crisis and utopian hope” (Huters 2005, 132) heralded the introduction of new literary forms and genres. The enthusiasm for the “new novel” represents a rare point of unity in the otherwise politically fractious intellectual atmosphere of early twentieth-century China. Probably the clearest justification for the new focus of the novel was the idea that the form could accommodate two urgent requirements: a larger audience for writing, and the potential to effectively represent to this larger audience the full dimensions of the crisis China faced (Huters 2005, 24–25; 1988, 261). This vision of literary purpose would be adopted by May Fourth literati, and its echoes continue to reverberate in the contemporary period.
Geographically, Milner also considers the applicability of world systems theory in understanding the development of SF, applying Franco Moretti’s concept of core, periphery, and semi-periphery developed in “Conjectures on World Literature” and Atlas of the European Novel to the development of SF. Milner argues that “what is true for the novel in general is also true for SF. Conceived in England and France, at the core of the nineteenth-century world literary system (Shelley, Bulwer-Lytton and, above all, Verne and Wells), it continued in both countries throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries” (Milner 2012, 165). Milner describes a largely European semi-periphery, arguing that the United States and Japan transformed from semi-peripheral to core SF countries during the twentieth century. The global periphery of Milner’s selective tradition consists of those countries that predominately translated works from core countries into their target languages, and which did not contribute to the global tradition. This parallels the emergence of Sinophone studies, a mode of analysis that understands Chinese-language cultural production as the product of core-periphery relationships betwixt and between a number of local and global empires (Shih 2007; Shih, Bernards, and Tsai 2013).
These approaches help demonstrate that SF is much more than any single Platonic prototype, neatly bound within the borders of a national literary tradition. All reflect a turn toward a historical approach to genre that understands the literary field as the product of global relations of economic and political power. John Rieder observes that “sf’s identity is a differentially articulated position in an historical and mutable field of genres,” and that furthermore SF fits into an “economy of genres.” In other words, SF is a gradual accretion of texts that make use of, rather than belong to, a genre (Rieder 2010, 197–199). In this light, it is most useful to ask what SF was at a given historical moment and geographical location, and what critical, social, or political purposes it served, rather than to seek universalizing definitions.
Milner identifies imperialism as one of the constituent elements of SF but ultimately concludes that social transformations wrought by technological innovation and the dialectic of enlightenment and romanticism are the most salient topoi of SF as a global genre. However, in the case of late Qing China, I argue that Orientalism and imperialism were indeed the most conspicuous themes. For this reason, before we are able to move on to an examination of the ways in which China’s semicolonial status shaped the emergence and thematic content of early Chinese SF, the various media and narrative modes that were particular to the emergence of the genre in China, and an analysis of the texts themselves, it is necessary to explicate the relationship between SF and imperialism.
Imperialism and SF
The historical conditions outlined in the introduction apply equally to the literary field of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Fictional depictions of exploration in the work of authors like H. Rider Haggard brought the imaginary horizons of imperial expansion home for readers, inspiring new generations of young imperial subjects to join in the effort (Katz, 1–3, 108–112). Romantic genres like adventure and SF were central to this self-reinforcing impetus to expansion, catalysts fueled by and that in turn helped to fuel the growing sphere of imperial influence. Dreams of material and intellectual rewards of conquest provided ample source material for authors of a number of genres. In turn, this imagination paved the way for and fueled the desire for continued efforts of exploration and conquest. The imaginary horizons of the twentieth century were heavily influenced by the exchanges between Europe and Asia. These exchanges were source material for early European SF, which in turn helped to broaden the literary and intellectual horizons of East Asian countries like China and Japan.
Quoting William Blake in Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said noted that “empire follows art, and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose” (Said 1993, 13).4 Empire is as dependent on the intellectual rationalization that sustains its mission as it is upon the military force necessary to carry out the act of physical conquest. Framed in terms of enlightenment, emancipation, and benevolent paternalism, the justifications for going to war and for continued occupation are as involved as the actual moment of conquest itself. Indeed, this rationalization, however untenable, is dependent on masking military conquest with the façade of moral good and humanitarian aid. Or, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri put it, “Empire is formed not on the basis of force itself, but on the capacity to present force as being in the service of right and peace” (Hardt and Negri, 15).
Recent work in the vein of Said’s critique of Orientalism has shown that SF was one of many genres that paved the way for empire by creating the conditions for its popular imagination. The wish-fulfillment narratives of science and adventure fiction served as primers describing how young men of ambition might contribute to and partake in the spoils of conquest. The imaginary horizons of imperial expansion were brought to the minds of readers of romantic genres of adventure and SF in the work of authors like H. Rider Haggard and Daniel Defoe, inspiring new generations of young imperial subjects to join in the effort. Images of men of action—explorers, engineers, soldiers, and sailors—were intended to be the role models of a new generation of imperial actors (Richards, 1–6; Mathison, 173–174). In Meiji Japan, translations of science fiction and adventure novels served as tools for establishing an imaginary horizon that valorized the mission of exploration and conquest, priming young men for their participation in what would eventually become Japan’s own effort at imperial expansion, the “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere.”
The global relations that led to the emergence of SF mirror those that swung late nineteenth-century China from an empire at the center of Asian trade and tribute to a semicolonial outpost at the margins of European empire. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay suggests that three factors were critical to the emergence of SF: “the technological expansion that drove real imperialism, the need felt by national audiences for literary-cultural mediation as their societies were transformed from historical nations into hegemons, and the fantastic model of achieved techno-scientific Empire” (Csicsery-Ronay 2003, 231).
These three factors reiterate Said’s vision of the novel writ large as a literary form functionally tied to the comprehension of expanding networks of global trade and domination, spurred on and enabled by industrial production in the context of the genre of SF in particular. Csicsery-Ronay identifies a positive correlation between SF and imperialism, recognizing Britain, France, Germany, the former Soviet Union, Japan, and the United States as the primary producers and consumers of SF, arguing that SF has been driven by a desire for “transformation of imperialism into Empire” (232). The geopolitical imagination of SF is intimately concerned with the imagination of a historical teleology leading to an all-encompassing world order.5 As empire is the imaginary political horizon of SF, Orientalism is a major influence on its discursive content. John Rieder’s Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (2008) adds to this critique an explanation of the historical conditions that tied Orientalism to SF. Colonial expansion and the simultaneous establishment of European capitalism on a global scale were driving forces in the emergence of the genre. Orientalist discourse strove to define inequalities often produced by the colonial project as the natural outcome of preexisting difference; SF served at turns to reinforce these notions, and at others to subvert them.
Two aspects of the construction of a world-embracing capitalist economy are particularly relevant to the relation between colonialism and the emergence of science fiction. The first is the realignment of local identities that accompanied the restructuring of the world economy….
