How "Chinese Goodreads" Illuminates Fading Sci-Fi Classics

Part II of 'Why Chinese Science Fiction Feels Different'

Link to Part I | Reference: The Top 100 Sci-Fi Books, According to China

Sunset in California by Albert Bierstadt (1897)

Intro: The Most Classic American Film You’ve Never Watched

We are moved because it seems like we see our own reflections, seeing those bright eyes, smelling that unique scent. Feeling angry when seeing the boy with another girl, unable to take our eyes off him when he's on stage, calling his name first when we need help the most. How we wish he could give us the courage and strength we need. Even if he just calls out our name, it makes us very happy, so happy that even our dreams at night are filled with the sweetness of doughnuts. The reason we are moved is that we have lost the firmness in our hearts, but Juli embodies many of the mental states we once had. She learns to pursue what she loves, to maintain her bottom line, to be optimistic and strong in adversity, to bravely say no amidst others' agreement, to think independently and discern right from wrong, and to be tolerant, understanding, and forgiving.

—Chinese anon on the American film Flipped, known in China as “Heart Flutter”

Lately I have been reflecting on what happens when a culture imports a foreign work of art. In most cases, the goal of both translator and curator is for the work to strike a similar chord as it did in its original culture. Sometimes it does indeed have the same type of impact that it did in its home country; other times the import will totally flop. But in rare cases, the work will do better in a foreign context than it did originally.

I like to explore this phenomenon by browsing Douban, a Chinese website for rating and ranking all kinds of media. You can think of it like IMDB meets Goodreads meets Rate Your Music. Since Douban has few foreign users and operates with an unusual degree of independence, it provides unique insight into how Chinese netizens feel about foreign media. And due to China’s relative isolation from the global Internet, Douban often reveals situations like the one above. China will often latch onto a work of art that was relatively unappreciated in its country of origin for unexpected reasons.

My favorite example of this is the aforementioned American movie Flipped, an earnest Rob Reiner children’s film that bombed at the box office and was almost completely forgotten… except in China, where Flipped is considered the 29th greatest movie of all time. (That is, according to Douban’s IMDB-esque Top 250 Movies list.¹)

But if you go into the film expecting some experimental gem à la Treasure Planet, you might be disappointed. Flipped is so very familiar and traditional: complete with corny diegetic narration, manicured suburban yards, and a very 1950s school. It is competent filmmaking, but it doesn’t exactly scream great cinema to an American audience.

This all made me very skeptical of the film’s supposed acclaim, so I asked a Chinese friend of mine about the film. While he had not seen Flipped, he said that it sounded very familiar and that he would ask around. Not long after, my suspicions were buried under multiple extremely passionate and long-winded meditations on this American “classic”, one of which is excerpted above. In light of this, I was forced to admit that sometimes the Internet is in fact real life.

I have gone through many theories about why China embraced this hyper-American film: perhaps its earnest straightforwardness played better in China, perhaps its overt “America-ness” validated certain ideas about America, or perhaps it was even a core designated film for English classes due to ease of licensing. But I think the full story may be beyond me, past the cultural barrier. I almost prefer Flipped as this black box, reminding me that there are other tastes out there that I may never fully understand.

The Course of Canon Importation

It is already quite interesting when a culture latches onto a work in a way that even the original culture did not. But perhaps even more interesting when a culture latches onto a whole set of works, importing them around the same time. When works are absorbed in the context of an entire canon, more formalized standards of quality tend to emerge— an independent set of criteria for why A is better than B. These standards will obviously mirror the originals in some way, but they are never exactly the same.

Perhaps the most famous example of canon importation is the West’s importation of Greek literature. Since Greek literature faded in prominence during the Early Middle Ages, it had to be re-introduced and re-canonized by the time of the Renaissance. And this gave scholars somewhat of a blank slate to decide what was going to have prestige.

We often talk about the canonized Greek philosophers as though their primacy was inevitable, but this was not really the case. The Hellenic world obviously had all of our same Hellenic texts (and more!), but they did not necessarily value them the same.

