by Ken Liu
The laboring masses, kept in the dark about the truth, worked even harder to earn the right to vacation, where all they recovered was the time that had been stolen from them.
Their children, on the other hand, seemed to be born with their sense of time out of balance. As they also entered the labor force, and their sense of time was further twisted, things began to spin out of control. The next generation learned to forget, an instinctual strategy for bringing relief to the overburdened brain. Periodically—the exact length of time differed from individual to individual—the memories of these people reset themselves, and they woke up as newborns with blank slates. As those with reformatted brains imitated each other, a primitive savagery began to spread like a plague, and violence and lust broke through the barriers set up by civilization and technology.
The wild people took over the streets and cities and destroyed every machine and institution that tried to change their raw nature.
They truly possessed time. They no longer needed time.
EPILOGUE: SPEAKING IN TONGUES
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Or, as a structural linguist would put it: language constructed thought; thought understood and transformed the world; and so language was the world’s prime mover, was God.
Wherever God was, so was the Devil, just as light could not be separated from darkness.
It was language, not tools, that separated humans from apes. The bridge between the signifier and the signified connected the world of subjectivity with the physical world. Meaning was like the water of the Ganges, a wide-flowing torrent. Humans extracted drops of sensory experience, saved them, classified them, generalized them, and sublimated them until the border between the self and objective reality was defined. Then they learned to exchange thoughts between different individuals, to communicate intent, and society began to form: division of labor, work, family, power, state, war—everything was built on this foundation. Language was the measure of understanding, and every debate among humanity was based on our shared linguistic system.
The gaps and seams persisted in the places that could not be encompassed by words.
Religion, music, painting, love, pain, joy, loneliness—these words are like the tips of icebergs, concealing the unfathomable, vast, complicated feelings beneath the surface. They accompanied humanity’s cultural genes from ancient times, and like the sedimentary strata of geology, folded and overlapped one another, interpenetrating and merging, evolving until today.
When you discuss these topics, you know not what you’re discussing.
All societies wish to promulgate an effective set of linguistic regulations in order to rectify the thoughts of the masses. From Qin Shihuang’s edict for all China to write the same way, to the Newspeak of 1984, words have vanished and new idioms have been invented. Some expressions were usable only by certain classes in certain places, while the masses were required to avoid these formulations reserved to the noble and highborn, and so they invented slang that required the overactive associative brain to smoothly wield its store of homonyms, puns, metonyms and rhymes, a celebration of the tongue and the vocal cords.
In a certain age, even revelry was a disciplined ideological tool, realized through technology.
The government installed firewalls in the language center of the brain of every newborn, thus achieving for the first time in history a real-time language surveillance network. When what an individual wished to say triggered the filters in their firewall—which were constantly kept up to date—the firewall cut off the person’s speech and punished them with an appropriate level of pain. On the other hand, when the person spoke the words that satisfied the desires of those in power, the firewall rewarded them with a pleasure similar to drugs.
A brave new world of reward and punishment.
The system worked so well that people, of their own initiative, devised a way to integrate the filters into their genes so that they could be passed on to their children, allowing them to meld with the firewall even more seamlessly. Eventually, even the merest hint of an undesirable thought would be eliminated before it could take root, maximally reducing the potential for being punished. The mechanism gradually became a part of the unconscious, assimilated into the part of the cortex that we inherited from our amphibious, piscine, reptilian ancestors, meshed with the most primitive part of human language.
Then things took a different turn.
Humanity never fully understood what happened next, not even now in the time I’m from. One theory is that humanity was indeed the creation of some higher intelligence, who implanted into the human mind a highly designed language system. The system evolved as civilization developed, but when a foreign invader threatened its fundamental principles, it would reset the system to factory defaults and return everything to the origin. The system was also highly infectious.
Can you imagine it? A world without language. Everything collapsed.
The problem wasn’t that it was impossible to talk; rather, humanity lost the very tool necessary to understand the world and the self. The universe returned to primeval chaos.
I am the product of a second system. Very few individuals showed symptoms of it—maybe in your time, it would be called “divine inspiration.”
It was no longer I who spoke words, but words that spoke me.
It was as if the divine intelligence had lost patience with foolish humans. The chosen ones who brought with them a brand-new linguistic logic had to direct the unenlightened primitives to reunderstand the world and rebuild civilization. The new world did seem to be more peaceful, more enlightened, more perfect. Scientists invented time machines and discovered the theory of timelines. They dispatched envoys to parallel universes along different timelines to spread the gospel so that the humans in these other worlds could avoid their mistakes. Many of these envoys did not meet happy fates.
This is why I, Stanley, have come from the future to speak to you. For reasons that I cannot reveal, I will terminate my sojourn here shortly and leave your timeline to leap into another unknown world.
In your universe, the number nine is special, symbolizing permanence, rebirth, the supreme. I hope the nine chapters of my gospel can accompany the lost souls of this world through the door at the end of time, to achieve eternal recurrence.
