R-SPEC is fortunate to include members with a wide range of experience. In January's meeting, we took advantage of that by inviting three of our members (Ruhan Zhao, David Pascal and Gabriel Prajitura) to talk about Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction in China, the Soviet Union and Romania, respectively.
SF in China
"I think in China there are only maybe two people who are making a living writing science fiction." -- Ruhan Zhao, on whether it's feasible to make a living as an SF writer in China
Ruhan kicked off the evening with an overview of Science Fiction in modern China, beginning with the first modern SF story published in China (Tales of Lunar Colonization, published in x in 1904). (Download a PDF of Ruhan's detailed PowerPoint presentation.) During this period and up through the 1940s, speculative fiction seems to enjoy a reasonably non-stigmatized place.
Science fiction boomed from about 1950 to about 1966, during which time the primary mode was hard SF such as Zheng Wenguang's From Earth to Mars (1954). SF was seen as a force for science education and understood as being primarily of interest to children, and there was naturally a great deal of Soviet influence. The boom was cut short by the Cultural Revolution (about 1966-1976), which nearly curtailed literary activity in general.
The Cultural Revolution ended by about 1976, and ushered in a new, short-lived science fiction renaissance. Again, it was seen by most as being primarily of interest to young people, and was seen as serving a public good by exciting interest in science and technology. During this time, SF was published in a wide variety of venues, including popular science magazines and literary publications. Many short stories were published, but only a very few novels. In 1979 a new specialist journal was founded. Initially called Science Literature and Art (Kexue Wenyi), in 1991 it was rechristened Science Fiction World (Kehuan Shijie), and eventually became the hub of a very successful publishing enterprise (its own circulation currently stands somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000 readers).
The 'second boom' came to a more or less abrupt end in the early '80s when it ran up against a political movement called 'anti-spiritual-pollutions.' Science fiction was seen as "western" and "polluting", and the science as being "not real science". The field gradually recovered, and In 1991, Science Fiction World sponsored the first of three international science fiction conferences. A number of foreign writers were invited, notably Frederick Pohl, Brian Aldiss and Jack Williamson.
The '90s saw steady growth in the field, led by Science Fiction World but also involving a number of new magazines. Many young writers emerged, who began to take SF out of its traditional "educational" role and into the literary mainstream, while still focusing on younger readers (by contrast with American trends).
By the turn of the century, publishers had begun to introduce western fantasy works in translation, beginning with the Dragonlance books. Fantasy proved a powerful attraction for many younger SF writers and readers, but many chafed at the predominance of western-style fantasy worlds. Beginning in the early '00s, a group of young fans and writers who were members of the "Qingyun Book Room" (Qingyun Shuyuan) BBS began to develop their own shared fantasy world, the "Nine States" (Jiu Zhou), which combined western "high fantasy" world-building and added eastern themes and elements, borrowing in particular from traditional martial arts stories. Jiu Zhou seems to have served both as a wellspring of creativity, as it encouraged the development of a thriving community of writers who produced stories set in the Jiu Zhou fantasy world and eventually spawned not just one but three specialist Jiu Zhou magazines. But the Jiu Zhou community eventually split over creative differences, and the specialist Jiu Zhou magazines were forced to branch out to include work of other types.
Turbulence in the Jiu Zhou community notwithstanding, speculative fiction in China today appears to be in vibrant health, driven by writers such as Zhao Haihong, Wang Jinkang, Han Song, and Liu Cixing, whose novel Three Body combines fascinating scientific ideas (such as the nature of life on a world with three suns -- the "three body problem") with social and philosophical elements. (Eric Scoles and Craig Delancey speculated that Liu Cixing's "human computer" may be an allusion to Ned Block's "China brain" thought-experiment on the nature of consciousness).
Soviet SF
"I'm not going to talk about Russian science fiction. I'm going to talk about Soviet science fiction. Science fiction in China is alive. Soviet science fiction is dead." -- David Pascal
David Pascal followed with a passionate discourse on science fiction during the Soviet era. David emphasized the risks that Soviet authors (SF and otherwise) took by publishing at all by pointing out that even those in favor with the state publishing apparatus could easily fall out of favor and end up unemployed, or even in gulag.
Soviet-era SF is characterized by a purity of purpose: Writers of speculative fiction were "enlisted in a war", and their work understood to play its part in re-engineering the human spirit into a noble, socialist form. Speculative literature was regarded as serious, not escapist, and that tradition can be traced to the inspiration taken by Lenin from a SF'nal chapter of Nikolai Chernyshevsky's 1863 novel What Is To Be Done? Soviet SF was more or less required to be "optimistic" in the sense of pointing a way forward, even within a dystopian vision.