For example, while Aristotle was respected in his era, other schools like Stoicism and Epicureanism surpassed his Peripatetic school in influence shortly after his death. For a time his works were not widely circulated at all. Only when Muslim and Christian thinkers took an interest did Aristotle’s ideas find new life. Abrahamic thinkers had little regard for the perceived hedonism of Epicurus, but they found much of God in Aristotelian thought. The Christian revival was so significant that it made Aristotle not just regain but even surpass the popularity that he enjoyed during his lifetime.

There is also the matter of attention. Aristotle wrote in a very crowded intellectual context, competing with the aforementioned Epicureans, Stoics, and others. Some of Aristotle’s most famous insights today were not necessarily well-covered at the time. But since the inflow of Hellenic thought was far less during the Middle Ages, scholars spent more time poring over the little material that they actually had access to.

Because much of the Greek canon has been lost to time. We have lost access to many of the previous works that made up the old Greek canon.² It is mostly a tragedy that we do not have access to this greater body of Greek thought, but the silver lining of a more concentrated canon is more specific focus, which can occasionally lead to novel interpretations that were previously overlooked.

Perhaps the best example of this is Aristotle himself. In his time, Aristotle was known primarily as a rhetorician à la Plato, not the systematizing philosopher that we known today. This was due to the popularity of his ‘exoteric’ works, which were much more suitable for public consumption than what we study now. We know about these works because they were favorably cited by orators across antiquity, but they have since been lost to time. The loss of these works, while tragic, paved the way for the emergence of our modern image of Aristotle, which may not have been possible otherwise.

There is also the temporal aspect of how we received Aristotle’s work. In general, it is difficult for writers to escape the shadow of the works that brought them their initial fame. It was hard for Aristotle’s later works on physics or zoology to catch on when he had already established his reputation on logic and rhetoric. But since Renaissance scholars got to evaluate Aristotle’s body of work all at once rather than within the decades-long context of his life, they were able to look past his previous reputation and perhaps find new life in his later ideas where the ancients did not.

In these ways, outsiders enjoy some advantages when it comes to evaluating a canon. The original culture has a lot of built-in “noise” to deal with: various idiosyncrasies that can shape the reception of a work. True, the receiving culture will have its own noise to deal with, like the availability of the original text, and this so-called noise is also valuable cultural information that unfortunately gets lost. But awareness of the source context and subsequent events gives an outsider a perspective that is in some ways more “neutral”. Much is lost in translation, but translation is also an opportunity to reevaluate works that were perhaps overlooked in their original context.

What Douban’s Top 100 Can Tell Us About Science Fiction

The Oxbow by Thomas Cole (1836)

So what does all this have to with Chinese science fiction? Well, I started to notice some of these patterns when I used Douban to get a feel for their canon. Perhaps the biggest initial surprise was that only 9% of the works on the list were Chinese, and Cixin Liu was the sole “big name” from Chinese science fiction that I could recognize.

I initially assumed that Chinese science fiction would be dominated by authors who were, well, Chinese, but Douban showed that this was not the case. China does have a rich sci-fi tradition, but the average Chinese netizen seems far more likely to sing the praises of Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov than that of He Xi or Wang Jinkang.

I should acknowledge that there is a bit of a split here: this “average Chinese netizen” framing is a generalization that deserves to be made explicit. (More on this later.) But in my personal experience, it does seem like the average Chinese sci-fi fan is more well-versed in Western sci-fi than Chinese sci-fi. One netizen that I talked to for this article, Paul, was very open about his feeling that Western science fiction was simply “better”; although he was quick to clarify that it wasn’t exactly a fair contest, since China has been writing sci-fi for far less long.³

I was initially hoping to find more information about how China felt about domestic authors rather than Western ones, and perhaps get excited about some translations that are coming down the pipe. While Douban clearly wasn’t the place for that, I soon realized that it was the place to explore that phenomenon of canon importation. So I decided to index this Top 100 (Substack post linked below) to see what I could find…

I: What Arthur C. Clarke Tells Us About China

I had seen many people I admire mention Rama as their introduction to science fiction—people like Yao Fei-La, like Han Song. At the time I didn’t understand. The book seemed so old. If our library hadn’t preserved a few aging copies, I might never have touched it. In 1973, America had just landed on the Moon (if it really had), and in China the slogan “Science and technology are productive forces” was only just coined. With today’s advanced technology, what shock could such an old book still deliver?

