12 February 2018, spacenews.com/pentagon-space-budget-shaped-by-threats-from-russia-china/.

“First China-Made Sci-Fi Blockbuster to Debut in U.S.” People’s Daily, 5 February 2019, en.people.cn/n3/2019/0205/c90000-9544283.html.

Flagg, Melissa. Global R&D and a New Era of Alliances: Data Brief. Center for Security and Emerging Technology, June 2020, cset.georgetown.edu/research/global-rd-and-a-new-era-of-alliances/.

“Full Text of White Paper on China’s Space Activities in 2016.” The State Council, 28 December 2016, english.www.gov.cn/archive/white_paper/2016/12/28/content_281475527159496.html.

Gaffric, Gwennaël and Will Peyton. “Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Trilogy and the Status of Science Fiction in Contemporary China.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 46, no. 1, 2019, pp. 21-38.

Goswami, Namrata. “China in Space: Ambitions and Possible Conflict.” Strategic Studies Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 1, 2018, 74-97.

Halper, Stefan A. The Beijing Consensus: How China’s Authoritarian Model Will Dominate the Twenty First Century. Basic Books, 2012.

Johnson-Freese, Joan. “‘Houston, we have a problem’: China and the Race to Space.” Current History, vol. 102, no. 665, 2003, pp. 259-265.

李行 [Li, Hang]. 《流浪地球》是怎么诞生的 [“How ‘The Wandering Earth’ Was Born”]. 中国新闻周刊 [China Newsweek], 14 February 2019, http://www.inewsweek.cn/survey/2019-02-15/5008.shtml.

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“Pence Unveils Plans for ‘Space Force’.” CNN Politics, 9 August 2018, http://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/08/09/pence-unveils-plans-space-force-lead-starr-pkg.cnn.

“Sci-Fi Blockbuster ‘The Wandering Earth’ Among Films Recommended to Students.” Xinhua, 19 September 2019, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-09/19/c_138403666.htm.

朔方 [Shuo, Fang]. 流浪地球电影制作手记 [The Wandering Earth Film Handbook]. 中国交通出版社 [China Communications Press], 2019.

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Thompson, Loren. “Trump’s ‘Space Force’ Motivated by Russian, Chinese Threats to Critical U.S. Orbital Systems.” Forbes, 18 June 2018, http://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2018/06/18/trump-embraces-space-force-as-russia-china-threaten-critical-orbital-systems-of-u-s/.

“Trump Vows To Keep U.S. Ahead Of China, Russia On Space Endeavors.” Radio Free Europe: Radio Liberty, 19 June 2018, http://www.rferl.org/a/trump-vows-keep-us-ahead-china-russia-space-endeavors-bezos-musk-/29302550.html.

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Wondering about the Futures of the Wandering Earth: A Comparative Analysis of Liu Cixin’s “The Wandering Earth” and Frant Gwo’s Film Adaptation

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 50, no. 2-3

Special Issue: Alternative Sinofuturisms (中华未来主义)

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Wondering about the Futures of the Wandering Earth: A Comparative Analysis of Liu Cixin’s “The Wandering Earth” and Frant Gwo’s Film Adaptation

Mitchell van Vuren
Leiden University / Netherlands

Frant Gwo’s big-budget film “The Wandering Earth” (2019) hit Chinese cinemas big as the acclaimed first science fiction blockbuster from Chinese soil (Kuo) and has become one of China’s highest-grossing films of all time (“The Wandering Earth”). The blockbuster also gained global visibility through its international distribution on Netflix, presenting an apocalyptic future scenario to the world through Chinese eyes. The film directly builds upon the universe conjured by the science fiction author Liu Cixin in his short story “The Wandering Earth”. Liu has been lauded for his imaginative mixture of philosophical and scientific contemplations, earning him multiple national Galaxy Awards for best science fiction work and even the international Hugo Award once for best science fiction work (“Liu Cixin”). However, the short story and the film differ radically on several aspects and portray very different visions on the way humanity needs to change its ways to reach a happy ending at the end of their stories, including the required transformation of humanity to meet the demands of a dystopian future.

In this paper, I will clarify these differences through a comparative analysis between film and short story to abstract the different visions on the required changes humanity is in need of to save itself from extinction. Before doing so, I will briefly discuss the various genres the two works position themselves in and the process of adaptation. Then, I will describe the representation of the future world in the works and the ethical dilemmas posed by these narratives. After having clarified the main subtextual differences between the two works, I will reflect on the implied and different ways whereby humanity needs to transform itself to be able to survive the same fictional apocalypse.

Liu Cixin himself names as the source and most prominent element of science fiction the beauty of science itself. He says: “Science-fiction novels are thus bridges to this beauty, freeing it from formulas and displaying it for all to see” (“Beyond Narcissism” 23). This love for science expresses itself profoundly in his works, and not the least in “The Wandering Earth”. The narrative reveals the life of the protagonist as a small part of a detailed macro-history: the gargantuan project of maneuvering the entire Earth to Proxima Centauri. The subjugation of the character development to the scientific macro-details is characteristic of Liu’s variant of science fiction, but these descriptive macro-details are in the film replaced by visual spectacle and dramatic turns.

From the considerable historical period Liu describes from initiation of the project to the abandonment of the solar system, the film only takes place during a small part halfway-through Liu’s story when the Earth passes Jupiter. In the high budget film, the tale of the Earth’s journey with its scientific specificities is substituted by an accessible disaster narrative that borrows many masculine and upbeat genre conventions from the action film. The distillation and popularization of the story comes to no surprise when the intended broad target audience of the film is juxtaposed with the niche sci-fi audience, but, in Liu’s intended sense, the film’s narrative is only part of a sci-fi tradition through the world it finds itself in and not specifically through narrative genre conventions.

At this point, we come to the issue of adaptation. Commonly, film adaptations are conceived as inferior to the books they are derived from. However, it is not my intention to approach these two works in a hierarchized relation of lineage. I will rather conceptualize them as two stories in a transmedial storyworld (as theorized by Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon), where audiences can enter this universe through multiple platforms and narratives that do not always find coherence. Although issues such as medium specificity or fidelity to a source text are conventional topics of discussion in Adaptation Studies, the implications of the stories’ subtextual elements are of most importance to my analysis to come to a conclusion about the differing morals of these stories and the suggested transformations of which the world is in need. To abstract these differing subtextual elements, I will focus in my textual comparison on ethical questions posed to humanity and the following decisions, with special attention to China as the focalizer of humanity in these narrated, apocalyptic futures.

