goods, pictorial representations of science and technology, and in the creation of scientific institutions, empire was a ubiquitous and vexing consideration. Terms like science, civilization, technology, empire, the West, and notions like civic involvement, political involvement, evolution, and social Darwinism, were often understood as “foreign imports,” in a nebulous cluster of overlapping associations. These associations clustered around the nucleus of the discourse of national peril, and the mutually reinforcing vocabulary of national salvation. Western science, as much as SF, was rightly understood to be a body of knowledge that helped to produce and was produced by Orientalist discourse. In the words of Qin Shao, I examine the manners in which “in the West science was mainly driven by industrial development, commercial profits, military conquest and intellectual curiosity, [while] in other parts of the world, Western science was ‘legitimized’ largely by imperialism. It became a measure of one’s strength and success in the modern world order” (Qin Shao, 694).
Natural and social sciences were in turn the products of a series of institutional formations that were part and parcel of the imperial project, and these institutions also helped to cement the ontological assertions of Orientalism. As Said notes, modern sciences were among the blades of the ideological arsenal that sprang from the material reality of colonialism.24
Overview
Chapter 1, “Genre Trouble,” begins with an inquiry into scholarly dating of the emergence of the genre, both in China and the West, examining some key debates and recent developments in academic approaches to SF. Genres are normative heuristic tools, often constructed long after the literary forms that they attempt to define and rarely constitute clearly delineated descriptive categories. To this end, I find many of the questions asked in the chapter headings of Andrew Milner’s Locating Science Fiction (2012) to be particularly useful in coming to terms with the emergence of SF in late Qing China. In brief, I find Milner’s work arguing that SF is a selective tradition, defining a whole field of cultural products best defined by their shared tropes and topoi rather than their formal qualities, to be useful in understanding the constituent elements of early Chinese SF.25 The question “Where Was Science Fiction?” is answered, as in Milner, in turning toward world systems theory and the work of Immanuel Wallerstein and Franco Moretti; but I also find Tani Barlow, Meng Yue, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and a number of others who have oriented China’s recent history in terms of a dynamic global political economy to be informative in specifying where Chinese science fiction originated. I find Milner’s response to the question “When Was Science Fiction?”—that in the nineteenth century “the Industrial Revolution decisively and definitively redefined science into an intensely practical activity inextricably productive of new technologies, in the everyday rather than the Heideggerian sense” (Milner 2012, 139)—and John Rieder’s analysis of the relationship between industrial modernity, colonialism, and early science fiction to be similarly applicable to the emergence of the genre in China, even though attitudes toward science and technology were markedly different. Finally, I also follow Milner’s “The Uses of Science Fiction” as it examines the ways in which SF has been “politically or morally effective” and, to this end, how it is “socially useful” (Milner 2012, 18) in the Chinese case. The features, functions, and forms identified in sketching the limits of a genre are subject to shifting ideological and aesthetic trends. Exploring the intersections between genres and the material and social circumstances that produced them has the potential to contribute to the question of canon formation in the national and transnational perspective.
In their essay “There Is No Such Thing as Science Fiction,” Sheryl Vint and Mark Bould likewise argue that SF has never been a single, clearly delineated body of work but is instead the result of various cultural forces by which the meaning of SF is constantly subject to negotiation. However, they trenchantly note that it is impossible to come to a full understanding of SF “without simultaneously acknowledging its erasures of women and indigenous people and its suppression of the human costs of colonization” (Vint and Bould, 48). Recent work by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay (2003), Patricia Kerslake (2007), and John Rieder (2008) elucidates the relationship between SF and imperial discourse, and these works are especially informative when applied to the case of early Chinese SF, given its emergence in the context of colonial modernity. SF is one of many genres for which specific definitions are elusive, despite readers’ and critics’ certitude that they know it when they see it. SF encompasses a wide range of literary forms; while features such as technology as a central device to the development and resolution of plot are common, I contend that they are not necessary and sufficient conditions. It is for this reason that I argue in favor of a functional definition of the genre, one that reads SF as intimately concerned with the ideologies and discourses of empire. Drawing upon this work, I propose that Chinese SF be examined through the same lens. In so doing, this work contributes to the critique of colonial modernity writ large, adds nuance to a promising avenue of inquiry for SF studies, and seeks to understand how Orientalist discourse is apprehended from the perspective of the other.
Chapter 2, “Lu Xun, Science, Fiction,” demonstrates how Lu Xun’s essays on science and SF, and his translations of Jules Verne, serve as a useful point of departure in understanding intellectual approaches to scientific knowledge, the written word, and the role of SF in the wide spectrum of experimental genres popularized during the late Qing. I argue that Lu Xun’s early work can be understood in part in terms of the “knowledge industry,” as an effort to write an encyclopedic history of Western thought. Historical developments in the knowledge industry that soon followed illustrate the ways in which Lu Xun was representative of China’s cultural zeitgeist. Like previous literary historians, I share the attitude that Lu Xun is one of the most significant Chinese authors of the twentieth century, if not the most important, and that his work is representative of a number of key transitions and literary themes of modern Chinese literature. However, it is imperative that this understanding of Lu Xun expand its focus in two principal ways. First, I demonstrate that Lu Xun’s critique of China’s national character, and many of the most vivid metaphors of this critique, can be identified as already prevalent in the work of other prominent late Qing writers. This is by no means intended to diminish the status of Lu Xun; rather, in understanding the ways in which he was working with a set of tropes that could already be seen in wide circulation in popular media, we may come to view Lu Xun as having aggregated and articulated a series of concerns that were already prominent in the popular imagination. As such, Lu Xun’s status as the representative of a generation is reinforced, rather than diminished. Second, I show that Lu Xun’s work prior to the publication of “Diary of a Madman” (Kuangren riji) in 1918, especially his early essays on science and evolution, is also vitally important and deserves greater attention. This body of work helps us both to uncover the labor pains associated with the emergence of vernacular literature, and to understand more clearly the relationship between science and the intellectual formulations of twentieth-century China.
Chapter 3, “Wu Jianren and Late Qing SF,” presents an extended, close reading of Wu Jianren’s New Story of the Stone (Xin shitou ji). While this work was not the first work of SF to be produced by a Chinese author, it is both one of the most comprehensive visions of late Qing society and one of the most complete visions of a Chinese utopia. Furthermore, as it is one of the most widely read and analyzed texts of the late Qing, a rereading of New Stone permits me to frame my analysis of the thematic content of late Qing SF in the context of a familiar work. I argue that both the first half of the novel, which takes place in Shanghai at the turn of the century, and the second half of the novel are marked by a sense of estrangement that has been identified as a key component of SF. One prominent theme of the novel is the pervasive sense of crisis and the inability to imagine lasting solutions to China’s semicolonial subjugation. Another leitmotif is a confrontation with China’s own past and its mythical tradition, and I examine the implications of an encounter with the alien other when that beast is one’s own tradition. The tropes relevant to Lu Xun’s work both before and after the
