1. Chinese Sci-Fi and Chaohuan, the “Ultra-Unreal”

A wave of Chinese writing has reached the Anglosphere in the last five or so years — much of it through the sterling translation work of Ken Liu — and has scooped up many of the genre’s big awards.

But why are Chinese and Taiwanese authors writing sci-fi, and why is it hitting home like this? “Realist literature often can’t keep up with the pace of the change that China is undergoing,” Alec Ash, a writer who lives in Beijing, writes in The New York Review of Books. In a 2016 article for New England Review, the writer Ning Ken agrees: “It is as if time in China has been compressed.”

Ning coins the term chaohuan, or “ultra-unreal,” in the same article (available on Lithub under the headline “Modern China Is So Crazy It Needs a New Literary Genre”). He describes chaohuan as a Chinese acceleration of Latin American magical realism: chaohuan seeks to capture a Chinese reality that is often stranger than fiction, and in which “there is nothing you can’t accomplish if you hold power.”

Chaohuan has four characteristics:

It engages the present and “the social issues that are the hottest topics of the popular discussion of the moment.”

“It is philosophically speculative,” avoiding direct criticism of the present situation in China and instead trading in paradoxes and uncertainty.

It “has the quality of a fable or an allegory,” because “one way to give fiction freedom is to maintain its ‘fabulous’ quality.”

It takes risks with form: the ultra-unreal is a “complex viewpoint,” and this needs to be reflected in the type of writing it produces.

The Western, Anglophone reader may note a certain indirectness to these principles. This is politically necessary. As Isaac Stone Fish notes in a Foreign Policy article about apocalyptic fiction, “in China, it’s far too sensitive for the Communist Party to be criticized, even implicitly.” He quotes the author Liu Cixin, who tells him that, “destroying the world is fine.” Destroying China, on the other hand, is not.

This doesn’t mean that chaohuan is afraid of being provocative. As Ash argues in The New York Review of Books:

The new sci-fi is now in many respects the most biting mode of social and political commentary in China. Long derided and marginalized by China’s literary establishment, it has slipped past the censors who so stringently watch realist fiction. And while much of the genre remains escapist entertainment for the nation’s surplus of engineering students, its more literary practitioners have reclaimed its place at the vanguard of China’s national introspection. They are using it as a Trojan horse to sneak in truths obliquely, offering not feel-good bromides but twisted visions of what modern China has become.

What to read