Liu’s story starts when the Earth stops rotating. The birth of the protagonist coincides with this first step of controlling the planet and transforming it into humanity’s vehicle, and alongside the character’s coming of age, the Earth changes more and more on its millennia-long journey. During a school trip around the world, the protagonist and his classmates witness the colossal Earth Engines that serve as the Earth’s motor, the catastrophic effects of the project on Earth’s ecology, and their first splendid sunrise after years on the dark side of the Earth. The supranatural, technological achievements of humankind are constantly brought into ambivalent juxtapositions with the terrifying splendor of nature in Liu’ descriptions. An example of this can be found in the protagonist’s first thought when seeing an Earth Engine for the first time (“The Wandering Earth” 6). While marveling at the immense scale of the blue plasma beam, he is reminded of a riddle about an infinitely tall and broad wall.

What is the wall?

Death.

Here, the conventional technocratic faith in technology to relieve humanity of the burdens of nature, and particularly of death, is lost when the power of technology becomes synonymous with the sublimity of death. During the following years, the expenses of technology to fuel the Earth’s journey leave their mutilating traces on the Earth, slowly transforming it into an unrecognizable and lifeless place.

The contrasting of the horrors of technology and nature serve a higher purpose than solely description in the story, which is expressed most clearly when the children see the Sun for the first time. The Sun, normally the source of life, has now turned into the Earth’s doom due to its predicted violent explosion in the near future, called a helium flash. When the children see the celestial body for the first time, they are struck with terror when they encounter humanity’s biggest threat. But, when the children and their teacher gaze at the starlit sky later on, hopeful tears well up in their eyes when the teacher points out Proxima Centauri, “their new home!” Among the stars, “[o]nly one star held steady; it was the beam of a distant lighthouse over dark and stormy seas. . . . That star had taken the place of the Sun in our hearts. It was the only pillar of hope for one hundred future generations as they navigated a sea of trouble” (13). Already from a young age onward, the children are taught to direct their hopes at the promises of technology and to abandon the symbols of life from the past.

The global process of accelerating the Earth to gain enough speed to leave the solar system also incorporates the people of Earth in its self-transformation. Genetic engineering (16) and birth control (26) have enabled humankind to regulate and evolve its members to unknown standards to meet the harsh conditions of the millennia-long project, but this has happened at a cost. For current generations, it is unimaginable how people in the past could have attached so many emotions to matters unrelated to planetary survival, including adultery (18). What is needed in the new world are reliable and docile persons, who can function optimally inside the world-encompassing Earth apparatus. Inessential subjects for this global cause, such as art and philosophy, are removed from school curricula (16), which leads to the solving of ethical dilemmas based on statistics in the name of the greater good. For example, when the underground hometown of the protagonist is hours away from being engulfed by magma, the rescue of young people is unquestionably prioritized regarding their higher beneficence to the global cause. Thus, it becomes too late to save the elderly, including the protagonist’s mother, following a naturalized social Darwinist logic. Every form of individual agency or reflection disappears in the collective because of their shared burden of saving humanity, while they gradually lose their own humanity along the way.

When the Earth passes the hellish “behemoth” (34) of Jupiter in Liu’s story, the film’s primary storyline begins. The gravitational pull of Jupiter leads to the malfunctioning and destruction of many Earth Engines and raises the danger of planetary collision. Liu Qi, the protagonist of the film, travels through China and beyond its borders to help reactivate the Engines. At the same time, his father Liu Peiqiang tries in the International Space Station (ISS) to avert hopelessness by the United Earth Government (UEG). Liu Qi shares many similarities with the protagonist of the short story, such as a father in space and an uncle from Shanghai, but his character arc and the events in the film differ to such an extent that inconsistencies arise between story and film. The differing plots also have a profound effect on the overall morale of the works. While Liu’s sci-fi shows the fragility and possible futility of humanity’s project, the film portrays several hardheaded characters that refuse to lose hope and keep on striving to survive.

This ultimate impossibility of defeat despite hardships, which is the norm in the disaster film and the action film with few exceptions, comes to the fore the most when the film poses an ethical dilemma to Liu Peiqiang. The UEG has decided at the perceived point of no return in the wake of collision to activate the Helios Project: the launch of the ISS as an arc, containing numerous samples of animal and human life, towards Proxima Centauri to act as the last means for humanity to survive. But, in a final attempt to avert collision, Liu Qi and his companions have, against the UEG’s orders, called for the help of many national rescue teams on Earth. They have the plan to shoot a plasma beam from an Earth Engine towards Jupiter to ignite its atmosphere and blast the Earth away (in full accordance with the action film genre).

Liu Peiqiang in the ISS stands before the choice to subjugate himself to the plan of the UEG and to watch the Earth be destroyed below him, or to fly the ISS into Liu Qi’s plasma beam that is just a few miles short of igniting Jupiter and to hope that the plan of the newly formed coalition of national rescue teams, under the leadership of the Chinese, will save the Earth. Liu Peiqiang chooses the latter and rebels against the UEG in a final attempt to save the world. In an emotional last dialogue between father and son, they forget their preceding conflicts and are reconciled as a family, just before the ISS explodes and Liu Peiqiang sacrifices himself for the greater good, ultimately saving his son and the world. The plan of the newly proposed world governance succeeds and Liu Qi survives, continuing to serve the purpose of The Wandering Earth with firm belief and in good spirits.

In Liu’s story, the Earth bypasses Jupiter without technical complications, but not without social unrest. A conspiracy theory maintains that the Sun is not dying at all and that the entire journey is a hoax. A rebellion against the Coalition, the current world government, starts to take shape and divides the world into two groups: the ones who have held hope in the project and those who have lost it and desire to return to the earlier state of heliocentric orbit. The protagonist sides with the Coalition, motivated by his family’s history in the military and not by his own conviction per se, but starts to slowly believe in the hoax as well after a long and violent period of war injuries and alcoholism. He deserts with other militaries on a hospital ward and helps to overthrow the last stronghold of the Coalition.

The rebels celebrate their victory and punish the remaining leading figures of the Coalition cruelly. During their last walk of shame, the remnants of the Coalition are spat upon and humiliated by all layers of society, including a little girl with “the wild rage in her eyes searing through her mask” (42). Then, the nuclear batteries from the prisoners’ thermal suits are confiscated, and they are left to freeze to death on the ice-cold surface of the Earth, with the people of the rebellion watching. Every standard of moral order seems to have been forgotten. During the painfully slow submission to the cold by the last figures of the Coalition, the rebels start to sing ‘My Sun’ to praise their giver of life in the sky. Faith in the Sun and in the natural course of life seems to be restored, until suddenly the helium flash occurs. Then, “[a] red dim sphere had replaced the Sun. From our vantage point, it slowly swelled until it reached the size of the Sun of old, a strange memory from Earth’s original orbit… But, it was no longer our Sun” (44). The rebellion shows itself to be built on an illusion. Their hope of return is shattered and their future is uncertain. The Sun has died, but “[f]ortunately, we still lived” (44).

