Chinese Science Fiction Guide

[00:00:03]What if the most ambitious science fiction being written anywhere in the world right now is coming from a country where the government actively wants it written? What if the genre has been officially embraced not as escapism but as infrastructure, a tool for cultivating the scientific imagination of a billion people? What if the distinction between speculative fiction and national vision is in this tradition not always easy to locate? And what if alongside that officially sanctioned optimism, some of the darkest and most politically unsettling SF being produced anywhere is emerging from exactly the same culture in the same moment, asking questions the official version would rather not hear. Let's crack it open.

[00:00:51]Welcome to episode 4 of our Asian SF series. We've covered Japan from Koo Abbey's post-war dread through the radical linguistic assault of Kenji Sirritorii. We've covered Korea, the philosophical precision of Kimbo Yang and the grotesque folklore of Borach Chang and the haunting structural impossibility of North Korean SF. Now we turn to China which is in some ways the most complex and the most varied and the most surprising conversation in contemporary Asian speculative fiction.

[00:01:24]And we have to start there's really no avoiding it with one book or rather one series. Shiishinlu or in Chinese Luci Shins, the three body problem, the first volume of the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, is the most successful Chinese SF novel in history and one of the bestselling SF works in the 21st century in any language. It won the Hugo Award in 2015 and the first time of non-English language work has done so.

[00:01:54]Barack Obama cited it as a favorite. It has been adapted into a Netflix series.

[00:02:00]For millions of Western readers, it was their first encounter with Chinese SF.

[00:02:05]And for many, it remains the only one.

[00:02:08]Which means it's worth being precise about what it is and what it isn't. So, what is it? A work of staggering conceptual ambition built on a first contact scenario that unfolds across centuries and eventually across the entire history of the universe. Luci Shin thinks at cosmic scale in a way very few SF writers manage. His physics is serious. His time scales are genuinely vertigenous. And his central question about whether contact between civilizations of different technological levels necessarily ends in annihilation is as dark and as rigorously pursued as anything in the genre. The dark forest theory which he develops across the trilogy is one of the most disturbing ideas in contemporary SF. The universe is silent not because it's empty but because every civilization capable of communication is also capable of recognizing that communication is a death sentence. So if that's what it is, what is it not representative of Chinese SF as a whole? Luci Shin's vision is cosmic, collective, and largely uninterested in the individual psyche.

[00:03:19]His characters tend to be vessels for ideas rather than fully realized people.

[00:03:24]And that's a deliberate aesthetic choice rooted in a particular view of humanity as a species rather than a collection of selves. That's a valid and some ways bracing perspective, but it's one strand of a much richer tradition. And the danger of Lucian Shin's dominance in Western awareness is that it makes the rest of that tradition invisible. So read the trilogy if you haven't. It earns its reputation. Most will agree that the second and third books, The Dark Forest and Death's End are superior to the first. And then keep going because the most interesting things in Chinese SF are waiting on the other side of it. Here's something with no real Western equivalent. In China, science fiction has been officially embraced as a tool of national development. What a concept. The country's stated ambitions in AI, robotics, quantum computing, and space exploration, not to mention neural implants are not incidental to its SF tradition. They are actively intertwined with it. The government has promoted SF as a means of cultivating scientific imagination and technological aspiration in the population. How is that for alliteration? SF has appeared in school curricula in China and is often shelved alongside scientific texts in libraries and bookstores. The genre has been cited in policy documents, which comes as no surprise when you realize that China is run by engineers, not lawyers. No wonder they're making such incredible progress while the West languishes in bitter ideological feuds. When China wants its citizens to dream about the future, it reaches for speculative fiction as an instrument. This produces a literary culture around SF that has no parallel in the West, where the genre has always existed somewhat outside the mainstream and has never been a tool of state aspiration in any direct sense. It means Chinese SF has institutional support, cultural visibility, and a reading public that takes it seriously at a level most Western SF writers would find bewildering. But it also means the tradition carries a complicated relationship with the political. The officially sanctioned version of Chinese SF tends toward optimism about technology, national capability, and collective achievement. Sort of like the North Korean SF, Luci Shin's cosmic collectivism fits comfortably within that framework, even when his conclusions are deeply dark. The unofficial version, the writers working at the edges of what the culture permits, asks harder questions about who the future is being built for and at what human cost. Both are real. Both are worth reading. And the tension between them is one of the most interesting things in contemporary world literature.

