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Liu Cixin already covers this in his well-known trilogy. Also, Folding Beijing is an award winning short story encompassing all three things plus class strife,

Liu Cixin already covers this in his well-known trilogy. Also, Folding Beijing is an award winning short story encompassing all three things plus class strife, written by a Chinese author.

treephen 8y ago
Trilogy which was written before Xi became a dictator. None of the new books will.
- faitswulff 8y ago
  I don't know if you read the article, but the investment in science fiction is state sponsored: > A big clue comes from the author Neil Gaiman’s collection of non-fiction essays, The View from the Cheap Seats, where he relates an anecdote from the time he attended the 2007 China SF/Fantasy Conference in Chengdu: > “A few years ago, in 2007, I went to China for the first-ever, I believe, state-sponsored science fiction convention, and at some point I remember talking to a party official who was there and I said, ‘Up until now I have read in Locus that your lot disapprove of science fiction and you disapprove of science fiction conventions and these things have not been deliberately encouraged. What’s changed? Why did you permit this thing? Why are we here?’ > ‘And he said, ‘Oh you know for years, we’ve been making wonderful things. We make your iPods. We make phones. We make them better than anybody else, but we don’t come up with any of these ideas. So we went on a tour of America talking to people at Microsoft, at Google, at Apple, and we asked them a lot of questions about themselves, just the people working there. And we discovered they all read science fiction… so we think maybe it’s a good thing.” > The more things change, the more they remain the same. Lu Xun in 1903 had written that ‘science fiction could play a crucial role in the advancement of the Chinese nation’ and 104 years later, the purpose of the 2007 Chengdu SF/F Conference seems to have been no different for it was described as ‘an ambitious Chinese effort designed to inspire public creativity toward future scientific and technological development as well as promote national insight for scientific exploration’. A laudable step towards sparking the imagination and fostering innovation, but the state support of science fiction is also about advancing China’s soft power. As the writer Chen Quifan said in a speech (co-written by the organisers) at the eighth Chinese Nebula Awards in November 2017, saying that the purpose of Chinese science fiction was to, “grasp what General Secretary Xi has put forward, and advance the establishment of the power of the international spread of the culture of socialism with Chinese characteristics, in order to tell the China story.”
  - treephen 8y ago
    That's back in 2006. Now everything has changed. Now China thrives on closing down churches, jailing pastors, censoring 'sensitive' materials in Hong Kong, indoctrinate muslims to eat pork and drink beer, etc etc etc. Doubt any book of significance will arise in this environment
    - forkLding 8y ago
      CCP thrives on atheism, most Chinese science fiction novels actually are also non or anti-religion which wins them points in the censor department. At least I've read several post-2015 Chinese sci-fi and whenever religion comes up, the religious figures are always greedy, corrupt and using their religious title for power, "polygamous-cultish" or fanatically stupid. Although the ones I've read have been remixing Cthulhu with Cyberpunk so I might be digressing. Also note that most Chinese modern sci-fi now begin life as internet and web forum novels because the web is the most important and fast-spreading medium for Chinese fiction readers now. As well, near-future sci-fi and most importantly those kind of TV shows are pretty much banned in China.
      - toufiqbarhamov 8y ago
        So don’t hold my breath for the Chinese Version of ‘Black Mirror’ hm?
        pnw_hazor 8y ago
        China is Black Mirror
yorwba 8y ago
Folding Beijing was linked in TFA, but in case someone overlooked it or went straight to the comments, here's the English translation: http://uncannymagazine.com/article/folding-beijing-2/ http://uncannymagazine.com/article/folding-beijing-2/
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  I hate that story so much. It’s practically the platonic ideal of engineer written fiction without the tiniest patina of knowledge of social science. A story about monstrous people and three worlds occupying one space over the course of a day in fantasy, good. As something vaguely purporting to be a plausible depiction of a possible reality it is absolute garbage. It makes no sense on a political, sociological or economic level. The machinery described is insanely complex and would be very, very expensive and all to get a tiny bit more use out of space when you could do as well by building skyscrapers, or going underground, or expanding the city. Beijing is big but there’s plenty of flat land to expand around it. If you can turn off all knowledge of how things work and just look at the human story of love, loss and sacrifice the translation and writing is excellent.
- B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
  Rabbit hole: one of the acknowledged magazine supporters is the creator of a verbless language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kēlen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kēlen (4 or 5 clicks and a search/name check, must get a grip ...)
aerophilic 8y ago
One thing I really appreciated about the three body problem (Liu Cixin), was the “completely different perspective” brought to bear. I feel to often with (American) science fiction, you have well known and “expected” themes. What will be interesting is how much further they can go. I personally prefer a “wealth” of perspectives, and you can only get that if people are coming from different cultures.
- toufiqbarhamov 8y ago
  It was amazing, and it was such a startling, yet “obvious-in-hindsight” way of packaging the potential isolation imposed by the sheer scale of the universe. The sense of dread, loss, and ultimately hope was almost overwhelming. I feel lucky to be alive at a time when I can hear on a website about a book written in China, find a digital copy of the whole trilogy professionally translated, and then discuss the experience on another site full of like-minded people.
- andygates 8y ago
  This is one of the reasons I devoured the trilogy and started looking for more: a whole different set of expectations and norms that are subtly different. I think scifi audiences might be primed for that?
MichaelMoser123 8y ago
Soviet censorship used to be less heavy on science fiction then on other subjects. is that true for China as well?
- int_19h 8y ago
  Still plenty heavy though. Infamously, one of Strugatsky's books was censored because it described an alien totalitarian society ruled by "The Unknown Fathers"; the censors demanded that the label be changed, among other things. Then there was Efremov, who had trouble publishing some of his stuff at all, despite it being heavily ideologically communist.
  - MichaelMoser123 8y ago
    Still they got it out in 1969, when everything was in deep freeze as the tanks rolled into Prague in 1967. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_of_Power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_of_Power

