Essay
Futurism in the Land of the Future
Finding Solace in Chinese Science Fiction
I have recently relocated from sunny Chapel Hill, North Carolina to the other side of the world, Chengdu, China. Something of note about the Sichuan provincial capital, home to more than sixteen million people and several thousand pandas, is that it is also the base of the Chinese SciFi World Publishing group. While you might not be familiar with the magazine Kehuan Shijie 科幻世界, you are likely familiar with the worldwide hit they published, Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin.
Since I have recently moved, I am still suffering through the many weeks of quarantine. Between desperate acts of creativity to engage my toddler in anything other than screen time, I have found much solace in reading the wonderful short stories in Kehuan Shijie. Chinese SciFi is a joy for many reasons, but a large part is that it feels a little less like fiction and more like near-future realities.
A short story published by Kehuan Shijie in 2019 has recently been making waves as it was the most highly fought over for film rights at the Shanghai Film Fest this year. But this science fiction story, Tuse Shijie 涂色世界 (or “Coloring the World”) is very different from the typical stories vied for in the Chinese film market.
Written by Mu Ming, a woman who has extensive experience in computer science and has worked at Google, Tuse Shijie is a story of a near-future world grappling with the benefits of technology at the costs of human individuality. The main key to the story is a retinal implant that provides tetrachromacy as well as other visual enhancements. A mother with luddite-leanings has to deal with the desires of her color-blind daughter to be like the rest of her classmates. As a winner of the 31st Annual Chinese Literature Awards, this story clearly hit a note with readers, many of whom are parents grappling with their own expectations and technological philosophies for their children. This is in noted correlation with the recent revamping of educational regulations and the banning of tutoring companies.
Another great example of social issues at the heart of Chinese SciFi is the 2016 Hugo award-winning short story, Folding Beijing, also written by a women, Hao Jingfang. She writes of a world where space is folded to create three separate geographical realities that inhabit the same space when opened up. The first tier is for the moneyed classes, and it represents a world of clean air, green parks, refinement, and they get most of the time in the space. The second tier is for the middle classes and is more densely populated and a little bit less nice, they also get less time in the space. And finally, the third tier is for the laboring masses, who live in towers of tiny apartments and subsist off of meager meals and have never seen an open sky or green trees. They also get the least amount of time, with only eight hours of access to the space in every 48-hour cycle.
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This stratification of the three classes is not too far from the current reality of modern Chinese cities. I write this as I look out my own window in the university district of Chengdu, and instead of lovely green parks, I see a massive ocean of giant buildings. Thousands and thousands of people live in the apartments within my view. It’s a little bit like sitting on the beach and staring out at the sea, one feels very small and insignificant in the face of it.
And yet that story reflects the fraught relationship for physical space and class, and recent rent controls and landlord rules being placed in Beijing is a reaction to this friction. To me, this is yet another example of the prescience of futurism in science fiction. And one of the many reasons why living in China, in certain aspects, is a little bit like taking a look at life in the future.
Recently, Kai-Fu Lee, the computer scientist who previously ran Google’s operations in China, wrote the book “A.I. 2041” which lays out his vision of our A.I.-enabled future. While this book is non-fiction, he collaborated with a previous employee and award-winning science fiction writer Chen Qiufan. What makes this book so truly unique is that it pairs ten essays penned by Lee with ten short works of speculative fiction by Chen. As one journalist wrote, “The effect is a little bit like reading an issue of McKinsey Quarterly and then watching an episode of the dark sci-fi TV series Black Mirror.”
Being based in metropolis China makes thinking of futurism in present-day terms a surprisingly easy thing to do. I currently live in a very average University-housing complex and the gate at my compound has a facial recognition system to open all the gates and entrances. It will alert authorities if I break my quarantine. I was impressed that it recognized my face, even with my mask, when I came back from my most recent COVID test.
It is a world where one has to carry their phone with them at all times not because they’re addicted to their screens, but because it contains an interactive QR health code. This code is scanned at access points to almost all buildings and public transport. If someone has been in contact with anyone who later tests positive for covid-19, this health code will then turn red. Only when it’s green are you able to walk around freely and use public transportation.
I am looking forward to the end of quarantine, and proudly being able to show my green QR code to other parents, after I’ve checked theirs so that I know that our children can play together safely. This is something that I could not do in America outside of our pod, as it was impossible to know exactly who people had shared air with. I am also looking forward to going out and attending nerdy futurist talks and other events that I’d be more wary of in the U.S. And so I wait, with bated breath, for the end of my quarantining. Biding my time between Teletubbies with the toddler and Kehuan Shijie when she naps.
Interstellar Flight Magazine publishes essays on what’s new in the world of speculative genres. In the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, we need “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.” Visit our Patreon to help pay our writers. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
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