Now I finally understand. The book has almost nothing to do with reality. Nor does it attempt the sort of grand predictions people expect from science fiction. Its essence may be science, but not science as mere technology. It is science as it ripens to its ultimate form—united with the rhythms of the cosmos, achieving a harmony of beauty.

What is the purpose of the universe?

—渣渣 on Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

The most represented author on this Douban Top 100 list is Arthur C. Clarke, who has seven entries to his name. Arthur C. Clarke was introduced to me by my father, who enjoyed many classic sci-fi authors but enjoyed Clarke most of all. Clarke is obviously most well-known today for his work on the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, but he also had real influence in the realm of engineering. His work contains surprising technical rigor, so much so that he was even granted patents for some his ideas that came to fruition. To a certain type of technically-minded sci-fi fan, Clarke has no equal.

So I was quite surprised when I learned that there are not very many young Arthur C. Clarke fans today. I have never heard someone under the age of 30 sing the praises of Arthur C. Clarke, and his first-order influence seems to be waning. I have come to see the popularity of Clarke as a sort of bellwether for the popularity of “Golden Age” SF—that mid-century brand of transcendent techno-optimism—as his fans seem to be somewhat demographically distinct from mainstream science fiction fandom. But Clarke does happen to be quite popular amongst the youth somewhere else: China.

In my previous article about Chinese science fiction, I characterized the genre as the rebirth of the Golden Age. I now think that this was perhaps a bit reductive. In their respective accounts of the history of Chinese science fiction, Cixin Liu wrote that “[it’s] interesting to note that the optimism towards science that underlay much of last century’s Chinese science fiction has almost completely vanished,” while Xia Jia wrote that “as China actually modernized with the reforms of the Deng Xiaoping era, these enthusiastic dreams of the future gradually disappeared from Chinese science fiction”. In general, they describe a genre that is not especially techno-optimistic.

I am now more inclined to compare the average modern Chinese science fiction fan to the average Arthur C. Clarke fan. This type of fan⁴ is much more directly tied to popular science, riding the recent modernization wave that has swept China in the past couple of decades. Like fans of Arthur C. Clarke (who became famous a bit later than the proper Golden Age), these readers are a bit distinct from the fandom mainstream: mostly engineer types rather than writers actively driving the genre. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t characterize the feeling of the genre to the outside.

In terms of actual contemporary output, the Chinese sci-fi scene is probably closer to the beginning of the New Wave. Rising talents like Chen Qiufan, Xia Jia, and Regina Kanyu Wang are reshaping Chinese sci-fi to be more literary, socially aware, and experimental. And unlike the original New Wave writers, these writers’ awareness of past works lets them push ahead on an even faster timescale. But it will probably be quite some time before these writers become the new face of the genre, just as how Arthur C. Clarke remained the “Prophet of the Space Age” into the new millennium.

I still think it is fair to describe much of Cixin Liu’s early work as optimistic; yarns like “Sun of China” and “Cannonball” definitely have a sort of Golden Age flavor. But to slap the label “Golden Age” on a work as cautionary as Three-Body is perhaps a bit reductive. Like his predecessor Arthur C. Clarke, Liu can be better thought of as a key bridge figure between the old Golden Age science fiction and the new. Liu himself probably wouldn’t object to the comparison either, as he personally cites Clarke as his biggest inspiration.