ESSAYS
A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO CHINESE SCIENCE FICTION AND FANDOM24
by Regina Kanyu Wang
Chinese science fiction has remained largely mysterious to the outside world until recently. In 2015, Liu Cixin (刘慈欣) won the first Hugo Award for Asia with his novel The Three-Body Problem («三体»), and in August 2016, Hao Jingfang (郝景芳) won the second with her novelette “Folding Beijing” («北京折叠»)—both translated by Ken Liu, who is himself a Hugo-winning American author. Now, as more and more Chinese science fiction is translated into English and other languages, it is the perfect time to explore its history.
This essay mainly focuses on science fiction, not fantasy, but a few words on fantasy may be helpful. In China, the boundary between science fiction, or kehuan (科幻), and fantasy, or qihuan (奇幻), is seen as quite rigid. However, due to our historical tradition in myths and kung fu stories, it is hard to define Chinese fantasy as a whole. You will find it hard to tell qihuan (奇幻: fantasy) from xuanhuan (玄幻: mostly referring to online fiction with Chinese-style supernatural elements) and mohuan (魔幻: mostly referring to fiction with Western-style magic elements). Narrowly speaking, though, current Chinese fantasy literature excludes themes such as grave robbery (盗墓, daomu: stories involving a group of treasure-seekers breaking into ancient graves, where they come across ghosts and all sorts of other evil creatures), time travel (穿越, chuanyue: stories featuring a contemporary person traveling back in time to ancient dynasties for some unexplained [and unimportant] reason, where they become involved in complicated courtly intrigue or some other soap-opera-like plot), and Daoism immortality-cha
sing (修真, xiuzhen: stories featuring a protagonist overcoming various challenges to pursue immortality by Daoism method), which stand as popular genres by themselves.
There have been fantasy magazines and fan groups throughout contemporary China, but compared to science fiction, Chinese fantasy literature is not at its peak. Having said that, TV series and movies adapted from successful early works are starting to come out in recent times. For example, in 2016 we have Novoland: The Castle in the Sky (2016), a TV series based on the Novoland fantasy universe, which is meant to be China’s Dungeons & Dragons and is the collaborative effort of many fans and writers; and Ice Fantasy (2016), a TV series adapted from the bestselling City of Fantasy (2003), written by Guo Jingming, a famous Chinese YA author. However, for this essay, I will only talk about science fiction in mainland China.
1.
PREHISTORY AND EARLY HISTORY OF CHINESE SF
Like all cultures, Chinese legends and myths have fantasy elements in abundance. In China, however, the first text in the science fiction genre can be found as early as 450 BC to 375 BC. In one of the classics of Daoism, Liezi («列子»), we can find a story called “Yanshi” («偃师») in the chapter “The Questions of Tang” («汤问»). Yanshi, a skilled mechanic, builds a delicate automaton resembling a real human being, which can move, sing, and dance. He shows the dummy to the king to prove his skill. The dummy is so delicate and convincing that the king suspects Yanshi is cheating him by using a real human. At the end, Yanshi has to break the automaton to prove that it is only made of wood and leather. Yanshi’s automaton can be seen as a prototype for an early robot.
Science fiction as we know it today first came to China in the late Qing Dynasty. Chinese intellectuals like Lu Xun (鲁迅) and Liang Qichao (梁启超) emphasized the importance of science fiction as a tool to help the country prosper. In 1900, the Chinese translation of French author Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days was published—it was the first piece of translated foreign science fiction published in China, translated by Chen Shoupeng (陈寿彭) and Xue Shaohui (薛绍徽) from an English translation (Geo M. Towle and N d’Anvers; Sampson Low, Marston & Co., London, 1873, The Tour of the World in Eighty Days, then changed to Around the World in Eighty Days). Lu Xun, arguably the most famous writer in modern Chinese literature, also translated several science fiction novels into Chinese, such as Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, published in Chinese in 1903 and 1906 respectively. Lu Xun translated the novels from the Japanese translation by Inoue Tsutomu since he didn’t know French. The earliest original Chinese science fiction novel we know of is Colony of the Moon («月球殖民地»), written by Huangjiang Diaosou (荒江钓叟, pen name of an anonymous author, which means “Old Fisherman by a Deserted River”), serialized in a journal called Illustrated Fiction («绣像小说») in 1904 and 1905.
For a long time in China, literature has been regarded as something which should carry social responsibilities. During the early years of the twentieth century, science fiction in China was supposed to play the basic role of teaching advanced science as well as democracy from the West. Most of the Western SF that was translated into Chinese was adapted to serve this role. For example, Verne’s original text for From the Earth to the Moon contains twenty-eight chapters, but Lu Xun’s translation only has fourteen; A Journey to the Centre of the Earth has forty-five chapters in its original French text, but Lu Xun rewrote it into twelve chapters. Much of this effort was, ironically, devoted to cutting out some of the highly technical messages to make the story more exciting to readers.
Wars and political turmoil lasted from the late Qing Dynasty (1833 to 1911) to the Republic Era (1911 to 1949). Lao She (老舍)’s Cat Country («猫城记») came out in 1932. It may be the best-known Chinese SF around the world before the founding of the People’s Republic. In this novel, the first-person narrator flies to Mars, but the aircraft is crushed as soon as it arrives. As the only survivor, the narrator is taken to the City of Cats by feline-faced aliens, where he then lives. With his ironic description of the alien community, the author criticizes his own society.