The Strugatskys' The Ugly Swans was offered as a useful example of the positivist bent. In the Strugatsky novel, children outgrow their society, but view it with benign dismissal -- as David paraphrased, "We are only building, we are not destroying." (Aside: Nevertheless, prior to perestroika, the novel appears to have been published in the communist block only in samizdat form.)
David offered two provocative propositions to illustrate the character of Soviet SF: Ayn Rand as the ideal Soviet novelist, and Gene Roddenberry's Federation as the ideal Soviet future. Rand, the ardent anti-communist, nevertheless shares with the Soviets an intense positivism about her vision and total commitment of her literary enterprise to its end, not to mention non-trivial similarities in style and temperament. And Roddenberry's Federation exists in a world that has outgrown market-competition, where earnest and serious men and women expend heroic effort not just defending, but polemicizing about the rights of the alien proletariates. (Aside: This brings to mind David Brin's critique of George Lucas's Star Wars universe.)
As would be expected, Soviets were strongly critical of American science fiction. Their critique was revolved around three main points:
- American SF was essentially xenophobic, focusing on threatening aliens and horrible BEMs, ignoring the possibility of civilized aliens.
- American writers were technically obsessed -- that science and technology in American SF were mostly used as ways of standing in for magical power, particularly the power to exercise control.
- Finally, that American writers ignored the social dimension -- people's relationships to other people -- in favor of writing about people's relationships with machines.
David and several other members (including Gabe Prajitura and Craig Delancey) offered suggestions for starting points:
- The work of the Strugatsky brothers, in particular The Ugly Swans, Definitely Maybe and Roadside Picnic.
- The SF films of Andrei Tarkovsky (such as Stalker and Solyaris [based on the novel by Polish writer Stanislaw Lem])
- Bulgakov's The Master And Margarita
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle
- Alexander Zinoviev's The Yawning Heights
Science Fiction in Romania
"In Romania every miracle works for three days." -- Gabriel Prajitura
While Romanian writers of the communist era shared some circumstances with Soviet writers, literature in general did not enjoy nearly the same level of respect in Romania that it did in Soviet Russia. After some initial stirrings -- Gabe described a novel from 1924 with a plot strikingly similar to Isaac Asimov's later "Nightfall" -- the post-war Communist regime did not foster literary development. The literary establishment was ceded to political appointees with little or no experience with, or interest in, literature, with predictable results. As Gabe put it, "the whole of Romanian literature in the 50s amounts to 2 books and that's it." Throughout the communist era in Romania, much literary trafficking was conducted through informal and ephemeral channels, such as by hand-copy, mimeograph, and later by photocopy. Naturally, most of that is now lost.
The 1960s saw some activity in the form of weekly magazines of short stories, in a form similar to one seen throughout Europe at the time. Much of that literature is now lost, since it was not archived at the time.
The post-communist era saw an initial flush of publishing activity in speculative fiction, with the rushing to print of many major foreign authors such as Wells and Herbert. (Gabe speculated that much of this material might have been translated during the communist era and cirulcated in samizdat form, thus explaining its rapid appearance after the fall of Ceauescu.) After the initial flush, though, many of the young writers of the early post-communist era have (notably) moved on to political writing.
Of special note is Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade, who late in life published two collections of excellent short stories, mostly in a fantastic mode and now very difficult to find. (His novella Youth Without Youth is the basis for Francis Coppolla's 2007 film of the same name.)
About Our Presenters
We were fortunate to have presentations by three experts with either first-hand knowledge or strong ties to their subject matter.
Ruhan Zhao is a native of Wuhan, China, and a Professor of Mathematics at SUNY-Brockport. He has published a number of short stories in Chinese science fiction magazines, is a past winner of the Galaxy award for Science Fiction, and until 2007 served on the editorial board of World Science Fiction magazine. He is one of three moderators on the Qingyun Book Room BBS.
Romanian-born and -educated Gabriel Prajitura is also a Professor of Mathematics at SUNY-Brockport. In addition to the literature of his home nation, he is also interested in contemporary Japanese and Latin American literature.
David Pascal is an advertising and marketing professional living and working in Rochester, who has written large amounts of fiction and nonfiction under a variety of pseudonyms. His intense interest in Soviet-era literature (and especially science fiction) stems in no small part from family ties to the old Soviet Union. David tracked down the examples of Soviet SF that are hosted on this website. David is also fascinated with manga in its many forms. We hope to have his input and Gabe's during a planned future session on such visual storytelling styles.
