Celestial Empire. Nathaniel Isaacson

its strong emphasis on technological innovation. The industrial revolution also saw a shift away from extensive labor and toward intensive, more productive labor and limited work hours, creating spaces of leisure time to be filled in part by reading. The birth of a consumer industry seeking to capitalize on the free time of individuals with disposable income presents a convergence of market forces productive of both a readership and a widening array of genres for their consumption.

      Finally, Rieder argues that the economic boom of the 1850s–1870s, followed by an economic downturn during the latter part of the same century, represented the establishment of capitalism as the global economic system, and increasing competition for land, labor, and capital between industrialized nations. This resulted in “the imperial competition that gave birth to the first modern arms race” (Rieder 2008, 28). “Three masses of modernity” converge in SF—mass production, mass consumption, and mass annihilation. If mass production and mass consumption are productive of readership of SF, mass annihilation and imperialism are among the anxieties at its narrative core. Again, in Istvan Csicsery-Ronay’s history of the relationship between SF and other genres, he argues that “SF’s characteristic mutations of the adventure forms reflect the discourse of a transnational global regime of technoscientific rationalization that followed the collapse of the European imperialist project. SF narrative accordingly has become the leading mediating institution for the utopian construction of technoscientific Empire. And for resistance to it” (Csicsery-Ronay 2003, 8).

      In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said demonstrates the degree to which even narratives that were critical of the excesses and abuses of the imperial mission were marked by a failure to imagine a world free of imperial expansion and domination. As tragic as were the incursion, extraterritorial governance, and virtual (and real) enslavement of indigenous peoples, together with the extraction of native resources for the benefit of the metropole, the discourse of social Darwinism and of the native incapacity for autonomy nevertheless went hand in hand with the assumption that self-governance was an impossibility. In his reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Said writes, “As a creature of his time, Conrad could not grant the natives their freedom, despite his severe critique of the imperialism that enslaved them” (Said 1993, 30). The imperial imagination proved to be such a compelling notion that many authors were not able to conceive of the absence of empire, despite growing awareness of its abuses.

      Another facet of the universalizing impulse of imperial discourse, Said’s “universalizing historicism”—the Orientalist notion that history possessed a “coherent unity” and that spatial difference was equivalent to temporal difference—has been used to explain the widely held impression that different places occupied different points in a universal time line, and that Europe was at the vanguard of history’s inexorable forward march. This mode of historiographical thinking also serves to freeze oriental societies in time, substituting culture for history (Said 1986, 211, 230–234; Dirlik, 96–98). Couched in terms of empirically observable truth and mathematical predictability, time asserts itself as a measuring stick of evolution, and Europe as the geographical vanguard of evolutionary progress. Hegelian Asiatic despotism marks China and the East as spatial and temporal laggards. For authors of Chinese SF, a crucial concern was the question of whether identifying cultural equivalencies, asserting cultural superiority, or arriving at cultural compromise could be possible in the context of a universal historical trajectory defined by Western civilization.

      Rieder’s “world-embracing capitalist economy” came into being in concert with what we might call the “three masses of modernity”—mass consumption, mass production, and mass destruction. These were precisely the material conditions that produced Tani Barlow’s colonial modernity, and that led to the polyphonous responses emergent in late Qing society and letters. The naturalization of inequity, an emerging culture of leisure and entertainment spurred on by mass production and mass consumption, and the threat of mass annihilation brought on by an emerging arms race in the competition to seize colonial holdings are as central to the development of Chinese SF and to its thematic concerns as they were to the development of European SF. SF and translations of Western science emerged in the popular presses of early twentieth-century Shanghai and in the publishing ventures that were undertaken in Japan.⁷ This publication was one aspect of a vibrant, burgeoning publishing industry, often alongside other more canonically recognized genres and discourses. As an instance of translingual practice, social Darwinism was unmoored from Thomas Huxley’s critical reading of its implications (perhaps not surprisingly, given China’s semicolonial plight), transmogrified into a system of moral and social valuation, and understood as a road map to emergent global relations of power.

      Patricia Kerslake identifies a parallel between the function of the other as delineated in Said’s critique of colonial epistemologies and the function of the other in SF’s visions of the alien. A leitmotif of SF is the exoticism of the unknown and the expansionist drive, in part for its own sake, but also in the interest of defining the self in opposition to the other: “Where postcolonial theory challenges the silencing and marginalization of the Other, SF takes the stance that such marginalization is a key element of self-identification” (Kerslake, 10–11). Self-identification in SF comes alongside the triumph over and silencing of the alien other, an affirmation of the superiority of humanity. Kerslake identifies an evolution of SF from a genre in which “marginalization is a key element of self-identification,” into a “legitimate cultural discourse that has brought “serious social expositions of contemporary society” (11, 14–15). To this end, Kerslake suggests that Said’s work offers academic legitimacy to SF studies, through which the relationship between extraterrestrials can be explored in a familiar critical vocabulary, stating that “given a residual academic reluctance to engage with SF, it is necessary to extrapolate certain contemporary theories and exchange the term ‘East’ for ‘extraterrestrial,’ so that the principles thus debated become productive in a genre which in itself has been marginalized” (14–15).

      Kerslake notes that in canonical SF, the silencing of an alien antagonist is often deployed as a means of subverting the legitimacy of European civilization/humanism as the universal subject. Rieder, Kerslake, and Milner all argue that SF does indeed have the potential to subvert ethnocentrism. Kerslake frames the duality of ethnocentrism and subversion in terms of a forbidden “political pornography” or an increasingly meaningful, if ironic, literary experiment (Kerslake, 29). Milner argues that Said’s relatively terse analysis of Jules Verne (Said 1993, 187), Gayatri Spivak’s more detailed deconstruction of the function of colonial consciousness in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Spivak 1988, 1999), and Rieder and Csicsery-Ronay’s analyses of SF and empire all overstate the thematic centrality of Orientalism in the genre. Milner contends that “the genre was at once ideological, in the pejorative sense, and yet also critical” (Milner 2012, 159). This approach understands genre in terms of its contradictions—identifying in SF the potential to subvert Orientalist discourse despite the fact that it borrows the same language and is embedded in its cultural milieu. In warning against seeing Orientalism as the single necessary and sufficient condition of SF, Milner goes on to argue that “the novel in general and SF in particular are equally unthinkable without capitalist relations of production, or without patriarchal gender relations, or without systematic heterosexism. Which is why Marxist, feminist, and queer readings are readily available, not only for Frankenstein, but for SF texts more generally” (Milner 2012, 160). Acknowledging the pitfalls of identifying industrial modernity or Orientalism as the sole identifying feature of the genre on a global scale, I argue that the emergence of Chinese SF cannot be adequately understood without coming to terms with the degree to which late Qing authors framed their predicament in exactly those terms. In the words of Wu Yan, “Colonialism is not the only problem for SF, but it is the most important question.”⁸

      Colonial modernity, Shanghai’s semi-peripheral position in the world economy, and the peripheral role of Chinese SF at the turn of the twentieth century meant that the contradictions of Chinese SF developed differently from the American and European counterparts at the heart of Milner’s and Kerslake’s analyses. In their approach to science and to science fiction, Chinese intellectuals were faced with a very different contradiction: even if SF’s ideological proximity to Orientalism could be subverted at the discursive level, how could these narrative turns undo the political realities that Orientalism had