[00:06:10]Before I get into some novels, here are a few anthologies worth knowing about because Chinese SF and English translation is still unevenly distributed enough that the collections do essential work as maps of the tradition. There are a few worth knowing about, each offering a distinct curatorial vision. Let's start with Invisible Planets and Broken Stars, both edited and translated by Ken Lou, whose importance to this tradition in the English-speaking world is difficult to overstate. His ubiquity in this space is on par with Neil Gaiman in the west. Lou himself a significant SF writer, author of the paper menagerie has been the primary conduit for Chinese SF in English and his translations are more than translations. His prefaces and editorial notes are themselves excellent critical documents that give Western readers the cultural context they need to read the work fully. Invisible Planets is the broader survey. Broken Stars goes deeper and includes some more challenging and politically ambiguous material. Both are essential. Read them in order if you can. And then there's Synopticon edited and translated by Shuing Christine Ni offers a different and complimentary curatorial vision where Kenl's selections tend toward the literary and the contemporary. knee reaches farther back into the tradition's history and brings a wider range of voices and registers [music] to bear between Invisible Planets, Broken Stars, and Synopticon. Readers get a genuine sense of Chinese SF as a tradition of depth, range, and internal argument not limited to the recent phenomenon created by Lui Shin. The Reincarnated Giant, an anthology of 21st century Chinese science fiction edited by Mingi Song and Theodore Hooters, published by the Columbia University Press in 2018, comes from a different direction entirely, academic rather than commercial. Designed as much for classroom use as for general readers, but no less valuable for that. 15 stories drawn not just from mainland China but from the sophhone world more broadly including Hong Kong and Taiwan which makes it the one anthology in this list that actively refuses the mainland China versus Taiwanese China equation we've been careful to navigate throughout this series. Hanong's The Passengers and the Creator appears here alongside Luci Shin's The Poetry Cloud, which gives you both ends of the tradition spectrum in a single volume.

[00:08:45]Kenlu himself calls it a definitive tour of the most influential landmarks of contemporary Chinese SF. And coming from the man who has translated more of that tradition than anyone else, that's an endorsement worth taking seriously. And then there is the way spring arrives and other stories published by tour in 2022 edited by Yen and Regina Canyu Wang.

[00:09:08]This is the anthology that does something the others don't attempt.

[00:09:12]Written, edited, and translated entirely by female and non-binary creators. It brings 17 stories plus five critical essays about translation and gender into Chinese SF, all previously unpublished in English. This matters not as a political gesture, but as a corrective to a genuine gap. The maledominated translation pipeline that has shaped Western reception of Chinese SF means the tradition, as most readers know it, is significantly skewed. The way spring arrives doesn't just add voices. It reframes the tradition itself, revealing a strand of Chinese SF and fantasy that is more intimate, more stylistically varied, and more concerned with myth in the natural world than the hard SF dominated by Kenloo selections might suggest. Shaja, whom we'll discuss in more depth shortly, is among the contributors, which creates a useful thread between the anthology and the individual authors in this overview. If you're new to Chinese SF and don't know where to begin, start with Invisible Planets, followed by Synopticon, and use what you find to navigate toward the individual authors who interest you the most. Return to the reincarnated giant when you want historical or geographical depth and the way spring arrives when you want to understand the full range of what the tradition contains beyond its most internationally visible voices. Ha Jing Fangs Folding Beijing is a novella.

[00:10:39]It first appeared in English and Invisible Planets and it won the Hugo Award in 2016, a year after Shiinlu won for three body problem. Two consecutive Hugo wins for Chinese SF writers is not a coincidence is a signal that the tradition has arrived in the western genre conversation with something to say. What how Jing Fang says in folding Beijing is considerably more intimate and politically pointed than Lu Xi Shin's cosmic scale might have you prepared for. The premise Beijing exists in three layers that physically fold and unfold inception style on a rotating schedule. Each layer inhabited by a different economic class, each allocated a different fraction of the city's time.

[00:11:23]The wealthy first space gets 24 hours.

[00:11:26]The middle class second space gets 16.

[00:11:29]The workers in third space get eight in the middle of the night while the rest of the city is folded away and sleeping.

[00:11:36]The story follows a waste worker from the third space who takes an illegal journey through the city's layers carrying a message and it is without being schematic or didactic about it one of the most precise fictional treatments of economic stratification and the spatial politics of inequality that the genre has produced. The folding city is not a metaphor that requires decoding.

[00:11:58]It's a thought experiment made visceral.

[00:12:00]What if the spatial and temporal resources of a city were literally allocated by class and the mathematics made visible? What gives the story its particular power is how Jing Fang's refusal to make it simply a protest narrative. The characters in all three layers are rendered with sympathy and specificity. The system is inhumane, but the people operating within it are not simply villains or victims. That moral complexity combined with the precision of central conceit is what elevates folding Beijing from clever SF to lasting literature. It's also worth noting written by an economist who works in policy research on poverty and inequality. She knows her stuff. The speculative premise isn't decorative.