Liu Cixin already covers this in his well-known trilogy. Also, Folding Beijing is an award winning short story encompassing all three things plus class strife, written by a Chinese author.

treephen 8y ago

Trilogy which was written before Xi became a dictator. None of the new books will.

faitswulff 8y ago
I don't know if you read the article, but the investment in science fiction is state sponsored: > A big clue comes from the author Neil Gaiman’s collection of non-fiction essays, The View from the Cheap Seats, where he relates an anecdote from the time he attended the 2007 China SF/Fantasy Conference in Chengdu: > “A few years ago, in 2007, I went to China for the first-ever, I believe, state-sponsored science fiction convention, and at some point I remember talking to a party official who was there and I said, ‘Up until now I have read in Locus that your lot disapprove of science fiction and you disapprove of science fiction conventions and these things have not been deliberately encouraged. What’s changed? Why did you permit this thing? Why are we here?’ > ‘And he said, ‘Oh you know for years, we’ve been making wonderful things. We make your iPods. We make phones. We make them better than anybody else, but we don’t come up with any of these ideas. So we went on a tour of America talking to people at Microsoft, at Google, at Apple, and we asked them a lot of questions about themselves, just the people working there. And we discovered they all read science fiction… so we think maybe it’s a good thing.” > The more things change, the more they remain the same. Lu Xun in 1903 had written that ‘science fiction could play a crucial role in the advancement of the Chinese nation’ and 104 years later, the purpose of the 2007 Chengdu SF/F Conference seems to have been no different for it was described as ‘an ambitious Chinese effort designed to inspire public creativity toward future scientific and technological development as well as promote national insight for scientific exploration’. A laudable step towards sparking the imagination and fostering innovation, but the state support of science fiction is also about advancing China’s soft power. As the writer Chen Quifan said in a speech (co-written by the organisers) at the eighth Chinese Nebula Awards in November 2017, saying that the purpose of Chinese science fiction was to, “grasp what General Secretary Xi has put forward, and advance the establishment of the power of the international spread of the culture of socialism with Chinese characteristics, in order to tell the China story.”
- treephen 8y ago
  That's back in 2006. Now everything has changed. Now China thrives on closing down churches, jailing pastors, censoring 'sensitive' materials in Hong Kong, indoctrinate muslims to eat pork and drink beer, etc etc etc. Doubt any book of significance will arise in this environment
  - forkLding 8y ago
    CCP thrives on atheism, most Chinese science fiction novels actually are also non or anti-religion which wins them points in the censor department. At least I've read several post-2015 Chinese sci-fi and whenever religion comes up, the religious figures are always greedy, corrupt and using their religious title for power, "polygamous-cultish" or fanatically stupid. Although the ones I've read have been remixing Cthulhu with Cyberpunk so I might be digressing. Also note that most Chinese modern sci-fi now begin life as internet and web forum novels because the web is the most important and fast-spreading medium for Chinese fiction readers now. As well, near-future sci-fi and most importantly those kind of TV shows are pretty much banned in China.
    - toufiqbarhamov 8y ago
      So don’t hold my breath for the Chinese Version of ‘Black Mirror’ hm?
      - pnw_hazor 8y ago
        China is Black Mirror