In the last chapter of the story, half a century has passed and the protagonist has grown old. The Earth’s journey has been continued towards the dark emptiness of space beyond Pluto. However, the protagonist is not overcome by despair or pessimism and sees before his mind’s eye visions from life in Proxima Centauri. “I see my great-grandchildren, one hundred generations removed, playing and laughing on green grass”. While faith in the original Sun has faded and the errors of technology have been discovered, he directs his beliefs at “the three golden suns of Proxima Centauri” (46). Hope has not been lost, although humanity has been forced to transcend its earlier moral and technological boundaries and a long and tough road is still ahead for many generations to come.

Despite both texts’ happy endings, the morals of the two narratives give a very different estimation of the new status of humanity after the hardships of the project. In the case of Liu’s story, humanity’s morale is busted and battered, but a shimmer of hope remains in the envisioning of a very distant and utopian future. The demise of the faith in technology and the following failed rebellion show that humanity is in dire need of self-transformation to find a new form that is fit for the conditions of the technological world of the future. Liu Cixin argues that humanity has to move beyond an anthropocentric narcissism in the far reaches of space, in which we are nothing but “a cosmic speck of dust” (“Beyond Narcissism” 22). Science fiction shows itself to be a genre well fit to challenge this central self-conception and to rethink the position of the human in relation to the ungraspable immensity of the universe and to the unthinkable potential of technology.

The film, however, has fewer moral bumps in the road to Proxima Centauri. Following the three-act model of Hollywood blockbusters, several obstacles are defined in the generic plot that need to be overcome to guarantee a happy ending. The plot-driven story designates the natural environment of Jupiter as the antagonist (at a certain point, a character even decides to futilely shoot a machine gun at it while cursing the gas giant), against which the Earth is in need of defense. Frictions between different characters and nations obstruct productive collaboration, which is only achieved when a shared goal is found and the previous form of world governance is overthrown under the new Chinese leadership. Humanity has not undergone a moral transformation but has only experienced a changing of the guards in its global governance.

In conclusion, Liu Cixin writes in accordance with his own principles concerning sci-fi by addressing the moral status quo of humanity as it is focalized by China. Through allegorically positioning characters and nations, he tells a tale of the world and envisions how humanity can change her own self-conception in relation to science to be ready for the challenges of ecological disasters and other sci-fi scenarios in the maybe not-so-distant future. Frant Gwo’s film does not question the core of humanity but rather the position of China in the world. The film utilizes the rebellion in its narrative to indicate the fallacies of the current world governance, and imagines how humanity can only be saved, and its utopian future far away can only be reached when China’s methods are followed. Although the film has international allure through representing the territories and populations of many nations, it ultimately tells a story of China as the world through its claimed monopoly to guide the world towards survival. The film’s moral, just like its narrative, seems to remain stuck halfway through Liu’s story, where the wavering of hope has not set in just yet. Hopefully, the announced sequel of the film will divert from just making a political statement and will correspond more with Liu’s sci-fi storyworld through engagement with the moral dimensions of the near future and the ensuing challenges in it for all of humanity, instead of merely redrawing national borders.

WORKS CITED

Kuo, Lily. “China Challenges Hollywood with Own Sci-Fi Blockbuster.” The Guardian, 11 February 2019, www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/11/china-first-blockbuster-sci-fi-film-wandering-earth.

Liu, Cixin. “Beyond Narcissism: What Science Fiction Can Offer Literature.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 40, no. 1, 2013, pp. 22-32.

Liu, Cixin. “The Wandering Earth.” The Wandering Earth, translated by Holger Nahm, Head of Zeus Ltd., 2017, pp. 3-47.

“Liu Cixin.” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, October 4 2019. http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/liu_cixin.

Ryan, Marie-Laure and Jan-Noël Thon. Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology. University of Nebraska Press, 2014.

“The Wandering Earth.” Box Office Mojo, n.d., www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl3710223361/weekend/?ref_=bo_rl_tab#tabs.

The Wandering Earth (流浪地球; Liulang diqiu). Directed by Frant Gwo, China Film Group Corporation, 2019.

A Diagnosis of Sinofuturism from the Urban-Rural Fringe

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 50, no. 2-3

Special Issue: Alternative Sinofuturisms (中华未来主义)

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A Diagnosis of Sinofuturism from the Urban-Rural Fringe1

Dino Ge Zhang
Zhejiang University / China

Sinofuturism, in its emergence as exemplified by a series of essays (Goodman, 1998; Land, 2014), books (Greenspan, 2014; Hui, 2016), and videos (Lek, 2016), is still predominantly a discourse of the Anglosphere. Through a reading of Land’s past essays on the Shanghai Expo and Greenspan’s perspectives on Shanghai urbanism (2014, 2020), I would argue that sinofuturism in its current English articulation is perhaps more of a reaction towards the impotence and expiry of the declinist West than an incisive provocation of Chinese futures concretely rooted in the Chinese condition. The disheartened Anglo intellectual looks beyond “the death-grip of an embittered and self-mortifying anti-modernism” (Land, 2011) of the apologetic old world and for “zones of experimentation” (Greenspan, 2020) in the new world. It starts with an astute critique and an exasperating divorce from baizuo or the ‘White Left’ but then it falls short in responding to the disparity between planned ideals of futurity and their manifestations in a (un)managed disorder in China

Shanghai is presented as the model city by the sinofuturists: a spectacular retro-futurist revival, propelled by the 2010 World Expo itself, towards the status of World Capital. The crucial argument is that this revival has its own texture of futurity: not linear, not cyclical, but a spiral temporality. “Forward to the past” of the Golden Age 1920s: “neomodernity is at once more than modernity and modernity again” (Greenspan, 2014, p.12). Unlike Land’s optimism, Yuk Hui’s assessment of sinofuturism is a pathological “modernisation without modernity”: there is nothing new about sinofuturism as “ultimately, it is only an acceleration of the European modern project” ( Hui 2016, p.297); a lack of moral cosmotechnics in contemporary China, despite the economic and sociotechnical achievements, can potentially lead to disastrous consequences. In both diagnoses, the singular sinofuture derives from the official vision of modernity, whether in Land’s twist of a spiral temporality or Yuk Hui’s critique of an accelerating society that lacks a moral cosmology. To various degrees, both remain ungrounded in already fermenting visions of immiscible futurities elsewhere.

