Rising star
Country’s science fiction steps onto world stage
On at least one occasion five years ago the science fiction writers Liu Cixin and Han Song decided to contribute their own money to get people to take notice of their greatly ignored genre.
When the annual 2012 Chinese Nebula award presentations were held in Chengdu, science fiction was so little known that each of them donated 10,000 yuan ($1,600) to ensure that the ceremony could go ahead.
But three years later another awards ceremony in another place would be enough to give those in China who admire Liu and Han, and who love science fiction, reason to hope that no longer would it be treated as a poor cousin to mainstream literature.
At the World Science Fiction Awards in Spokane, Washington state, Liu was announced as winner of the Hugo Award of 2015 for best novel for The Three Body Problem, and that Saturday night in August, as Ken Liu, who translated the book into English, accepted the award on the author’s behalf, it became clear that Chinese science-fiction had finally arrived on the world stage.
To underscore the point, at the subsequent World Science Fiction Awards in Kansas City, Missouri, almost exactly a year later Hao Jingfang won the Hugo for best novelette for her story Folding Beijing, which Liu also translated.
Those award successes set alight the imaginations of Chinese readers and have transformed science fiction into a star not only of book publishing but of films, video games and amusement parks as well.
A big-screen movie based on The Three Body Problem is being made at the moment, and the 800-hectare, 10 billion yuan ($1.52 billion) Oriental Sci-Fi Valley theme park is due to open soon in Guiyang, Guizhou province. In the park there is a heavy emphasis on virtual reality that ties in with Guiyang’s large big data industry.
Last month the Sichuan Association for Science and Technology announced plans to build a 12 billion yuan China Science Fiction City in Chengdu aimed at showcasing and developing China’s cultural industry.
It is not as though Chinese science fiction is exactly new, having its roots in the early 1900s, so why has it taken the best part of a century for the genre to begin to show anything like its best potential, and what does it say about the country?
Xia Jia, a science fiction writer and associate professor of Chinese literature at Xi’an Jiaotong University, says: “You can sense there is general anxiety about the future of humanity, but you could also say Chinese people are anxious about their own future. How will they survive the pressures of cutthroat competition? In Liu Cixin’s rivalry between humans and aliens, some see another version of the competition between powerful countries. In this there is a feeling of crisis