How Chinese Novelists Are Reimagining Science Fiction

Most SF readers probably didn't give much thought about Chinese science fiction. Then Liu Cixin's novel, The Three Body Problem, won the Hugo Award in 2015, and people started paying attention. The New Statesman has published a long article that looks at Chinese science fiction and how it is both similar and different to SF being published in the West.

The stories being written in China feel significant because they are emerging from a real dystopia that becomes stranger and more futuristic by the day. In “Project Dove”, for example, drones that look and fly like birds are used for surveillance. But Project Dove is not fiction – it is an actual government project. The robots are so convincing that real pigeons flock with them.

In another example, factory workers, train drivers and soldiers are made to wear devices on their heads that scan their brainwaves for signs of anger, depression or loss of concentration. The devices are monitored by artificial intelligence programmes that can recommend workers be retrained or reassigned if their emotions are not consistent with productivity goals. Such devices have been in widespread use in China for almost five years.

But for Ken Liu, the Chinese-American author who translated Waste Tide, The Three-Body Problem and the stories in Invisible Planets, it is too simplistic to see Chinese sci-fi writers as imaginative dissidents. “We do the works a disservice,” he writes, “when we focus on geopolitics alone.” Chen Quifan agrees. “There are universal feelings in science fiction, across all different cultural backgrounds,” he says. Chen has readers on several continents who email him to say that his stories about anxiety, social divisions and pollution are as resonant in the American Midwest as they are in Guangdong.