Abstract

This paper deals with the rise of a new wave of Chinese science fiction over the last decades, attempting to draw a parallel to twentieth-century American science fiction. The paper explores the many similarities (as well as some differences) between these two phenomena, relying on both translation studies and genre studies. Drawing on a definition of genre as a “recurring response to recurring situations” (Miller 1984), the paper briefly examines historical, social, and literary conditions of the two countries, providing examples of the agents, the works, and the reasons that allow us to describe this process as a form of “inter-generic translation.” This study aims at providing an overview of the present discourse on Chinese science fiction in relation to the American experience, highlighting the potential for further and deeper developments of this kind of analysis.

Abstract

Chinese science fiction is entangled with translation from its very beginning. The emergence of the kexue xiaoshuo 科學小說 genre during the late Qing was the byproduct of fin de siècle China’s condition of semi-colonial encroachment by the iron hand of the European colonial powers. Fostered by translation as a practice of “productive distortion” that led to the hybridization of forms and ideas, this genre thrived at an exceptionally productive crossroads of Chinese history, in that it intercepted some of the major concerns at the core of “the discursive construct of the Chinese modern.” Yet as the multiform circulation of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1887 at the turn of the century clearly shows, conventional notions of source and target, derivation, emulation and productive distortion itself fall short of properly articulating the modalities of imbrication between foreign texts, local renditions, and autochthonous writing during this period. By looking at Lu Shi’e’s systematic (yet never acknowledged) reference to Looking Backward in the proto-science fictional novel New China (1910), this paper argues for a more plastic understanding of translation and its role in the shaping of early Chinese science fiction. Here translation not only emerges as a practice that is bestowed upon a text and leads to its “re-authoring” in another language, but also as a trope or rhetorical strategy in the active hands of the author.

Abstract

Recent scholarship on canonical late Qing and early Republican science fiction has accentuated the role of translation as a channel of import that contributed to the birth of the genre in China. The paper proceeds from this view of translation, but contends that the current historiography does not confront the complexity of the emergence of the genre, which took place in the vast textual landscape of the periodical press through the appropriation of foreign verbal and visual sources. This mode of emergence is described in the paper with a case study of the transmission of the images of the German science fiction film Frau Im Mond in Chinese periodicals during the period 1929–1933.

The case study, inspired by keyword searches in the National Periodical Index and Shenbao databases, explores how the film was reported, synopsized and advertised in the film magazine Silverland and the newspaper Shenbao in the years preceding its first screening in Shanghai in 1933. In the next decade, the media coverage was followed by a surge of interest in space missions to the Moon in a wide range of periodicals. Tracking the transmission of the cinematic images and examining later periodical publications about lunar exploration, the paper observes that the borderline between scientific writing and science fiction in this period was not only indistinct, but that indistinctiveness was also self-strengthening, as it became a source of wonder in the Chinese periodical press that motivated the continuous inflow of visual and verbal sources of science and science fiction from abroad. With its method and observations, the paper hopes to open up new materials and analytical paths for the study of the role of translation in the emergence of science fiction in China.

Abstract

Recently, Chinese science fiction literature seems to have gained unprecedented visibility in Western countries, since it is translated in many Western languages, in particular in English. The question of translation of this literature seems therefore to be a topical issue with several potential difficulties, such as the translation of neologisms and coined words, as well as that of the resulting encyclopedias (Eco; Saint-Gelais) and paradigms (Angenot). Hence, this paper aims to discuss the difficulties and possibilities of recreating Chinese written neologisms and coined words to Western alphabetic languages.

Abstract

After receiving the Hugo Award in 2015 for the English translation of The Three-Body Problem, Liu Cixin’s Three-Body trilogy and its translations into a large number of languages have been a massive success, prompting many reactions and much praise. In this article, I attempt to discuss first the global processes of translation and reception of Liu’s novels beyond China. I particularly focus on the Orientalist imaginary conveyed by the publication of the trilogy, at a time when Chinese science fiction has become a tool for the Chinese soft power strategy based on the culturalist and nationalist discourse of the “Chinese Dream.” I also examine the reception in China of the success of Liu Cixin’s translations, and the way in which Chinese media and officials are also engaging in a process of self-Orientalization.

In a the second phase, I try to question the task and the strategy of the translators when confronting these Orientalist projections: how does a translator makes himself or herself an accomplice of these fantasies, and how can she/he engage in a post-Orientalist or anti- Orientalist approach? This reflection is illustrated by concrete examples from my own translation of Liu Cixin’s trilogy into French.

Abstract

This essay focuses on the salient place given to staging both the modern regime of translation and the institution of literature alongside a dramatization of anthropological difference in Liu Cixin’s acclaimed science fiction trilogy, Remembrance of Earth’s Past (also known as The Three Body Problem). These are concerns that are, I would argue, not only historically central to twentieth-century Chinese literature, but also place twentieth-century Chinese literature squarely at the crux of some of the most fundamental questions about aesthetic modernity. These questions revolve around the way in which the type or the figure plays a crucial role in the construction of the nation-state.

As quintessentially modern social institutions, both the regime of translation and the institution of literature converge around aesthetic ideology, in which the figure and the type play a paramount role. This is not just any figure, but rather the figure of the human, configured through the logical economy of genus, species, and individual. As a kind of abstraction that is intimately woven into the fabric of everyday life (or what Marx calls a “real abstraction”), this “logical economy” is most evident in that experience of identity peculiar to modernity: being an individual who belongs to a national community within that community’s membership in a larger, single species among other species. Together, these two institutions form an inherently comparative biopolitical infrastructure that I call the apparatus of area and anthropological difference.

A brief comparison with Wuhe’s Remains of Life helpfully illustrates the extent to which Liu Cixin’s Trilogy is invested in the apparatus of area and anthropological difference that arises through the operation of translation, while a comparison with Mao Dun’s focus on subjective formation helps to highlight the implications of Liu Cixin’s attack on Chinese socialist realism. Liu’s fiction should not be seen as what happens when a large developing nation with a tradition of literary talent achieves the concentration of capital and technology that might permit an ambitious space program, but as what happens when the international institution of literature develops on the basis of an historical repression of its own aesthetic ideology.

Abstract

This paper explores the ways in which Western conceptions of the Chinese language have influenced the development of science fiction in English. I argue that, as the ultimate earthly “Other,” Chinese civilization was conceived as utterly alien to Europe and America. Whether viewing China through rose-tinted glasses or with a distempered spleen, Europeans and North Americans have long treated China as different, not just in degree but also in kind. When it came to trying to imagine extraterrestrial Others, China and the Chinese thus naturally functioned as a model. While this was true in regard to a wide variety of aspects of Chinese culture, this paper focuses on language and the ability to communicate with the Chinese as a template for later descriptions of contact with extraterrestrial alien civilizations. I will demonstrate that this holds true for both the written and the spoken language, and is bound up with the search for a universal language, discussions of pidgin English, and the invention of Basic English in the early twentieth century. Finally, I will demonstrate that this discourse has also found expression even in science fiction written in Chinese.