The invaluable Invisible Planets introduces the world of Chinese sci-fi

“Folding Beijing,” also by Hao, describes a multi-level city where social classes live by different clocks, a la Metropolis. (The story, originally published as a novelette, won the Hugo in that category earlier this year.) The most prescient story in Invisible Planets, Ma Boyong’s “The City Of Silence,” first published in 2005, imagines a totalitarian state that has restricted all information and communication to a strictly regulated internet. Ma writes of computers welded shut, with no hard drives or slots for “CDs or even a USB port”; of data that can only be stored or accessed remotely; of verifications that make it impossible to use the internet under anything except one’s real name. Ironically, what this pastiche of grayish Orwell-isms resembles is not dictatorship or state censorship, but our current capitalist dystopia of Apple products, cloud storage, and Facebook login prompts.

Liu’s smooth translations cover an assortment of styles, from Cheng Jingbo’s opaquely coded “Grave Of The Fireflies” to the Arthur C. Clarke-ian, idea-centric stories of Liu Cixin. (One wonders, though, if “miasma,” used in multiple stories, is a term more common in written Chinese than in English, or a pet word of the translator.) At the same time, Invisible Planets doesn’t attempt to be encyclopedic. Readers already interested in the large body of science fiction produced in China since the 1980s will notice at least one obvious omission in Han Song, an important figure whose short fiction has also been translated by Liu. The three author essays included at the end of the book provide some context. They tell roughly the same story of Chinese sci-fi as a national genre that started early (two reference the fact that Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature, also introduced Chinese readers to Jules Verne), but matured late.

In his essay, which includes a lengthy discussion of Han Song’s still-untranslated novels, Chen calls science fiction “the byproduct of the process of gradual disenchantment with science.” Xia, in hers, dubs it “a literature always in the state of becoming,” citing a favorite term of the French philosopher and critic Gilles Deleuze, and offers up the hope that Western readers of Chinese sci-fi will find “an alternative Chinese modernity and be inspired to imagine an alternative future.” Liu, in his own introduction, flips the popular definition of sci-fi as “the literature of ideas” by declaring, “Science fiction is the literature of dreams, and texts concerning dreams always say something about the dreamer, the dream interpreter, and the audience.”

The task that Invisible Planets has taken upon itself is to introduce to the average English-speaking sci-fi fan something that has mostly been a subject of academic study, all the while respecting the spheres of academia (the stuff of “text” and “modernity”) and genre readership. The challenge is summed up by the way the book handles Liu Cixin’s name: on the cover, it uses the Westernized “Cixin Liu,” in keeping with the English translations of his novels published by Tor Books, but inside, it uses to the proper order, after a footnote on Chinese names. It tackles its problem with intelligence, and in its diverse and often inspired selections, it makes the implicit point that the rapid growth of Chinese sci-fi in recent decades have made it both difficult to define and a microcosm of the various things that speculative fiction can be.