II: Isaac Asimov and Golden Age Fatigue

You can't read too many science fiction novels, especially those involving the ultimate questions. Because they will easily pull you out of the real world, let you see how vast time and space are, how small life is, how meaningless your existence is, how meaningless everything is. They will bring you a strong sense of beauty, followed by emptiness, and finally fear. The strongest psychedelic is not Dali, not Pink Floyd, but Asimov.

—fox.psd.不明白 on The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov

One book that really surprised me on the Douban list was The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov. I must admit that I had never heard of the work, even though it is apparently well-liked amongst serious science fiction fans. But it certainly isn’t as popular in the modern West as it is in China today, where it sits at #7 all-time. The Douban blurb asserts “This stand-alone novel is widely regarded as Asimov's best science fiction novel,” but I highly doubt that this claim holds up to scrutiny.

The Douban discourse about Asimov was a good reminder that his reputation really has changed quite a bit since his peak. When he was actually still alive and visible in popular culture, Asimov was more recognized for his diverse array of output. People knew him as this great popularizer of science, as well as someone with superhuman output. But amongst the modern public, his reputation has largely flattened into the “Foundation guy”, the “robot guy”, and perhaps being the “worst great writer”.

This flattening is not unique to Asimov; our perception of almost every author loses resolution as they drift further into the past. In general, it is hard to predict how an author’s reputation will shift, decades into the future. But genre-defining works tend to act predictably, crowding out anything that feels too dissimilar in the record of history. Asimov’s most famous works: Foundation, the Robot series, and “Nightfall” were so genre-defining that they skewed the contemporary perception of Asimov in their direction. Asimov is one of the most prolific and interdisciplinary writers of all time, but the Asimov = Foundation association would be hard for anyone to shake.

Artists also tend to be defined by the works that made them famous. They may be recognized for later works within their genre circles, but it is comparatively much harder for an artist’s later works to define their reputation amongst a general public who already knows their name. In Asimov’s case, the works that made him famous came relatively early in his career. All of them came before his “mature period”, when he started to explore interiority and social dynamics more in depth.

But Asimov’s mature period novels have found new life in China, where Asimov is thought of not just as a workmanlike technician⁵, but a master of sociological science fiction, trippy mysticism, and even time travel. The End of Eternity was released in the late 1950s, when Isaac Asimov was already “the Foundation guy” and “the Robot guy”.

This is partially because China has only had access to much of sci-fi for a short time. Sci-fi was quite niche before the success of Cixin Liu, so there was little demand for professional-grade Chinese translations until about 20 years ago. But the floodgates have now opened. Asimov in particular had most of his catalog ported over to China from 2014 to 2015. Imagine Foundation, the Robot series, and The Gods Themselves all coming out within two years. Without preconceived notions of Asimov = Foundation, the Chinese public was more able to absorb him as the diverse writer that he was.

It is initially quite confusing to see Ray Bradbury receive a 2020s Galaxy Award for Best Foreign Work, but these “classics” are in fact still coming out new in translation. Just as in Aristotle’s case, the timeline of Asimov’s bibliography ends up mattering a lot less post-importation. Since Chinese science fiction fans get the canon as a corpus undivided by time, they are more able to appreciate later works for what they are.

III: Okajima Futari and ‘Science Mystery’

In the 1980s, detective novels were all written with a heavy “formula.” But Okajima dared to break away, bold and unconventional, devoted to an innovation of “plot above all, entertainment to the death.” Like Nüwa molding clay into men, he breathed souls into lifeless narrative vessels, making them vivid, animated, and unique.

This novel blends elements of mystery, detective fiction, and science fiction. Its open ending resonates uncannily with one of the conclusions in The Butterfly Effect. At the time of publication, its story must have felt strikingly fresh and intriguing. And today it naturally recalls a string of controversial, singular works: Paprika (The Dream Detective in its original form), Inception, The Matrix… and many more. One cannot help but think of Zhuang Zhou’s butterfly dream, exploring the relationship between an internal cosmos and external reality—what is true, what is false? Are we dreaming, or is this reality itself?

