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INVISIBLE PLANETS

^{CONTEMPORARY CHINESE SCIENCE FICTION IN TRANSLATION}

Translated and edited by Ken Liu

INTRODUCTION: CHINA DREAMS

by Ken Liu

This anthology collects a selection of short speculative fiction from China that I’ve translated over the years into one volume. Some have won awards in the United States, some have been selected for inclusion in various “Year’s Best” anthologies, some have been well reviewed by critics and readers, and some are simply my personal favorites.

China has a vibrant, diverse science fiction culture, but few stories are translated into English, making it hard for non-Chinese readers to appreciate them. I hope this anthology can serve as an introduction for the Anglophone reader.

Whenever the topic of Chinese science fiction comes up, Anglophone readers ask, “How is Chinese science fiction different from science fiction written in English?”

I usually disappoint them by replying that the question is ill-defined… and there isn’t a neat sound bite for an answer. Any broad literary classification tied to a culture—especially a culture as in flux and contested as contemporary China’s—encompasses all the complexities and contradictions in that culture. Attempts to provide neat answers will only result in broad generalizations that are of little value, or stereotypes that reaffirm existing prejudices.

To start with, I don’t believe that “science fiction written in English” is a useful category for comparison (the fiction written in Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States are all quite different, and there are further divisions within and across such geographical boundaries), and so I wouldn’t even know what baseline I’m supposed to be distinguishing “Chinese science fiction” from.

Moreover, imagine asking a hundred different American authors and critics to characterize “American science fiction”—you’d hear a hundred different answers. The same is true of Chinese authors and critics and Chinese science fiction.

Even within the limited selection of this anthology, you’ll encounter the “science fiction realism” of Chen Qiufan, the “porridge SF” of Xia Jia, the overt, wry political metaphors of Ma Boyong, the surreal imagery and metaphor-driven logic of Tang Fei, the dense, rich language-pictures painted by Cheng Jingbo, the fabulism and sociological speculation of Hao Jingfang, and the grand, hard-science-fictional imagination of Liu Cixin. This should give a hint of the broad range of the science fiction written in China. Faced with such variety, I think it is far more useful and interesting to study the authors as individuals and to treat their works on their own terms rather than to try to impose a preconceived set of expectations on them because they happen to be Chinese.