Invisible Planets: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese SF in Translation

by Ken Liu

You can say that I really have been to those places, or that I have never left. The planets I speak of are scattered at every corner of the universe, but sometimes collect themselves into the same place as though they have always been together.

Stories cannot gather anything together, if they’re fated to separate.

They believe that they are still themselves, and it’s no big deal to exchange some materials. But they don’t realize that this sense of “self” is an illusion. At the moment when two of them merge, the two original selves cease to exist.

Do you understand? When I am done telling you these stories, when you’re done listening to these stories, I am no longer I, and you are no longer you. In this afternoon we briefly merged into one. After this, you will always carry a bit of me, and I will always carry a bit of you, even if we both forget this conversation.

“A civilization only has a fixed location in her infancy. Planets and stars are unstable and change. The civilization must then move. By the time she becomes a young woman, she has already moved multiple times. Then they will make this discovery: no planetary environment is as stable as a sealed spaceship. So they’ll make spaceships their home, and planets will just be places where they sojourn. Thus, any civilization that has reached adulthood will be a starfaring civilization, permanently wandering through the cosmos. The spaceship is her home. Where are we from? We come from the ships.”

“Different civilizations grow old and die in different ways, just like different people die of different diseases or just plain old age. For the God Civilization, the first sign of her senescence was the extreme lengthening of each individual member’s life span. By then, each individual in the God Civilization could expect a life as long as four thousand Earth years. By age two thousand, their thoughts had completely ossified, losing all creativity. Because individuals like these held the reins of power, new life had a hard time emerging and growing. That was when our civilization became old.”

“Think about it; if the jungles of primitive Earth had been filled with inexhaustible supplies of fruits and tame creatures that desired to become food, how could apes evolve into humans? The Machine Cradle was just such a comfort-filled jungle. Gradually we forgot about our technology and science. Our civilization became lazy and empty, devoid of creativity and ambition, and that only sped up the aging process. What you see now is the God Civilization in her final dying gasps.”

Long ago, we forgot all our technology. Now we have no way to repair these ships that have been operating for tens of millions of years on their own. Indeed, in terms of the ability to study and understand technology, we are even worse than you. We can’t even connect a circuit for a lightbulb or solve a quadratic equation …

That was when we began the process of seeding life on Earth so that in our old age we would have support.” “Two thousand years ago?” “Yes. Of course I’m talking about time on the ships. From your frame of reference, that was three-point-five billion years ago, when Earth first cooled down.”

“I hear that the technology you gave us will soon allow us to experience true Communism! When that happens, we’ll all have things according to our needs. Things won’t cost any money. You just go to the store and pick them up.” God smiled and nodded at her, his white hair bobbing. He spoke in heavily accented Chinese. “Yes. Actually, ‘to each according to need’ fulfills only the most basic needs of a civilization. The technology we gave you will bring you a life of prosperity and comfort surpassing your imagination.” Yulian’s laughed so much her face opened up like a flower. “No, no! ‘To each according to need’ is more than enough for me!” “Uh-huh,” Qiusheng’s father agreed emphatically.

“We’re leaving not because of how you treated us. The fact that you took us in and allowed us to stay was enough. But one thing made us unable to stay any longer: in your eyes, the Gods are pathetic. You pity us. Oh, you pity us.”

Children, you don’t have much time. Work hard!” “Do the most learned and most powerful people in our world know these things?” Qiusheng’s father asked, trembling. “Yes. But don’t rely on them. A civilization’s survival depends on the effort of every individual. Even the common people like you have a role to play.” “You hear that, Bingbing?” Qiusheng said to his son. “You must study hard.”

“The human race needs to start thinking about who is going to support us in our old age.”

An interesting observation can be made when one surveys the science fiction published during this period. In the early years after the Communist Revolution, politics and revolutionary fervor infused every aspect of daily life, and the very air one breathed seemed filled with propaganda for Communist ideals. Given this context, one might have expected that science fiction would also be filled with descriptions of Communist utopias of the future. But as a matter of fact, not a single work of this type can be found. There were practically no science fiction stories that featured Communism as the subject, not even simplistic sketches to promote the concept.