While also remaining vigilant for “zones of experimentation”, this essay chooses not to focus on the first-tier cities, Pudong skyline, special economic zones, massive factories, drones, automation, surveillance, and techno-nationalism. I am not interested in searching for the “authentic” China as much as the immiscible condition of a sinofuture itself—I will give one example of the quarantined temporality of the chengxiangjiehubu (literally “urban-rural fringe”).2 The urban-rural fringe is not necessarily the side of China that the official propaganda of futurity prevents one from seeing, nor should it be seen as somehow more authentic or naturalistic than the city. This is not to say that the fringe is invisible, but it is certainly undesirable, as its clear definition is often obscured. These intermediate contact zones are to be differentiated from chenzhongcun, or “urban villages,” which were transient, dense, urban overgrowth in/around the city centres to accommodate migrants during the early phase of (re)modernisation from 1990s onwards. They were hastily demolished as junk space in the 2010s to pave way for erections of new urban architectures.3 In contrast, the urban-rural fringe constitutes semi-permanent settlements that serve an indispensable role between cities and the countryside as “a point of transit and transformation” (Gong 2012).

The urban-rural fringe is a “filthy disorder” (Gong 2012) of various settlements: small-to-medium scale factories/workshops that are mostly outcast by the city administrators, garbage recycle stations, the bastardized residential architecture that arbitrarily and incongruously mixes influences (i.e. stereotypes) from all over the world, main roads as the large trucks pass through with (often unfinished) subsidiary roads connecting the villages, unsanitary restaurants with trashy décor, dodgy home clinics (especially those specializing in illegal abortions), pink neon light hair salons (as brothels are further purged from the cities), internet cafes filled with underage dropouts who are bored stiff, and wet markets of fresh produce and various exotic meats which are chiefly blamed as “sources of hedonistic-cum-pathogenic peril” (Lynteris 121).

The urban-rural fringe processes the trash and various material and affective excess for the cities. It also accommodates the “humiliated people, the peasants [who have] lost their land yet been rejected by the city, the trash collectors” (Gong 2012). The term piao, or float, was used to accentuate migrant precarity in the first-tier cities.4 However, people don’t “float” here at the fringe; instead, people are mostly rejects being sedimented without future hope. It is not sedentariness in the sense of full modernisation as if the society will finally be rid of its “premodern” and transitory deformities. The fringe zone is not a temporary construct; even though some areas gentrify as the mega city expands, they will continue to exist on the new fringe as their existence is marginal but indispensable. It is not an alterity that transcends modernity nor an alienated “dead time” that was fiercely attacked by Situationism but being sedentary in the “never-ending everyday” (Thouny 114). Lawrence Lek summarizes it well in his video essay: “sinofuturism does not care about a dramatically better future as long as it survives.” Survival is the true fundamental “hard-lined principle.” People rather put faith in a tiny profit margin than uncertain futures; there is no morality or “values” where there is no time. Gong (2012) considers the stray dogs omnipresent in the fringe zone and their society formed around human waste “presents a portent of our future,” much like the “waste people” on Silicon Isle as described in Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide: it is a futurity arrested in multilayered dissolution and reconfiguration of pollutants and temporality.

Urban-rural fringe produces a no-futurity that symbolizes the “quotidianized apocalypse” (Thouny): “there is no departure, no aim to reach or home to return to” (Thouny 116). As a contemporary example, my current self-quarantine eerily resonates with the idea of a quotidianized apocalypse of the fringe. Wuhan, the original epicentre of the COVID-19 outbreak, was often disparagingly given the nickname chaoji da xiancheng or “supersized county town” for the city’s infamous image of being “unhygienic, disorderly, and dreadful” (zhang luan cha).5 Wuhan’s spatial texture, unlike the fulfilling aspirations of Shanghai, was accelerating and decelerating at an entirely different pace. To a large degree, despite being an immense city in size, Wuhan glorified the aesthetics of the urban-rural fringe as captured in the recent crime thriller Wild Goose Lake (2019). In an attempt to elevate itself from the stigma of “supersized county town,” the city hosted international events like the World Military Games 2019, through which the city centre was “rejuvenated” and its colonial past (the European concessions much like Shanghai) was refurbished and modernized. The expectation was high, much like Shanghai’s World Expo. However, the city only succeeded in garnering international attention due to the current pandemic situation.

During the lockdown, time itself is quarantined in a state of continuous waiting. Cai Bo (2020) writes on his experience during the lockdown, “time itself is a burning anxiety; my mum used to tell me, days seem to be long but short when they are lived; she complains recently, whatever is plenty, nothing is more plentiful than days.”6 Linear time, or calendar time, becomes irrelevant, and cyclical time also malfunctions as I sleep and wake up during arbitrary hours. A week in, time was spent in between spasms of violent emotions provoked by the videos circulated on WeChat: terror, anxiety, and fury. The quarantine time is “severed forwards” (Cai 2020) as it is torn between stacks of temporalities: the viral acceleration choked, quite literally, the health care system; desperate and panic-stricken patients waiting eight hours in long queues outside the hospital and risking another round of nosocomial infection; waking up day after day filtering fake news and dubious WeChat screenshots only to find out the official Hope is plastic and melts instantly with the flaming anxiety; staying up until midnight to order groceries online before they’re instantly sold out; even the most politically unmotivated realize that poetics of heroism and stories of machinic efficiency (of tracking the infected) merely covers the unknown number of bodies that went into the furnace without any rituals and countless others who live in unresolved temporal anxiety. The imagery of the pandemic is thus “a cyclical plot of meaningless endlessness… [it is] a poetics not of death and resurrection but hollowed out of hope and inhabited by omens and signs of an ‘end indefinitely postponed” (Gomen cited in Lynteris 127).

The “viral alarm” caused by the untimely death of Dr Li Wen-Liang did not last long as rage was quickly soaked and dissipated in idleness and lethargy. Zizek (2020) had hoped for the “unintended consequence” of “dead time” self-reflection: being stuck in quarantine at home briefly forced people to realize the sedentariness and precarity in “look toward money” that replaced the official slogan “look to the future” (Cockain 2). However, the miserable populace never cared about progress nor regression, as it had been already waiting for an “apocalypse that never ceases to come, and pass” (Thouny 2009, p.126). The urban-rural fringe should not be seen as the disintegration behind the glorious façade of Shanghai but rather one of the sinofuturisms we can all, but are too reluctant to, viscerally experience. My hope is that the already fermenting immiscible condition of sinofuturity won’t be entirely eclipsed by ungrounded theoretical speculation.

NOTES

1. This essay is written on the quarantined grounds of Wuhan amidst a provincial lockdown.

2. It would be naïve to juxtapose the urban and rural but it’s largely true that until quite recently, rural villages were largely left alone in the developmental discourse as the major cities absorbed the most capable—village life was sapped of its vitality; migration to the city via cheap labour or university entrance exam was the only upward mobility possible. Gong Jian and Li Jinghu’s art project Urban Rural Fringe Group (2012) is a great source of inspiration for this essay. For another example, the animation film Have a Nice Day (2017) by Liu Jia also captures the aesthetics of the urban-rural fringe very well (Da).