—龙骑士兰斯洛特 on Klein Bottle by Okajima Futari

Now, none of the interpretations I have mentioned so far have been especially novel. Clarke and Asimov were certainly respected in these ways by their sci-fi peers, even if this reputation didn’t stick with the general public. But I did want to talk about a sci-fi subgenre that wasn’t even recognized as such until it was imported by China. I’m not sure if this title has an English name, so I will call it Japanese science mystery.

When I was chatting with the aforementioned Chinese sci-fi fan Paul earlier this year, he said that he really liked Japanese sci-fi like The Century Law by Muneki Yamada. I said this book had never been translated into English, and this made him sad. He said there were a lot of great works of Japanese sci-fi that the US was missing out on.

Later on, I learned that The Century Law was indeed a classic of Chinese sci-fi, clocking in at 55 on the Douban list. Not only that, but there were several works of Japanese sci-fi that I had never heard of. I assumed that China was simply more plugged into the established Japanese sci-fi scene due to the lower language barrier.

So when I went to WorldCon earlier this month, I felt like I had a banger question for the Japanese panel on my hands. I was very excited to hear what they had to say about Muneki Yamada.

Instead they were confused. They were like, “Do you mean Masaki Yamada?” (another sci-fi author, associated with Ghost in the Shell). I was eventually able to correct them, but their reaction suggested that Muneki Yamada was no titan of Japanese science fiction. They seemed to see him as some kind of broader genre or literary writer who was respected but not particularly associated with science fiction.

I decided to look deeper into the matter and confirmed that Muneki Yamada had in fact never been nominated for a Seiun Award (Japanese Hugo). Even stranger, neither Yusuke Kishi of From the New World (10th on the list) nor Okajima Futari of Klein Bottle (19th) had been nominated for a Seiun Award. Instead, all three were classified as “mystery writers” in Japanese encyclopedia entries. And none of these works were particularly contemporary either, with all of them dating back to before the 2010s.

I began to wonder if these books were just misclassified by Douban and did not have particularly strong sci-fi themes. But I did not find them wanting in this respect. The Century Law explores a dystopian world in which Japan discovers immortality but outlaws use of the technology beyond 100 years of life. Klein Bottle explores a PKD-esque fragmented reality with a mysterious virtual reality game at the center. And if the reviews are accurate, From the New World features exceptional hard speculative biology. But for whatever reason, these books were snubbed by the genre mainstream.

I came to realize that there is some kind of Japanese sci-fi / mystery fusion genre that has really caught on in China in a way that it hasn’t even caught on in Japan science fiction itself. Perhaps their strong mystery association kept Japanese genre purists from taking them seriously, or perhaps they distanced themselves from the genre as an intentional decision. It may be too impossible to say for sure. But Yusuke Kishi almost reminded me of Aristotle’s fate in particular— so well known in one domain that the public overlooked his deep interest in animal biology. Perhaps it won’t be long before China unearths some Western sci-fi subgenre as well.

Conclusion: Chinese Science Fiction as a Funhouse Mirror

Lake with Dead Trees by Thomas Cole (1825)

In her review of The Three-Body Problem, recent podcast guest

Lillian Wang Selonick

argued that the novel should be seen as science fiction first and Chinese second. She criticized Western intellectuals for tilting at geopolitical windmills, trying to project Chinese designs onto a work that is most interested in playing homage to not just sci-fi greats but specifically Western sci-fi greats like Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov.

I think Lillian was basically correct in her analysis here: to come at this book from such a geopolitical angle does feel lazy at best. But I also think that this take has an interesting corollary. Let’s put aside all things China-specific about Chinese science fiction for a second. Even in the world where Chinese culture and Western culture were identical, Chinese sci-fi would still be a parallel canon: while it has canonized largely the same works as its Western counterpart, it operates mostly independently and evolved in a radically different historical context. The texts may be the same, but just as important is how and when these texts made contact with the public.

The reception of Western sci-fi in China is an interesting opportunity to reevaluate these works ourselves. These slight differences can remind us of the idiosyncracies of our preferences, as well as the degree to which canonization is just arbitrary (or not!). I personally think it is quite cool that overshadowed works can get their time in the sun.