By the 1980s, as Deng Xiaoping’s reforms took effect, the influence of Western science fiction on Chinese science fiction became more apparent. Chinese science fiction writers and critics began to debate whether science fiction was more about “science” or “fiction,” and ultimately the literary camp won out. The debate had tremendous influence on the direction of the future development of Chinese science fiction, and in some ways can be seen as a delayed Chinese response to the New Wave movement in the West.

It’s interesting to note that the optimism toward science that underlay much of last century’s Chinese science fiction has almost completely vanished. Contemporary science fiction reflects much suspicion and anxiety about technological progress, and the futures portrayed in these works are dark and uncertain. Even if a bright future appears occasionally, it comes only after much suffering and a tortuous path.

As modernization accelerated its pace, the new generation of readers no longer confined their thoughts to the narrow present as their parents did, but were interested in the future and the wide-open cosmos. The China of the present is a bit like America during science fiction’s Golden Age, when science and technology filled the future with wonder, presenting both great crises and grand opportunities. This is rich soil for the growth and flourishing of science fiction.

In the Chinese science fiction of the last century, the universe was a kind place, and most extraterrestrials appeared as friends or mentors, who, endowed with Godlike patience and forbearance, pointed out the correct path for us, a lost flock of sheep.

But if one were to evaluate the place of Earth civilization in this universe, humanity seems far closer to the indigenous peoples of the Canadian territories before the arrival of European colonists than the Canada of the present.

In a widely distributed recent essay, Han Song wrote, “The younger generation is torn to a far greater degree than our own. The China of our youth was one of averages, but in this era, when a new breed of humanity is coming into being, China is being ripped apart at an accelerated pace. The elite and the lowly alike must face this fact. Everything, from spiritual dreams to the reality of life, is torn.”

Han Song described my novel this way: “The Waste Tide shows the fissures ripping China apart, the cleavages dividing China from the rest of the world, and the tears separating different regions, different age cohorts, different tribal affiliations. This is a future that will make a young person feel the death of idealism.”

In my view, “what if” is at the heart of science fiction. Starting with reality itself, the writer applies plausible and logically consistent conditions to play out a thought experiment, pushing the characters and plot toward an imagined hyperreality that evokes a sense of wonder and estrangement. Faced with the absurd reality of contemporary China, the writer cannot fully explore or express the possibilities of extreme beauty and extreme ugliness without resorting to science fiction.

the ruling class of China has endeavored to produce an ideological fantasy through the machinery of propaganda: development (increase in GDP) is sufficient to solve all problems. But the effort has failed and so created even more problems. In the process of this ideological hypnosis of the entire population, a definition of “success” in which material wealth is valued above all has choked off the younger generation’s ability to imagine the possibilities of life and the future. This is a dire consequence of the policy decisions of those born in the 1950s and 1960s, a consequence which they neither

The result is a division of the population into two extremes: one side rebels against the government reflexively (sometimes without knowing what its “cause” is) and trusts nothing it says; the other side retreats into nationalism to give itself the sense of mastering its own fate. The two sides constantly erupt into flame wars on the Internet, as though this country can hold only One True Faith for the future: things are either black or white; either you’re with us, or you’re against us.

“Science” is itself one of the greatest utopian illusions ever created by humankind. I am by no means suggesting that we should take the path of antiscience—the utopia offered by science is complicated by the fact that science disguises itself as a value-neutral, objective endeavor. However, we now know that behind the practice of science lie ideological struggles, fights over power and authority, and the profit motive. The history of science is written and rewritten by the allocation and flow of capital, favors given to some projects but not others, and the needs of war.

Contemporary China is a society in the transition stage when old illusions have collapsed but new illusions have not yet taken their place; this is the fundamental cause of the rips and divisions, the confusion and the chaos.

Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature, said, “The progress of the Chinese people begins with scientific fiction.” He saw science fiction as a tool to inspire the nation with the spirit of science and to chase away the remnants of feudal obscurantism.