3. In some recent cases, Chinese city planning has learnt to build upon and gentrify these sites that are supposed to be outmoded by continuous modernisation itself instead of outright demolition.

4. Anna Greenspan has described Cara Wallis’s Technomobility as a relevant ethnographic account of this sociotechnical precariousness of “the floating population.”

5. Xiancheng is a different geographical concept from urban-rural fringe but the two concepts are almost identical in their imageries of aesthetics and sociality.

6. Chinese translation is my own.

WORKS CITED

Cai, Bo. “Wuhan Time is Torn Forward by Seconds” (originally in Chinese). ARTDBL, 27 Feb. 2020, mp.weixin.qq.com/s/6HLh3N5r-iEiAvNZTPa9TQ

Cockain, Alex. “Regarding Mr. Wu, a Dragon and Conversations in Traffic: Social Acceleration, Deceleration and Re-acceleration in Shanghai.” Time and Society, vol. 27 no. 3, 2018, pp. 363–383.

Da, Mengna. “A Darkly Comic Animated Film Set on China’s Urban-Rural Fringe.” Hyperallergic, 26 Jan. 2018.

Gong, Jian and Li Jinghu. “What is the Urban-Rural Fringe, and why is it the Urban-Rural fringe?” Urban Rural Fringe Group, 2012.

Goodman, Steve. “Fei Ch’ien Rinse Out: Sino-Futurist Under-Currency.” Pli, vol. 7, 1998, pp. 155–172.

Greenspan, Anna. Shanghai Future: Modernity Remade. Oxford University Press, 2014.

Greenspan, Anna and Mikkel Bindslev. “Zones of Experimentation.” ŠUM: Journal for Contemporary Art Criticism and Theory, vol. 13, 2020, pp. 1873–1884.

Hui, Yuk. The Question Concerning Technology in China. Urbanomic Media, 2016.

Land, Nick. Shanghai Times. Urbanatomy Electronic. 2014.

Land, Nick. “Re-Animator.” 2011.

Lek, Lawrence. “Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD).” https://zkm.de/en, 2016.

Liu, Jia. Have a Nice Day. Produced by Nezha Bros. Pictures and Le-joy Animation Studio. 17 Feb. 2017.

Lynteris, Christos. “The Prophetic Faculty of Epidemic Photography: Chinese Wet Markets and the Imagination of the Next Pandemic.” Visual Anthropology, vol. 29, no. 2, 2016, pp. 118–132.

Thouny, Christophe. “Waiting for the Messiah: The Becoming-Myth of Evangelion and Densha otoko.” Mechademia, vol. 4, no. 1, 2009, pp. 111–129.

From the Editor

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 50, no. 2-3

From the SFRA Review

DownloAD

From the Editor

Sean Guynes
Senior Editor, SFRA Review

The previous issue of SFRA Review appeared in February of this year. Then, there weren’t even a dozen cases in the U.S. Now, the U.S. is once again a world leader in deaths caused by political leaders’ stupidity and the need by citizens to rebel against authority. Huzzah to this America-made-great and, well, really sorry about those tens of thousands dead. Despite the shittiness of our times, I’m convinced this double issue of SFRA Review (the spring issue delayed by COVID) will bring some smiles even as many readers return to universities while administrators look away, put fingers in ears, and shout “LALALALA” in an effort to pretend it’s all going to go fine, just fine, nothing to see here.

New Review Website

As has become the chorus of the editor’s note the past few years, this issue brings with it the announcement of several changes—all, we hope, for the betterment of the Review. To begin with, you’ll hopefully have discovered our new home on the web at http://www.sfrareview.org.

Prior to the creation of this website, SFRA Review had made the important transition in the mid-2000s to an online publication, providing the PDF of each issue online for free; by the mid-2010s, the Review had gone entirely online, with no print option. But, even if a PDF is freely available, presenting a PDF as a downloadable link poses significant issues for contemporary journals publishing—and for the tens of authors published in each issue. For one, PDFs put on a website as a downloadable link are not text-searchable, even if the PDF, once downloaded, is. Say a scholar, reader, fan, or whomever is searching online for an essay on Israeli SF or a review of a certain work of scholarship. That’s how most of us begin our scholarly reviews. But an article in a 100+-page PDF (hosted as a downloadable file no less) won’t show up in your search. Moreover, at a time when the discoverability and shareability of scholarship is tied to a scholar’s ability to promote herself, to be “known” in academia, and thus to get further writing commissions and/or relevance in an increasingly irrelevantizing job market, the inaccessibility of a full-issue PDF impedes discoverability, makes shareability next to impossible (unless you cut up the PDF and host just your article on a personal website), and ultimately dissuades folks from contributing to a journal. I could go on, but you’re already bored.

Tl;dr—ours is a scholarly ecosystem in which digital presence makes or breaks a journal (often regardless of the content of the journal!). My day job is spent as the editorial coordinator for Michigan Publishing, part of which means managing a journals program with more than 35 online open access journals. And yet until last month I was helming a journal that, quite frankly, I’d have been embarrassed to have in the program I manage. But no more! We are online, our website looks not bad, and each article and review has a permalink (not a DOI yet, sadly) that ensures authors can share their work on social media and elsewhere. SFRA Review has stepped into the present (of online journals publishing). And we’re excited to see how this will augment and help our growth in the coming years.

Speaking of growth, some announcements.

Editorial Collective

First, as of this issue, SFRA Review has rethought the relationship between the editor and editorial staff. From now on, we are operating as an editorial collective divided into two groups: the general editors and the reviews editors. The reviews editors are the heart and blood of the journal, which properly retains the review focus of the publication in its title and endeavors to publish an increasingly number of fiction and media reviews in the coming year alongside the considerable number of nonfiction reviews we already publish. The main change is that, rather than attempting to divide editorial duties between a “managing” editor and “associate” editors—and recognizing that duties often overlap and that work tends to unfold more as a collective effort than as a neatly oiled machine—the general editors will all take the title of “editor,” with the lone exception of the lead editor whose goal is to guide the overall direction of the journal and ensure timely publication (when the world makes that possible). That person (this is awkward, but: me) will be called the senior editor, with the acknowledgment that this is not a position “above” other editors but rather a recognition that the journal needs an official representative to the SFRA. We have also begun discussing a process for replacing the senior editor, which will involve members of the editorial collective (general and review editors) nominating themselves and submitting their reasoning to the whole collective, which will vote for a new senior editor that must ultimately be approved by the SFRA Executive Committee. Collectivity rules; rules drool.

