Celestial Empire: The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction by Nathaniel Isaacson
So the non-fiction reviews are always a little shorter, but I wanted to highlight some cool things about this book, which appears to be a repurposed Ph.D. paper by author Nathaniel Isaacson. He was a guest on Dickheads once so link at the bottom of this review. I really think that is a great episode of the podcast.
So Celestial Empire: The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction is a great history of Chinese science fiction as was just starting to become a thing. From my interview with Isaacson I knew and understood that a huge part of the emergence of Chinese SF was the translation of Jules Verne books becoming domestic bestsellers. So it was interesting to hear about how the translation got an interesting Chinese spin. I didn’t really know what to expect from this book, thinking it might a history similar to Lee’s Astounding or Damon Knight’s Futurians. I am assuming that was pretty impossible.
One of the reasons we got such a cool and detailed history of the early sci-fi scenes like that was the fact that it was a scene. There were conventions, zines and ways that the history got documented. Chinese SF eventually had all those things but early SF in China doesn’t appear to be so organized.
Isaacson however does make an interesting claim 7 pages in. “An anomaly of the emergence of science fiction in China is that while the genre itself saw its beginning as a Western import through translation, the term “science fiction” (kexue xiaoshuo) began to appear regularly as a literary genre category associated with specific stories in a publication in China (c.1904) before it did in the English language.”
This is of course after H.G. Wells used the term Scientific Romances before Hugo Gernsback used the term Scientific fiction, and thirty-five years before Don Wollheim was the first to use the genre name on a book cover with the Pocket guide to Science Fiction. A bold claim, and one that prompted the most thought for me.
The book is less a history of the creators as many books on the history of most Western-based science fiction tend to be. Isaacson looks at the major themes and ideas of the major works including a few dystopias and one Mars colony novel. They all sound fascinating but the one that I was most interested in was Lao She’s City of Cats.
The impression one gets from this book is that there were not many works populating the Chinese bookshelves but that there were key works that were important not just to genre but all of the culture literature. That these works reflected the intense era of Late Qing dynasty, colonial change and revolution. Cool book, I am glad to have highlighted the heck out of it and it will have a valued spot on my Sci-fi non-fiction shelf.
The Dickheads episode on Asian SF in translation:
Video of the episode
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