[00:12:44]It's a professional's thought experiment about how stratification actually functions translated into fiction. That combination of technical knowledge and literary ambition is something you encounter repeatedly in the best Chinese SF. If folding Beijing leaves you wanting more, and it will, her debut novel, Vagabonds, is the next natural step. Also translated by Canlu, it is a far more expansive work, a Mars Earth story following a group of Martian students on a cultural exchange who find themselves stranded between two civilizations with irreconsibly different values and no easy way home.

[00:13:20]The comparison that gets made most often is to Ursula Leguin's The Dispossessed, and it's earned how Ching Fang shares Leguin's interest in contrasting social systems and the human cost of ideological difference. The same patience with ideas, the same refusal to resolve complexity into simple allegory.

[00:13:40]Bagabonds confirms what folding Beijing suggests that she is consistently almost obsessively interested in the politics of who gets access to space physical, social, temporal, and what it costs to cross the boundaries between worlds. If Luci Shin represents Chinese SF at its most cosmically scale and how Jing Fang at its most quietly political, then Chen Chu Fan, who also publishes as Stanley Chan, represents the tradition at its most viscerally immediate. Waste Tide is set on Silicon Isle, a fictional island off the Chinese coast that processes the world's discarded electronics. A barely fictionalized version of real places like Guayu in Guangdong Province, where mountains of e-waste are stripped by hand for precious metals by workers with no protective equipment and severely shortened lives. into this environment.

[00:14:32]Shenshu Fan introduces a young migrant worker, Mimi, who becomes infected by something in the waste and begins to transform. And the novel proceeds from there as a hybrid of an environmental horror, corporate thriller, class warfare, and cyberpunk body horror that is unlike anything else in the tradition. Wastist Tide is the Chinese novel most directly in conversation with the Japanese cyberpunk tradition we covered earlier in this series. the body invaded by technology, the boundary between the organic and the digital becoming violently permeable, but it's grounded in the Chinese economic and environmental reality that gives its specificity the Chinese tradition rarely attempts. It's also not nearly as experimental. This is not pure abstract posthumanism. The e-waste crisis is real. The exploitation of migrant workers is real. The novel is speculative in its mechanisms but documentary in its moral urgency.

[00:15:32]Chenchu fan is also worth knowing as a voice in the AI conversation. His essay collection AI 2041 co-written with AI investor Kfu Lee pairs speculative fiction stories with analytical essays about near future AI development and is one of the more serious attempts to use the SF forum as genuine futures thinking rather than entertainment. Simply put, it's a different kind of book from Waist Tide, but together they establish Chenu fan as a writer who moves fluidly between literary fiction genre SF and public intellectual work in ways that feel distinctly Chinese in their refusal to keep those categories separate. Next up is Shia, the pen name of Wang Xiao, who is also an academic specializing in SF studies. represents the tradition's most consciously literary end. And her short fiction is where Chinese SF most clearly steps outside the shadow of Luci Shin's influence towards something more intimate and formally adventurous. Her work tends to be quiet, emotionally precise, and interested in the textures of everyday life under technological transformation rather than in grand cosmological scenarios. where Luci Shin asks what happens to humanity across millennia. Shaja asks, "What happens to a person in a world that is changing faster [music] than feeling can keep up with?" Sound familiar? That's a different question and in some ways a harder one to answer well in fiction.

[00:17:03]She appears in both major Kenloo anthologies and is one of the writers most worth following from there into her individual work. Her combination of critical and creative practice, thinking rigorously about what SF is while also making it, gives her fiction a self-awareness that rewards close reading. I believe she has a short story collection in English called A Summer Beyond Your Reach. And then there is Han Song, who we're going to give his own episode in the members area because he deserves it and because trying to do justice to his work in the space remaining here would short change both him and you. The short version, Hansong is the darkest, most politically ambiguous, and in many ways the most difficult writer in contemporary Chinese SF. He's also a noted journalist for a Chinese state newspaper. Where Luci Shin's darkness is cosmic and impersonal, Han songs is intimate and systemic. His work circles obsessively around the Chinese state, the body, illness, institutional power, and the gap between official optimism and lived reality. Novels like hospital are deeply strange works that operate somewhere between Kafka, Lim and Body Horror, and they ask questions about Chinese modernity that the officially sanctioned version of Chinese SF would probably rather not entertain. The contrast between Hansong and Luci Shin, two writers working in the same national moment, arriving at almost opposite visions of what SF is for, is one of the most interesting arguments in contemporary world literature. We'll spend a full episode on that argument in the members area. Great time to join.