Active Calls for Papers

SFRA Review has endeavored these past few years to engage the wider scholarly SFF community through two means: (1) special issues on topics of particular relevance and importance to contemporary SFF studies, and (2) symposia collecting papers originally presented in person or virtually at conferences, institutes, symposia, and other scholarly gatherings of SFF studies nerds. The present issue provides an excellent example of what a solid special issue in SFRA Review can look like, thanks to the wonderful editing chops of Virginia L. Conn (recently PhD’d!).

At present, we have two calls for papers active.

Us in Flux: Community, Collaboration, and the Collective Imaginations of SF

The first is a special issue being edited in collaboration with Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, which started the Us in Flux project in April to curate flash fiction SFF stories about the near-future ends of current crises and has included stories and interviews with authors like Nisi Shawl, Kij Johnson, Tochi Onyebuchi, Sarah Pinsker, Usman T. Malik, Ernest Hogan, and others. We have issued a call for papers for a special issue that builds on the Us in Flux stories through critical thinkpieces that address how SFF can help us figure out our shit and build a better future. The CFP can be found here: https://sfrareview.org/2020/07/31/51-1-cfp/. Abstracts for thinkpieces are due October 4, with full drafts of 2,000-3,000 words due November 29. Please consider joining this exciting collaboration!

Mormonism and SF

Much further in the future, and which I’ll plug more in a later issue, is a special issue edited by Adam McLain on Mormonism and speculative fiction. The CFP can be found here: https://sfrareview.org/2020/08/11/51-3-cfp/. Abstracts will be due March 1, 2021, with full drafts of 2,000-3,000 words (or more) due May 15, 2021.

In the future, please look out for a special issue CFP on Hungarofuturisms to be co-edited by Beata Gubacsi. The next issue, 50.4, will have two symposia, one spinning out of Lars Schmeink’s cyberpunk conference and the other from the German organization Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung’s annual conference in collaboration with German Popular Culture Studies Association.

SFRA Review is actively soliciting future special issues and conference symposia. Please reach out to the general editors to discuss possibilities for collaboration: https://sfrareview.org/submissions/.

In this Issue

In this issue, the editorial collective is happy to present not only an incredible article by former fiction reviews editor Jeremy Brett on information science in Fran Wilde’s Fire Opal Mechanism, plus the usual range of features, including Rachel Cordasco’s regular column on SFF in translation and an interview with up-and-coming scholar Julia Gatermann, but also a wide-ranging special issue on Sinofuturisms offering the brilliant insights of a dozen scholars from all over the world! Thanks to editor Virginia L. Conn for putting this together and editor Amandine Faucheux for helping with copyedits. Because the summer issue of each Review typically follows the annual SFRA conference, this issue features some Executive Committee musts, including the Treasurer’s report on SFRA’s financial situation and the Secretary’s report on the annual Executive Committee meeting. Moreover, although we couldn’t celebrate them in person, this issue presents to you the winners of SFRA’s annual awards, along with awards committee statements and the letters from each winner. Finally, but never least, you’ll also find an incredible number of reviews of recent works of SFF scholarship, and several fiction and media reviews.

Enjoy, share, and join us, won’t you?

Special Issue CFP / Mormonism and SF (March 1, 2021)

Mormonism and SF

Special Issue of SFRA Review, vol. 51, no. 3, Summer 2021

Edited by Adam McLain

Background

Since its inception in the early nineteenth century, Mormonism has shot for the stars. With angelic visitors, planetary afterlives, and astronomical texts written by ancient patriarchs, the theology and history of Mormonism is ripe for analysis and criticism through the lens of SF. In addition to the beliefs, practitioners of the religion—the largest denomination of which is formally known as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with various smaller sects that use or engage with the same history and scriptures—have been and remain actively involved in the history and growth of SF. From staple science fiction authors like Orson Scott Card to contemporary authors like Brandon Sanderson and Shannon Hale, the genre has been shaped and will continue to be shaped by those who are practitioners and those who are adjacently connected to Mormonism broadly.

Submissions

SFRA Review seeks essays of c. 2,000-3,000 words for a special issue interrogating, analyzing, and critiquing the intersections of Mormonism and SF, where SF and Mormonism are understood in their broadest and most inclusive senses.

Submission should address but are not limited to:

• Early Mormonism and 19th century SF

Examples: Parley P. Pratt’s “A Dialogue between Joseph Smith and the Devil”, Nephi Anderson’s “Added Upon”

• Mormonism and Latter-day Saints/Mormons represented in SF

Examples: The Expanse (Spaceship Nauvoo), Starcraft (Zarahemla Starport and Helaman Colony in Tracy Hickman’s Speed of Darkness), Battlestar Galactica, Angels in America

• SF texts by Mormon/Latter-day Saint authors

Examples in Literature: Orson Scott Card, Brandon Sanderson, Shannon Hale, D. J. Butler, Stephenie Meyer, James Dashner, Ally Condie, Brandon Mull, Chris Heimerdinger, Jessica Day George, Obert Skye, J. Scott Savage, Aprilynne Pike, David Farland/Wolverton, Tracy Hickman, Charlie N. Holmberg, Dan Wells, Howard Tayler, Richard Paul Evans, and more.

Examples in other media: Glen A. Larson (Battlestar Galactica), Justin Santistevan (Dragon Prince), Sanderson board games (The Reckoners; Mistborn: House War; Call to Adventure: Stormlight Archive), Mormon versions of classic board games (Settlers of Zarahemla, Count Your Blessings Monopoly, Missionary Risk, Trek to Zion), Sandy Petersen (a creator of Doom), and more.

• History of Mormon fantasy and science fiction institutions

Examples: The Life, the Universe, and Everything Symposium; Leading Edge Magazine

• Mormon theology as SF

Examples: Planetary afterlives, angelic visitors, astronomy in the Book of Abraham, Saturday’s Warrior

For further reading on this topic, to help shape and springboard ideas, the editor suggests reading:

Michael R. Collings, “Refracted Visions and Future Worlds: Mormonism and Science Fiction,” Dialogue

Liz Busby’s recent five-part series on Mormon speculative fiction for the Association for Mormon Letters

Abstracts of c. 250 words and short author bios should be submitted by email to the special issue editor Adam McLain at adam.j.mclain@gmail.com using the subject line “Mormonism and SF Submission / Name Surname” by March 1, 2021.

Abstracts should clarify how the essay will engage with the intersections of Mormonism and SF, but prospective authors are encouraged to be creative in their approach to the questions raised by this special issue of SFRA Review. Authors will be notified of acceptance (or rejection) within two weeks.