I talked earlier in the article about how a similar dynamic played out with Western importation of Greek culture. But the difference here is that Western sci-fi culture is still alive and well. In this way, the two genres can reflect back on each other, creating a conversation that is two-way and strangely straddled across time.

It is still early days for Chinese sci-fi, so this conversation is just beginning. The bulk of the forthcoming Chinese sci-fi canon has likely not yet been written, and the extent to which Chinese and Western sci-fi will continue to bounce off of each other is still an open question. It is my hope that these parallel genres will take advantage of this rare cultural moment to reach a truer understanding.

Kindred Spirits by Asher Durand (1849)

There were many other interesting trends that I could focus on here: China’s greater tolerance for info-dumping, the general absence of women (besides Ursula K. Le Guin), or the surprising absence of Western cyberpunk. But I wanted to focus on the idea that works can find new life in a cultural context beyond their own.

I also wanted to clarify that Douban is not the be-all-and-end-all of Chinese taste. I did talk to friend of the pod Regina Kanyu Wang about this article, just to confirm that Douban wasn’t known for having an especially strong bias that I was unaware of. She mentioned that while it is known to have “starving artist” urbanites, it isn’t really known for being particularly male or otherwise demographically skewed. That being said, she did mention that it was a much more selected part of the population, being much smaller than platforms like Weibo / Rednote. And this particular Top 100 list does seem to have a relatively male slant: I would imagine female netizens may be more likely to congregate in other places, like the JJWXC forums. So Douban obviously only gives us a selected slice of the population from which we can draw conclusions.

Two authors that didn’t make it into the essay were both named Robert: Robert Sheckley and Robert J. Sawyer. Sawyer’s popularity appears to be more straightforward: he is quite popular in China not just because of his works but also because of his engagement with the Chinese fan community. Here you can find him giving a talk at a Shanghai bookshop, where he clearly has passionate fans. He was so well-known, in fact, that they chose him specifically to feature alongside Cixin Liu in promotional materials for WorldCon in China.

Robert Sheckley, whose collection Store of the Worlds sits at 42 on the Douban list, is a bit harder to pin down. He was quite well-liked in his time, but his lack of a genre-defining novel really limited the longevity of his work. Sheckley is borderline obscure in the West today, with Store of the Worlds netting just 1,000 ratings on Goodreads. Despite high favorability, his just isn’t really a name that people recognize nowadays.

But in China, Sheckley was one the lucky few sci-fi authors chosen for one of the early batches of sci-fi translation, perhaps due to the ease of obtaining rights or simply because the editor took a liking to his work. And after Sheckley’s works emerged into a much more sparse science fiction landscape, they were able to thrive where they never could in America. In other words, they found a “second act”. I am curious if this fame will ever bounce back into America as the Chinese scene grows and starts to spill over in other ways.

This post has been much delayed, in part because I got so into these articles that I started learning Mandarin! This has consumed a great deal of my free time, but I am excited about the prospect of being able to read Chinese science fiction in its original language and engage with Chinese science fiction fans. I’d like to thank you all for reading, and perhaps at the end of my language-learning journey there will be even more insights I can share with you all.

—K

1. There are many other cross-cultural curiosities from the Douban list that I could comment on, but why not check it out yourself?

2. I have a lot of thoughts about how the base differences between the Chinese and Latin languages contributed to this, but that is a story for another time.

3. This was kind of a funny culture shock moment for me, in that I could not imagine an American saying anything remotely similar.

4. In his aforementioned account of Chinese science fiction, Cixin Liu even specifically mentions this type of fan as he reflects on the surprisingly high interest in Three-Body from China’s aerospace engineering community.

5. Several reviewers have noted that translator Ye Lihua actually had to translate Asimov in a much more lyrical way to produce an idiomatic translation. I actually suspect that this is a third contributor to Asimov’s popularity: his plain writing was able to really shine with the influence of another professional prose stylist.