yorwba 8y ago

Folding Beijing was linked in TFA, but in case someone overlooked it or went straight to the comments, here's the English translation: http://uncannymagazine.com/article/folding-beijing-2/ http://uncannymagazine.com/article/folding-beijing-2/

barry-cotter 8y ago
I hate that story so much. It’s practically the platonic ideal of engineer written fiction without the tiniest patina of knowledge of social science. A story about monstrous people and three worlds occupying one space over the course of a day in fantasy, good. As something vaguely purporting to be a plausible depiction of a possible reality it is absolute garbage. It makes no sense on a political, sociological or economic level. The machinery described is insanely complex and would be very, very expensive and all to get a tiny bit more use out of space when you could do as well by building skyscrapers, or going underground, or expanding the city. Beijing is big but there’s plenty of flat land to expand around it. If you can turn off all knowledge of how things work and just look at the human story of love, loss and sacrifice the translation and writing is excellent.
B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
Rabbit hole: one of the acknowledged magazine supporters is the creator of a verbless language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kēlen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kēlen (4 or 5 clicks and a search/name check, must get a grip ...)

aerophilic 8y ago

One thing I really appreciated about the three body problem (Liu Cixin), was the “completely different perspective” brought to bear. I feel to often with (American) science fiction, you have well known and “expected” themes. What will be interesting is how much further they can go. I personally prefer a “wealth” of perspectives, and you can only get that if people are coming from different cultures.

toufiqbarhamov 8y ago
It was amazing, and it was such a startling, yet “obvious-in-hindsight” way of packaging the potential isolation imposed by the sheer scale of the universe. The sense of dread, loss, and ultimately hope was almost overwhelming. I feel lucky to be alive at a time when I can hear on a website about a book written in China, find a digital copy of the whole trilogy professionally translated, and then discuss the experience on another site full of like-minded people.
andygates 8y ago
This is one of the reasons I devoured the trilogy and started looking for more: a whole different set of expectations and norms that are subtly different. I think scifi audiences might be primed for that?

MichaelMoser123 8y ago

Soviet censorship used to be less heavy on science fiction then on other subjects. is that true for China as well?

int_19h 8y ago
Still plenty heavy though. Infamously, one of Strugatsky's books was censored because it described an alien totalitarian society ruled by "The Unknown Fathers"; the censors demanded that the label be changed, among other things. Then there was Efremov, who had trouble publishing some of his stuff at all, despite it being heavily ideologically communist.
- MichaelMoser123 8y ago
  Still they got it out in 1969, when everything was in deep freeze as the tanks rolled into Prague in 1967. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_of_Power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_of_Power