If you are interested in writing an article for the special issue and would like to discuss it with the editor before submission of the abstract, please do so.

Accepted drafts of 2,000-3,000 words will be due in mid-May and should be prepared in MLA style with a Works Cited in MLA 8th edition. A full project timeline is listed below.

Timeline

March 1, 2021 = Abstracts due
March 15 = Authors notified of acceptance
May 15 = Drafts due to editor
June 15 = Edits on drafts returned to authors
July 15 = Second/Final draft due to editors
Early August = Publication of special issue in SFRA Review 51.3

Special Issue CFP / Us in Flux: Community, Collaboration, and the Collective Imaginations of SF (Oct. 10)

Us in Flux: Community, Collaboration, and the Collective Imaginations of SF

SFRA Review, vol. 51, no. 1 (Winter 2021)

Co-edited by Bob Beard, Joey Eschrich, Amandine Faucheux, and Sean Guynes

SFRA Review is partnering with the Center for Science and the Imagination (CSI) at Arizona State University to create a special issue of short thinkpiece essays that build on the flash SF stories published by CSI’s Us in Flux project. 

Background

Us in Flux began in April 2020 during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US, just weeks before a new wave of protests against anti-Black racism and state brutality emerged worldwide. Us in Flux brought together a diverse range of authors like Kij Johnson, Nisi Shawl, Tochi Onyebuchi, Usman T. Malik, Ernest Hogan, and others to explore themes of community, collaboration, and collective imagination in response to transformative events, through flash-fiction stories and conversations between authors and experts in a broad range of subjects. Stories have tackled pressing issues of agronomy, ecology, virtual reality, educational theory, conflict journalism, the human microbiome, and more. 

Submissions

For this special issue of SFRA Review, we seek thinkpiece-style essays of 2000-3000 words that use Us in Flux, its guiding themes, and its stories as jumping-off points to examine speculative fiction and its interactions with a variety of mutable possible futures, and its intersections and collisions with real-world efforts to reimagine and redefine community, collaboration, and collectivity. 

We seek pieces that focus on Us in Flux stories and the conversations around them—but also pieces that use Us in Flux to frame or inspire broader analyses of SF, extending to other texts, movements, trends, and patterns. Of particular interest are pieces that trace connections between SF and concrete efforts to forge new communities and systems in the face of calamity, uncertainty, and upheaval. We encourage submissions by folks from historically marginalized and oppressed groups, as well as early-career scholars, fiction writers, and public intellectuals. 

Abstracts of c. 250 words and short author bios should be submitted by email to the editors at sfrarev@gmail.com using the subject line “Us in Flux Submission / Name Surname” by Sunday, October 4, 2020. Abstracts should clarify how the thinkpiece will engage with the Us in Flux themes, but prospective authors are encouraged to be creative in their approach to the questions raised by this special issue of SFRA Review. Authors will be notified of acceptance (or rejection) within two weeks.

If you are interested in writing a piece and would like to discuss with the editors before submission of the abstract, please contact us via the email address above and the appropriate special issue editor will reach out to you.

Drafts of 2,000-3,000 words will be due at the end of November. A full project timeline is listed below.

Timeline

October 10 = Abstracts due
November 29 = Drafts due to editors
December 13 = Edits on drafts returned to authors
January 17 = Second/Final draft due to editors
Early February = Publication of special issue in SFRA Review 51.1

Us in Flux Stories and Conversations

Essays for the Us in Flux special issue should draw on the ideas, conflicts, and solutions imagined in the following flash SF stories and conversations with authors. If you are interested in writing a thinkpiece essay for the Us in Flux special issue, but unsure of how to incorporate an Us in Flux story, please reach out to the editors (above) to discuss essay ideas.

“The Parable of the Tares” by Christopher Rowe

“An Attempt at Exhausting My Deck” by Kij Johnson

“When We Call a Place Home” by Chinelo Onwualu

“A Room of One’s Own” by Tochi Onyebuchi

“Skating Without Streetlights” by Tina Connolly

“Fourth and Most Important” by Nisi Shawl

“Notice” by Sarah Pinsker

“A Cyber-Cuscuta Manifesto” by Regina Kanyu Wang

“The Wandering City” by Usman T. Malik

“Even God Has a Place Called Home” by Ray Mwihaki

“Tomorrow is Another Daze” by Ernest Hogan

  • Us in Flux: Conversations  – TK with Latinx cultural theorist Frederick Luis Aldama

A Contact List of Graduate Students, Postdocs, Adjuncts, and Alt-Acs in SF, Fantasy, and Horror Studies

For the sake of solidarity among graduate students, postdocs, and other contingent members of the academy, SFRA Review editor compiled a collaborative list via Google Docs of folks working on/in/at the intersection of science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, and horror (SFFH) studies. SFRA Review now presents the list publicly for further collaboration.

Whether it’s your primary focus, a side focus, a minor interest; whether you are in literary studies, history, media studies, sociology—we want to get to know you in order to connect, share resources, and develop camaraderie between graduate students, postdocs, adjuncts, and others struggling up through the ranks of academia or now working outside it. This is also a good way to get a sense of the breakdown of institutions, fields, and research interests represented by global scholars of SFFH.

This list is administered by the SFRA Review; information provided here is for the benefit of all SFFH scholars; if contact info is provided, it may be used to contact listees for the purpose of academic work and camaraderie.

Click to enter the Google Doc

Review of The OA, Season 2

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 50, no. 1

Media Reviews

Download

Review of The OA, Season 2

Carmen Victor

The OA. Season 2, produced by Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, Plan B Entertainment and Anonymous Content, 2019.

The second season of The OA picks up exactly where the first one left, and both continues and, arguably, doubles down on its strange allegorical and metaphysical take on science fiction and transdimentionality. To recap, the first season centers around a young woman named Prairie Johnson (Brit Marling) who returns to her adoptive family after disappearing under mysterious circumstances seven years earlier. Now preferring to go by “The OA”, Prairie, who had been blind for most of her life, assembles a misfit group of four local high-school students and one teacher (called the Crestwood Five) for the purposes of travelling to another dimension, utilizing a method she and another four other people developed during their time in captivity, as revealed in the first season.. Season 2 of The OA is set in the second dimension. We are introduced to a private eye named Karim Washington (Kingsley Ben-Adir), who has been hired to investigate the disappearance of a young teenage girl named Michelle. In this dimension, the captives (Homer, Rachel, Scott, Renata) as well as Hap and OA have jumped into different versions of themselves. Hap is now Dr. Percy, the director of a large psychiatric institution where Homer works as a resident psychiatrist. Rachel, who had a beautiful singing voice in Season 1, is mute in Season 2 and OA has jumped into a version of herself that did not have a car accident as a child, thus she never had a near death experience so she never lost her sight, was never adopted, and instead led a life of luxury and privilege with her biological father who was alive and present throughout most of her life. Despite her being thrust into this new dimension, OA remembers her seven-year captivity, she remembers her friends, the movements, and the Crestwood Five, as well as everything else from the dimension whence she came. The entirety of Season 2 weaves an endlessly intriguing narrative of how Karim Washington’s search for a missing teenager interconnects with the people and events surrounding the OA and the mysteries of interdimensional travel.