[00:18:44]Consider this a teaser. Now, step back from the individual titles and the shape of Chinese SF becomes clear. It's a tradition operating under unusual pressure from both directions. From above, a state that actively promotes scientific imagination and national technological ambition, which gives the tradition visibility and institutional support, but also exerts gravitational pull towards official optimism. And from below, a literary culture with deep roots in social criticism and formal experimentation and the desire to tell you the truth about what rapid modernization actually costs in human terms. The best Chinese SF lives in that tension between those two forces. Lucian Shin's cosmic collectivism, Houching Fang spatial politics, Shenshu fans environmental body horror, Shia's quiet intimacy, Han songs Kofka- Darkness.

[00:19:40]These are not random variations. They are different responses to the same set of pressures. Different answers to the question of what imaginative literature owes to the society changing faster than any previous society in human history.

[00:19:54]That's a conversation worth paying attention to. Not just because the books are worth reading, but because the questions Chinese SF is asking are questions the rest of the world is going to be asking shortly, whether it's ready or not. I want to end this episode with a brief but necessary detour. One that comes with its own friction which I'm going to acknowledge rather than paper over. Taiwan. The question of whether to include Taiwanese SF in an episode about Chinese SF is not purely literary. It is political in ways that are genuinely contested and that I don't intend to resolve here. Taiwan has its own government, its own cultural identity, its own literary tradition, and a complicated relationship with mainland China that has been defined by politics for over 70 years. Including it here risks implying a relationship that many Taiwanese writers and readers would probably object to. Excluding it entirely risks erasing a distinct and interesting literary culture from this series altogether. The compromise I've landed on is this. mention it, flag the friction honestly and let you draw your own conclusions about the geography. The writer worth knowing is Wuingi and the book is the man with the compound eyes translated into English in 2013 in the most significant Taiwanese speculative work available to Western readers. The premise involves a colossal island of oceanic trash arriving by a tsunami into the coast of Taiwan, bringing together an outcast from a mythical island and a Taiwanese woman on the verge of suicide.

[00:21:29]It sits across ecological SF, climate fiction, and magical realism simultaneously. And Ursula Kawwen's response to it was simply to ask, "South America gave us magical realism. What is Taiwan giving us?" Her answer was, "A new way of telling our new reality."

[00:21:46]That's as good a recommendation as a book is likely to receive. What's distinctly Taiwanese about Wu Ming Yi's work and what distinguishes it from the mainland Chinese tradition we've been discussing is its relationship to the natural world and to indigenous Taiwanese culture. Where mainland Chinese SF tends to be oriented toward the urban, the technological, and the future, Wuingi is as interested in the ecological and the indigenous as in the speculative. The trash vortex in the man with the compound eyes is not a metaphor for technological hubris and the Luci Shin mode. It's an indictment of the specific material relationship between global consumer culture and the ocean.

[00:22:24]And it's written by someone who is also a naturalist, a butterfly scholar, and an environmental activist. That combination of commitments produces a very different kind of speculative fiction than anything else we've discussed today. read it and when you do, read it as Taiwanese, not as an extension of anything else. A question that occurred to me while I was developing this series, what about Southeast Asia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand? Is there speculative fiction there worth paying attention to? The honest answer is probably in their original languages, but nothing really in English that I can tell, nothing that I could recommend. There is a genuine and growing SF and speculative fiction scene. Singapore and the Philippines are known to have active communities, dedicated journals, and writers doing interesting work. Names like Zeno, Cassandra Kaw, and Elliot de Bagard have broken through in Western genre publishing, though largely writing in English and often from diaspora positions rather than from within their home literary traditions. The translation pipeline for work originally written in Tagalog, Bahasut Thai, and Vietnamese remains thin. I'm watching this space with genuine interest and real anticipation, and when there is enough available in translation to do it any justice, I'll continue the series.

[00:23:45]Consider this a placeholder and a promise. So that's our map of Chinese SF and the edges of what lies beyond it.

[00:23:53]Broad, necessarily partial, and designed to send you in multiple directions at once. Tell me in the comments which of these you've already read and where they took you. Tell me if the threebody problem was your door in. I imagine it was, and whether you found the tradition waiting on the other side of it. Tell me if there are writers and titles I've missed that deserve attention. Uh, the field is large and my survey is selective and the comments on this series have already sent me to books I wouldn't have otherwise found. Next time we wrap up this series and go deep on Hansong, the writer who might be the most important and least discussed figure in contemporary Chinese SF and who asks harder questions about his own culture than almost anyone working in the genre anywhere else in the world. If you aren't a member already, I'll remind you again. It's a great time to join.

[00:24:42]You get access to exclusive videos like that one. You get access to everything on the channel. You get early access to new videos and you get voting rights on upcoming book reviews. All for the price of a cup of coffee per month. It really can't be beat. And you know how much I love coffee. Until next time, stay speculative and keep reading great science fiction.