contemporary theories and exchange the term ‘East’ for ‘extraterrestrial,’ so that the principles thus debated become productive in a genre which in itself has been marginalized” (14–15).
Kerslake notes that in canonical SF, the silencing of an alien antagonist is often deployed as a means of subverting the legitimacy of European civilization/humanism as the universal subject. Rieder, Kerslake, and Milner all argue that SF does indeed have the potential to subvert ethnocentrism. Kerslake frames the duality of ethnocentrism and subversion in terms of a forbidden “political pornography” or an increasingly meaningful, if ironic, literary experiment (Kerslake, 29). Milner argues that Said’s relatively terse analysis of Jules Verne (Said 1993, 187), Gayatri Spivak’s more detailed deconstruction of the function of colonial consciousness in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Spivak 1988, 1999), and Rieder and Csicsery-Ronay’s analyses of SF and empire all overstate the thematic centrality of Orientalism in the genre. Milner contends that “the genre was at once ideological, in the pejorative sense, and yet also critical” (Milner 2012, 159). This approach understands genre in terms of its contradictions—identifying in SF the potential to subvert Orientalist discourse despite the fact that it borrows the same language and is embedded in its cultural milieu. In warning against seeing Orientalism as the single necessary and sufficient condition of SF, Milner goes on to argue that “the novel in general and SF in particular are equally unthinkable without capitalist relations of production, or without patriarchal gender relations, or without systematic heterosexism. Which is why Marxist, feminist, and queer readings are readily available, not only for Frankenstein, but for SF texts more generally” (Milner 2012, 160). Acknowledging the pitfalls of identifying industrial modernity or Orientalism as the sole identifying feature of the genre on a global scale, I argue that the emergence of Chinese SF cannot be adequately understood without coming to terms with the degree to which late Qing authors framed their predicament in exactly those terms. In the words of Wu Yan, “Colonialism is not the only problem for SF, but it is the most important question.”8
Colonial modernity, Shanghai’s semi-peripheral position in the world economy, and the peripheral role of Chinese SF at the turn of the twentieth century meant that the contradictions of Chinese SF developed differently from the American and European counterparts at the heart of Milner’s and Kerslake’s analyses. In their approach to science and to science fiction, Chinese intellectuals were faced with a very different contradiction: even if SF’s ideological proximity to Orientalism could be subverted at the discursive level, how could these narrative turns undo the political realities that Orientalism had created? I demonstrate that in the case of Chinese SF, the other that must be silenced is as often China’s own indigenous tradition as it is an alien invader. In the same moment that Chinese SF authors attempted to assert the imperial strengths of embattled antiquity, they also struggled to bring other aspects of Chinese antiquity into the interpretive framework of scientific explanation. The impulse to resuscitate antiquity also necessitated choosing which version of antiquity would be restored or reinterpreted, and which would be silenced. Such a response also engendered competing impulses between explanations of science in the context of Chinese tradition and explanations of Chinese tradition in the context of science. This is part and parcel of the schizophrenic response to foreign incursion wherein the binaries of traditional/modern and native/foreign appeared equally nonviable. In Chinese SF, the other is a hydra whose heads are competing versions of tradition and modernity. Time is one aspect through which this study examines the question of narrative and empire from the other side of the colonial equation that the Chinese authors grappled with in attempting to answer the question of whether they themselves could overturn the epistemological realities born of European empire and Western science. Chinese authors were conscious of the contradictions and pitfalls inherent in attempting to use an imperialist genre in the effort to overturn such discourses. As with many Western works of SF that enact critiques of empire, it can be argued that even those authors whose work was highly critical of the world system that empire strove for were unable to envision its absence. At the same time, Chinese SF evinces a competing and contradictory impulse in the often-unconscious desire to expand China’s own empire beyond its late Qing borders. Turn-of-the-century Chinese intellectuals often wrote through the lens of a false dichotomy of besieged nation and foreign empire.
Rieder’s definition of the functions and emergence of SF has profound implications for the intellectual and literary ground of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Shanghai. Shanghai was one of the locations where the artificial line between civilization and savagery, and between tradition and modernity, was drawn, and where the deleterious effects of colonial capitalism naturalized the difference between conquerors and conquered. It was also a city where the decentering of Europe appeared not as a side effect of an evolving vision of the world, but as an imperative project in the mission of China’s own national salvation. Rieder’s contention that misrepresentation and misunderstanding of the causes and effects of global disparities in wealth and power are plainly visible in early SF and that SF has the potential to work against such ethnocentrism is of central concern to this study as well. Global disparities in wealth and power, the relations that produced them and the veracity of scientific theories that explain them, are a salient concern of early Chinese SF. The line between civilization and barbarity, and whether this line is drawn by might or right, is a leitmotif in the writing of a number of late Qing SF novels. Furthermore, an explicit point of contention in Chinese discourses on science and in SF was not the question of whether ethnocentrism was a tenable notion, but which ethnic/cultural system deserved to be at the center, and how one could come to be there.
SF against the Empire
In order to assess the particularities of SF in the Chinese context, this study takes late Qing authors such as Lu Xun and Wu Jianren as models for the construction of a local poetics of the tradition. These two authors demonstrate the unique ways in which Kerslake and Rieder’s theories of colonialism and imperialism are reflected in Chinese SF. An understanding of the local inflections of these discourses that emerge in analysis of Lu Xun and Wu Jianren will in turn serve as a theoretical springboard for the rest of this work. Lu Xun, positioned between the worlds of medicine and literature, and firmly ensconced in canonical literary historiography as the father of modern Chinese literature, serves as a theoretical linchpin both for understanding attitudes toward science in early twentieth-century China and for understanding the form and function of SF. Wu Jianren, whose multi-genre New Story of the Stone contains many of the hallmarks of SF, serves as a second example of local iterations of SF in the late Qing and of the matrix of anxieties that I intend to explore throughout the modern period. In their SF works, both authors evince the utopian “sense of wonder” that Suvin identifies as a hallmark of the genre. This sense of wonder is expressed as a focus on scientific advancement and a deep faith in the transcendental possibilities of technology. This utopian wonder is tempered by a profound ambivalence, which I understand in terms of Lu Xun’s iconic iron house metaphor—while both men produced fiction aimed at awakening China’s benighted populace, inky shadows of doubt loom large in their work. Both express concern with China’s incorporation of Western epistemologies and the process of reconciling these fields of knowledge with Chinese philosophical and political traditions. In many cases, this incorporation is an out-and-out physical confrontation, reflective of the influence of colonialism and imperialism.
For Chinese writers of SF, the question that emerged and that they openly grappled with in their writing was whether a genre that they clearly understood to be imbricated with Orientalism and scientism could be turned against its wielders. While SF was used in attempts to unmask, resist, and subvert Orientalism, such efforts often proved to be futile. On other occasions, these narratives repeated the discourse of imperial domination, finding their own fictional others to depict. Just as often, these narratives were characterized by a dialectic of native tradition and modernity, meaning that the confrontation was not between China and another civilization but between China and its own past.
Furthermore, in Chinese SF, China’s cultural totems become representatives of the totality of its history. This reappropriation of Orientalist depictions of China as frozen in history is fraught with uncertainty regarding the power of native tradition and its