After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the first wave of new Chinese SF came in the 1950s. A Dream Tour of the Solar System («梦游太阳系»), by Zhang Ran (张然), was regarded to be the first story with SF elements in the PRC.25 Published in 1950, it introduces astronomical bodies in the solar system in the format of a dream narrative, more like science fairy tale than hard sci-fi. Some of the big names at that time were Zheng Wenguang (郑文光) and Tong Enzheng (童恩正). Zheng Wenguang’s From Earth to Mars («从地球到火星», 1954) was regarded as the first SF short story in the PRC. It’s about three Chinese teenagers stealing a spaceship and flying to Mars for adventure. SF writers of the period were largely influenced by SF from the former Soviet Union. The complete collection of Jules Verne was translated from Russian into Chinese from 1957 to 1962 because it was highly praised in the former Soviet Union. Works by former Soviet Union writers like Alexander Belyayev were also translated. Most science fiction of the period was written for kids or as popular science texts, optimistic and limited in scope.
Then came the Cultural Revolution, leaving little space for literature, and even less for science fiction. Anything that bore any relation to “Western capitalism” was regarded as harmful. Many writers were forced to stop writing. After the reform and opening-up policy, the golden age of Chinese SF finally arrived in the late 1970s. A large body of work emerged, along with a growing number of fan groups and magazines specializing in SF. During this time, Ye Yonglie (叶永烈) was one of the most prestigious writers. His Little Know-It-All Travels around the Future World («小灵通漫游未来», 1978), has sold more than 1.5 million copies, and its comic book adaptation sold another 1.5 million copies. Zheng Wenguang and Tong Enzheng started to write SF again. Zheng’s Flying to Sagittarius («飞向人马座», 1979) became a milestone of Chinese SF. It tells the story of three teenagers trying their best to return to the Earth after roaming outside the solar system for years. And Tong’s most famous work, Death-Ray on Coral Island («珊瑚岛上的死光», 1978), is about scientists fighting against evil corporations to protect the peace of humanity. Coral Island was adapted into the first SF movie in China in 1980 with the same title.
In 1983, the anti-spiritual-pollution campaigns wiped SF from the map again. Since 1979, there had been arguments on whether science fiction should be literature or popular science. The charge of pseudoscience was leveled against science fiction. In 1983, Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese paramount leader at the time, spoke against capitalism and exploitation in literary works. Science fiction was regarded as spiritual pollution because of the elements of capitalism and commercialism in it. Stories that talked about more than science were regarded as being harmful politically. Very few—or more accurately, none—dared to write or publish SF during the period. It wasn’t until late 1980s and early 1990s that Chinese SF recovered from the attack and flourished again.
2.
PUBLICATION OF PROZINES
The definition of prozines in China is a bit different from the definition used in America. In China, you have to get a special number called a “CN,” similar to an “ISBN,” certificated by the government, to be allowed to publish prozines.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, lots of SF magazines popped up in China. In 1979, Scientific and Literary («科学文艺») began to publish in Sichuan Province. Age of Science （«科学时代»), Science Literature Translation Series («科学文艺译丛»), SF Ocean （«科幻海洋»), Wisdom Tree （«智慧树»), and SF World–Selected SF Works («科幻世界——科学幻想作品选刊») appeared within the following three years. However, all these magazines except Scientific and Literary stopped publishing during the anti-spiritual-pollution campaigns.
In 1980, Scientific and Literary sold about 200,000 copies of each issue, but after the anti-spiritual-pollution campaigns
, the number dropped as low as 700 copies. After 1984, Yang Xiao (杨潇), editor of the magazine, was selected as the president of Scientific and Literary. Together with her team, she made great efforts to hold the fort for Chinese SF. In 1991, the name of the magazine was changed to Science Fiction World («科幻世界»), and that year in Chengdu, they held the annual conference of World SF. We can look back to 1991 as the year Chinese SF started to flourish again. By 1999, an essay question in China’s National Higher Education Entrance Exam, “What if memory could be transplanted?,” was the same as the title of an article published in Science Fiction World that year. This partly pushed sales of Science Fiction World to its peak: 361,000 copies of each issue in 2000.
As the twenty-first century drew closer, another important Chinese SF magazine came to life in the Shanxi Province. Science Fiction King («科幻大王») started to publish in 1994, changing its name to New Science Fiction («新科幻») in 2011. The peak sales were around 12,000 copies per issue in 2008. Unfortunately, at the end of 2014, New Science Fiction stopped publishing due to its relatively low sales. Science Fiction Cube («科幻Cube») is the youngest member of the current existing SF prozine market in China. Its first three issues only came out in 2016, and each issue sold about 50,000 copies. Some other SF magazines appeared and disappeared in this period, including World Science Fiction («世界科幻博览») and Science Fiction Story («科幻-文学秀»). Other publications, like Mengya («萌芽»), ZUI Found («文艺风赏»), and Super Nice («超好看»), publish science fiction as well as other genres.
3.