In other words, the Chinese had to wake up from their five-thousand-year-old dream of being an ancient civilization and start to dream of becoming a democratic, independent, prosperous modern nation-state. As a result, the first works of science fiction in Chinese were, in the word of the famous writer Lu Xun, seen as literary tools for “improving thinking and assisting culture.” On the one hand, these early works, as myths of science, enlightenment, and development based on imitating “the West”/“the world”/“modernity,” attempted to bridge the gap between reality and dream. On the other hand, the limitations of their historical context endowed them with deeply Chinese characteristics that only emphasized the depth of the chasm between dream and reality.

The Chinese nation has not only been revived, but is even able to overcome abuses which the West could not overcome on its own. In the author’s view, “European entrepreneurs were purely selfish and cared not one whit for the suffering of others. That was why they had stimulated the growth of the Communist parties.” However, with the invention of Dr. Su’s spiritual medicine, every Chinese has become altruistic, and “everyone views everyone else’s welfare as their responsibility; it is practically socialism already, and so of course we’re not plagued by Communists.”

After the founding of the People’s Republic, Chinese science fiction, as a branch of socialist literature, was handed the responsibility for popularizing scientific knowledge as well as describing a beautiful plan for the future and motivating society to achieve it. For instance, the writer Zheng Wenguang once said, “The realism of science fiction is different from the realism of other genres; it is a realism infused with revolutionary idealism because its intended reader is the youth.” This “revolutionary idealism,” at its root, is a continuation of the Chinese faith and enthusiasm for the grand narrative of modernization. It represents optimism for continuing development and progress, and unreserved passion for building a nation-state.

In 1987, Ye Yonglie published a short story called “Cold Dream at Dawn.” On a cold winter night in Shanghai, the protagonist

has trouble falling asleep in his unheated home. A series of grand science fictional dreams fills his mind: geothermal heating, artificial suns, “reversing the South and North Poles,” even “covering Shanghai with a hothouse glass dome.” However, reality intrudes in the form of concerns about whether the proposed projects would be approved, how to acquire the necessary materials and energy, potential international conflicts, and so forth—every vision ends up being rejected as unfeasible. “A thousand miles separate the lovers named Reality and Fantasy!” The distance and the gap, one surmises, demonstrate the anxiety and discomfort of the Chinese waking up from the fantasy of Communism.

Motivated by binary oppositions such as China-the West, underdeveloped-developed, and tradition-modernity as well as the desire to reintegrate into the international order, Chinese science fiction writers attempted to break away from the science-popularization mode that had long held sway. They hoped to rapidly grow (or perhaps evolve) Chinese science fiction from an underdeveloped, suppressed, juvenile state to a mature, modern mode of literary expression.

The end of the Cold War and the accelerating integration of China into global capitalism in the 1990s led to a process of social change whose ultimate demand was the application of market principles to all aspects of social life, especially manifested in the shock and destruction visited upon traditions by economic rationality. Here, “traditions” include both the old ways of life in rural China as well as the country’s past equality-oriented socialist ideology. Thus, as China experienced its great transformation, science fiction moved away from future dreams about modernization to approach a far more complex social reality.

Chinese science fiction writers have gradually constructed a cultural field and symbolic space possessing a certain degree of closure and self-discipline vis-à-vis mainstream literature and other popular literary genres. In this space, gradually maturing forms have absorbed various social experiences that cannot yet be fully captured by the symbolic order, and after a series of transformations, integrations, and reorganizations, resulted in new vocabularies and grammars. It is in this sense that the Chinese science fiction of the era dating from the 1990s to the present can be read as a national allegory in the age of globalization.

On the one hand, the failure of Communism as an alternative for overcoming the crises of capitalism means that the crises of capitalist culture, accompanied by the process of globalization, are manifesting in the daily lives of the Chinese people. On the other hand, China, after a series of traumas from the economic reforms and paying a heavy price for development, has managed to take off economically and resurge globally.

Our stories are written primarily for a Chinese audience. The problems we care about and ponder are the problems facing all of us sharing this plot of land. These problems, in turn, are connected in a thousand complicated ways with the collective fate of all of humanity.

In reading Western science fiction, Chinese readers discover the fears and hopes of Man, the modern Prometheus, for his destiny, which is also his own creation. Perhaps Western readers can also read Chinese science fiction and experience an alternative Chinese modernity and be inspired to imagine an alternative future.