Invisible Planets

[extrapenguin]

So! I finally finished the anthology Invisible Planets: 13 Visions of the Future from China, ed. and tr. Ken Liu. The stories were good, and I appreciate reading it. I have some thoughts!

Firstly, the byline calls it an anthology of contemporary Chinese science fiction. I wouldn't actually class that many of the stories as science fiction – a lot of them were more fantasy/mythology/hard to classify. Chinese Weird, if you will. (In analogy with Finnish Weird.) This is not necessarily a negative, merely misleading marketing (just like the marketing that called The Three-Body Problem hard SF when it imo isn't).

Secondly, the stories all had very similar tones. I don't know if Ken Liu has very particular likes or whether Chinese SF is all like this, but: it was all a bit dark and had a thread of focusing on the futility of existence/victory of entropy; no-one won big, everyone either lost or continued on trudging as they were. It's a tone not that easy to describe but also very familiar – it's ubiquitous in Finnish SF! You could've slotted something by someone like Shimo Suntila right in and I don't think I'd have even noticed. I'm trying to figure out whether there's some parallel tonal evolution going on for whatever reason, or whether Anglophone SF is just the outlier.

I still have some essays at the back to read about Chinese SF (by authors featured in the collection), but I figured those'll take me another few months to get to (*g*) so I had better post this now.

Comments

[mekare]

My first thought was, China being an authoritarian state that hopepunk is farfetched for the writers when the reality is so grim, and especially when technology is being used for mass surveillance and regulating people‘s behaviour?

[extrapenguin]

I mean, I'm not at all surprised that hopepunk isn't a Thing in China, but I was surprised that the tone of the ... grimness, if you will, is nigh identical to the tone of grimness in Finnish SF. Finland is after all not and authoritarian state and has completely different neuroses. (I was also a bit surprised that the grimness was so uniform in flavor, instead of having variations in it, but perhaps I just missed some subtleties due to not being immersed.)

[phyrry]

I wouldn't be surprised if Anglophone SF was an outlier with an ego-driven assumption of universality... but then I grew up on the John Campbell-era stuff.

[extrapenguin]

I do know that places outside America in general have much more restraint, and a lot of non-Anglophone countries have either been colonized, suffered from war on their soil within the past century, or are dictatorships. Often more than one. I do wonder what e.g. Francophone SF would look like, or in general SF from Western Europe.

[tinny]

I'm trying to figure out whether there's some parallel tonal evolution going on for whatever reason, or whether Anglophone SF is just the outlier.

Interesting! I'd like to know, too.

I know that Asian storytelling is very different from "ours" (whatever that may be), and I don't know much about Finnish at all. I have no clue what to make of this, but it's very interesting.

[extrapenguin]

I know that Asian storytelling is very different from "ours"
I ... am not that sure? Or at least that if you include stuff like genre in there instead of just origin, it isn't vastly different anymore/some of the difference comes from genre. (Or maybe the differences are pronounced in some genres and flattened in others?) I suppose some of my (lack of) reaction might be prior immersion in Chinese narratives in cnovels and cdramas, but it's not like I found those immesurably alien, either, so I suspect there's some exotification going on.

My comments were mostly on the tone, but I do think that one could take almost all of the works from the anthology (like, 10+ out of 13), take a similar anthology of Finnish Weird, press "shuffle", and the result would be at least mostly coherent.

[tinny]

Well, I've mostly just compared Chinese/Japanese fairy tales to German ones, and it is obvious how those are different in the morals they want to show. And I found that consistent with how movies etc. show the same thing: "Western" things often concentrate on good/bad and on punishing the bad guys /the Wolf, and Asian ones just don't. They have a much more resigned attitude (which is what I picked up from your post about the Chinese stories, too) - it's not about good vs. evil as much as just... life, and generally doesn't cast people in bad guy/hero roles as much. Just my 2c.

[extrapenguin]

Ahh yeah fairy tales will of course have different sets of morals depending on the region. I haven't read any actual fairy tales recently enough to recall them; I was more discussing adult literature. That's of course more of a globalized phenomenon, but I was struck by both Chinese and Finnish SF sharing a tone that Anglophone/American SF doesn't have.