Sunday, November 23, 2014

In a Topsy-Turvy World, China Warms to Sci-Fi

Liu Cixin
With a state-owned power plant in nearby Shanxi Province temporarily shut down to reduce air pollution, one of its engineers, Liu Cixin(刘慈欣), is using the free time to work on his hobby: reigning as China’s best-selling science-fiction author.

Along with working on a new novel and advising on screenplay adaptations of his earlier fiction, Mr. Liu, 51, has been promoting the English translation of “The Three-Body Problem,(《三体》)” the first book in his best-selling apocalyptic space opera trilogy. Translated by Ken Liu, an award-winning science-fiction writer in his own right who is based in the United States (the men are not related), it is one of the few Chinese science-fiction novels to be translated into English. It will be released in the United States on Tuesday by Tor Books.

The success of the “Three-Body” series, as it is called in China, has gained a following beyond the small but flourishing science-fiction world here. Since the third book was published in 2010, each entry in the series has sold about 500,000 copies in the original Chinese, making Mr. Liu the best-selling Chinese science-fiction author in decades.

In addition to the usual high school and college-age fans of science fiction, China’s aerospace and Internet industries have embraced the books. Many interpret the battle of civilizations depicted in the series as an allegory for the ruthless competition in the nation’s Internet industry.

The series has also breathed new life into a genre that, here as elsewhere, the literary establishment often marginalizes.

For decades, science fiction was subject to the whims of Communist Party rule. The genre went from being a vehicle for popularizing science for socialist purposes to drawing criticism in 1983 from party newspapers for “spreading pseudoscience and promoting decadent capitalist elements.” When the prestigious People’s Literature literary magazine published four of Mr. Liu’s short stories in 2012, it was a sign that the genre was back in official good graces.

At its core, science fiction capitalizes on uncertainty about the future to push the boundaries of the reader’s imagination. In fast-changing China, stories that lay out what coming years may hold in store have therefore found deeper resonance among readers.

“China is on the path of rapid modernization and progress, kind of like the U.S. during the golden age of science fiction in the ’30s to the ’60s,” Mr. Liu said. “The future in the people’s eyes is full of attractions, temptations and hope. But at the same time, it is also full of threats and challenges. That makes for very fertile soil.”

Chinese science fiction serves another purpose in the eyes of Xia Jia, a science-fiction writer and professor at Xian Jiaotong University. “Chinese science fiction, in a way, has borne the weight of the ‘Chinese dream’ since the genre first appeared in China in the late Qing dynasty,” she said, referring to the turn of the 20th century.

“The dream is about wanting to overtake the Western countries and become a very powerful modern China while still preserving these old elements,” she added. “This is what we who write science fiction in China have to grapple with.”

The “Three-Body” tomes chronicle a march of the human race into the universe set against the recent past, the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution. It is a classic science-fiction story in the style of the British master Arthur C. Clarke, whose work Mr. Liu says he grew up reading. “Everything that I write is a clumsy imitation of Arthur C. Clarke,” he said.

The first book in the series explores the world of the Trisolarans, an alien civilization on the brink of destruction. When a secret military project in China attempts to make contact with aliens, the Trisolarans capture the signals and decide to invade Earth. Back in China, people split into two camps: those who welcome the aliens and those who want to fight them.

The series is likely to be a change of pace for science-fiction fans in the United States, where many leading contemporary writers in the genre are rejecting classic alien-invasion plots in favor of those that take on real-world issues like climate change or shifting gender roles.

Please read more at NYT.

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