Whereas the first season of The OA is a told like an ordinary drama, recounting an emotional tale of narrative fiction while hinting at the trappings of science fictionality, the second season is more akin to a neo-noir thriller, told particularly effectively visually through the use of unbalanced camera angles. In addition, the narrative at times blurs the lines between good and bad, right and wrong and employs thematic motifs that include revenge, paranoia, and alienation.

Admirers of allegorical science fiction television and film such as The Prisoner (McGoohan, 1967), mystery horror drama such as Twin Peaks (Lynch, 1990-2017), supernatural drama Lost (Lindelof, 2004-10), supernatural mystery drama The Leftovers (Lindelof, 2014-17) or German science fiction drama thriller Dark (bo Odar and Friese, 2017-20) will appreciate The OA. Like these various examples of allegorical science fiction television and film, The OA engages audiences that revel most in unravelling the mysteries of decoding a myriad of literary and historical references and associations, while seeking the sophisticated underlying and cosmic meanings embedded within the show that slowly reveal themselves on multiple narrative, visual and metaphorical levels.

However, while The OA occasionally uses science fiction tropes, it does so without deploying the hard mechanics of sci-fi. For example, while interdimensional travel is a key narrative device in The OA, it generally does not use technology as a means to travel, unlike recent science-fiction films Inception (Nolan, 2010) or Interstellar (Nolan, 2014) which do employ technology as a means to enter metaphysical worlds. When science fiction technological devices become divulged towards the end of the second season of The OA, they are as a revelation because the audience has grown accustomed to the idea of achieving interdimensional travel through choreographed movements, as entirely plausible. That The OA is wholly convincing about interdimensional travel as an analogue activity, arrived at through a series of physical movements executed in unison and with perfect feeling, differentiates this series from other science fiction narratives that deal with interdimensional travel. The second season of The OA ends climactically with characters in dual dimensions jumping together to a third dimension whose conditions are immediately apparent as meta-narrative. The season-ending cliff-hanger is maddeningly self-referential, drawing to attention the idea of its own artificiality while tangibly questioning the very medium through which The OA is being told.

According to the show-runners, the entirety of the narrative arc of The OA was meant to be told over five seasons and it had all been mapped out before production began. In an allegorical work such as this, the number five is in itself significant because it is one of many emblems that is repeated throughout the series. Five seasons, presumably five dimensions, told in five distinct genres, corresponding to the five Crestwood characters, the five captives, the five connected glass chambers in which they were imprisoned, Hap’s name short for ‘haptic’ meaning the five senses, and the five movements which enable interdimensional travel.

Scholars and researchers interested in televisual works invoking intertextuality as an aesthetic strategy will recognize The OA as a profoundly postmodern media text. though not in the way Frederic Jameson defines postmodernism, which in Jameson’s view, relies too heavily on nostalgia for a past that never existed. Rather, the postmodernism expressed in The OA is more analogous to the way Linda Hutcheon describes it: “that which paradoxically wants to challenge the outer borders of cinema and wants to ask questions (though rarely offer[s] answers)” (117). Further in line with Hutcheon’s theorizing, The OA leaves behind unresolved tensions, challenges spectators expectations, and allows contradictions to deliberately manifest. The OA is shaped by adjunct literary references that elaborate a narrative which reveals clues pointing to a series of mysteries which are never entirely articulated, self-reflexively. The OA is meta-cinema. Some of the literary references in The OA are overt and others are covert. For example, Karim Washington gives Octavia Butler’s novel The Parable of the Sower (1993) as a gift to another character in Season 2. The Parable of the Sower is a sci-fi novel featuring a character with hyper-empathy following the collapse of society due to climate change. During experiments, Hap fixates on the audio recordings captured during near death experiences, which he then situates as occurring among Saturn’s Rings. That immediately calls to mind W.E. Sebald’s 1995 novel The Rings of Saturn, a hybrid work of history, myth and memoir in which themes of time, memory and identity feature prominently. Interdimensional travel and communication (not limited to human communication but interspecies communication as well) is a central focus of The OA. Prairie/Nina/The OA uses the term an “invisible river” as a poetic description of interdimensional travel achieved by executing the five movements. This reference to an invisible river in The OA recalls German poet and philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin’s influential hymn The Ister (1803) which, briefly, is a poem about the Danube River concerned with cyclical history while unpacking concepts of space and time. A documentary was made of The Ister (Barison and Ross, 2004) where well known philosophers including Bernard Stiegler, Jean-Luc Nancy and Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe discuss myriad, interconnected relations and, of particular significance here, the film is divided into five chapters that end as the river reaches its source, seeming only to claim the failure of its own project. 

Despite the highly enigmatic ending of Season 2, Netflix unceremoniously cancelled The OA shortly after the second season aired, citing that it didn’t generate enough new subscriptions, which is one of the key metrics that Netflix uses to measure the success of its productions. The fandom of The OA was in an uproar, and conspiracy theories abounded about the characters having jumped into our present dimension as well as theories circulating about supposedly innovative marketing plans for subsequent seasons by faking out the audience about the show’s cancellation. A fan went on a weeks-long hunger strike at Netflix headquarters and fans raised money to install digital billboards in New York’s Times Square in protest of the cancellation. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, the series remains cancelled. The showrunners, however, stand by their 16 hours of unfettered television, which shares narrative and conceptual elements with other examples of independent, speculative fiction as exemplified in films by Benson and Moorhead: Resolution (2012), Spring (2014), The Endless (2017). As well, The OA shares conceptual commonalties with works such as Coherence (Byrkit, 2013), Arrival (Villeneuve, 2016), films written by Alex Garland 28 Days Later and Sunshine (both 2002), Never Let Me Go (2010), and Annihilation (2018) and similar radically sincere (Gilbert), independent works such as Primer (Carruth, 2004), Upstream Color (2013) and the German sci-fi Dark (bo Odar and Friese, 2017-20). 

WORKS CITED

Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. Routledge, 1993.

Gilbert, Sophie. “The Radical Sincerity of The OA.” The Atlantic, 19 Mar. 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/03/the-return-of-the-oa-tvs-strangest-most-sincere-show/585208/.