Abstract
Toward the end of his life Kang Youwei retired to Shanghai, where he took up teaching astronomy under the pen-name of Tianyou Huaren 天游華人 (the Chinese Traveler the Heavens) at the “Academy of Celestial Peregrination.” Encouraged by his disciples, during this time Kang also undertook the publication of his Zhutian shu 諸天書 (The Book of the Heavens), an eclectic piece of juvenilia dating back to 1886 in which he interweaved scientific speculation with cosmological thinking, metaphysical musings, and the occasional “Ode to the Extragalactic Heavens.” Promoting a cosmological worldview that envisioned the Earth as “one among the many celestial bodies in the heavens,” and “earthlings” as “but one of the infinite number of creatures living in the universe,” Kang anticipated by decades Heideggerian Weltbild (world-picture) conceptualizations and Blue Marble-inspired planetary visions. Taking such a unique and overlooked text as its starting point, this essay delves back into the early history of Chinese science fiction in an attempt to redefine its foundations. By exploring the epistemological assumptions upon which this then new genre built as it gained traction in late-imperial China, it advances a reflection on the meaning and affordances of “science fiction” during this time. On the one hand, Kang’s Zhutian shu attests to the extraordinary transcultural grounds on which what we now know today as “Chinese SF” emerged; on the other, it shows how such unique conditions produced texts that require us to think of science fiction off the beaten tracks—to reconsider, that is, the aesthetic and socio-political affordances of writing speculatively between science and fiction.
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Notes
- 1.
William Wilson, A Little Earnest Book upon a Great Old Subject (London: Darton and Co., Holborn Hill, 1851), 137–40.
- 2.
Hugo Gernsback, “A New Sort of Magazine,” Amazing Stories 1, no. 1 (April 1926): 3.
- 3.
Liang Qichao 梁啓超, “Zhongguo weiyi zhi wenxuebao Xin xiaoshuo” 中國唯一之文學報《新小說》, Xinmin congbao 新民叢報 14 (1902), viii.
- 4.
Lu Xun 魯迅, “Yuejie lüxing bianyan” 月界旅行辨言, in Lu Xun quanji 魯迅全集, vol. 11 (Beijing: Lu Xun quanji chubanshe, 1948), 10. Originally published in Lu Xun 魯迅 (tr.), Yuejie Lüxing bianyan 月界旅行 (Tokyo: Dongjing jinhua she, 1903).
- 5.
Bao Tianxiao 包天笑 (tr.), Tie shijie 鐵世界 (Shanghai: Wenming shuju, 1903), 1.
- 6.
Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 194.
- 7.
Zhang, Joy Y., and Saheli Datta Burton, The Elephant and the Dragon in Contemporary Life Sciences (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022): 19.
- 8.
“This change of ‘vantage point’…implies a modification of the instruments used to measure, analyze, appraise, understand, and compare texts.” Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004): xii.
- 9.
Theodore Huters, “A New Way of Writing: The Possibilities for Literature in Late Qing China, 1895–1908,” Modern China 14, no. 3 (1988): 246.
- 10.
David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849–1911 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 14 passim.
- 11.
See Liang’s manifestos “Yiyin zhengzhi xiaoshuo xu” 譯印政治小說序, published in the first issue of Qingyibao 淸議報 in 1898, and “Lun xiaoshuo yu qunzhi zhi guanxi” 論小說與群治之關係 (On the relationship between fiction and the government of the people), published in the first issue of Xin xiaoshuo 新小說 in 1902.
- 12.
“The American book Bainian yi jiao [Looking Backward],” Kang commented, “is a reflection of Datong” (美國人所著《百年一覺》，是大同影子). Kang Youwei 康有為, Kang Nanhai xiansheng koushou 康南海先生口說 (Guangzhou: Zhongshan daxue chubanshe, 1985), 31.
- 13.
See in this regard Lorenzo Andolfatto, Hundred Days’ Literature: Chinese Utopian Fiction at the End of Empire, 1902–1910 (Leiden: Brill, 2019).
- 14.
Kang Youwei 康有為, Kang Nanhai zipian nianpu 康南海自編年譜, manuscript, Beijing tushuguan 北京圖書館, https://archive.org/details/02084772.cn/page/n48/mode/2up (accessed January 11, 2022), [41–42; pagination not available in the original]; translation by Lo Jung-pang in Lo Jung-pang (ed.), K’ang Yu-Wei: A Biography and a Symposium (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1967), 36.
- 15.
As Hsiao Kung-chuan commented, “[t]he Kai-chih k’ao and the Ta-t’ung shu do not neutralize each other but represent two levels of thought”; and “One must, in short, be constantly in touch both with the present and the future.” Hsiao Kung-chuan, A Modern China and a New World: Kang Yu-wei, Reformer and Utopian, 1858–1927 (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1975): 101 and 194.
- 16.
Kang, Nianpu, [48]; tr. adapted from Lo, Symposium, 38.
- 17.
On Kang’s possible sources of Western astronomical knowledge, see also Lin Qingyuan 林庆元, “Kang Youwei yu Zhutian jiang” 康有为与《诸天讲》, Lixue yuekan 5 (1997): 95–103.
- 18.
Kang, Nianpu, [55]; tr. Lo, Symposium, 40.
- 19.
Kang, Nianpu, [56]; tr. Lo, Symposium, 41.
- 20.
Kang Youwei 康有為, Kang Nanhai xiansheng yizhu huikan 康南海先生遗著汇刊, vol. 18, Zhutian jiang 諸天講, ed. Jiang Guilin 蒋贵麟 (Taipei: Hongye shuju, 1987), 3–4. This is a facsimile reproduction of the Book of the Heavens’ woodblock edition from 1930, which had no punctuation; the passages directly quoted in this essay are punctuated according to the Zhonghua shuju edition of the book from 1990. Unless otherwise specified, all translations from this work are mine.
- 21.
Dating back to the Zhou 周 dynasty, the Zhoubi 周髀 is one of the oldest astronomical texts from the Chinese tradition.
- 22.
Hsiao, “Excursion,” 382–383.
- 23.
See in this regard the chapter “Wenxue and New Practices of Writing in Post-1840 China” in Theodore Huters, Taking China to the World: The Cultural Production of Modernity (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2022): 53–90.
- 24.
With the exception of Hsiao’s essay “Kang Yu-wei’s Excursion into Science: Lectures on the Heavens” collected in Jung-pang Lo, K’ang Yu-Wei: A Biography and a Symposium from 1967, there is virtually no scholarship in English about the Book of the Heavens. Queries in Chinese on databases like CNKI yield but a handful of results, all of them of the introductory kind.
- 25.
Kang, Zhutian jiang, 1; tr. by Kung-chuan Hsiao in Lo, Symposium, 375.
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
In this regard, Wu Xianzi further commented: “A thousand years from now, people will laugh at the immaturity of today’s science, so if we were to hold onto it [now] as absolute truth, how different such an attitude would be from holding onto the old pre-Copernican belief that the Sun revolved around the Earth and that the latter did not move? The universe is vast and full of secrets and wonders, so much so that our modest scientific knowledge of today cannot explain it exhaustively. How can we rely on it then to cast judgement on the Book of the Heavens?” Kang, Zhutian jiang, 1–2.
- 28.
Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995), 10.
- 29.
Fei Dao 飛氘 quoted in Song Mingwei, “Representations of the Invisible: Chinese Science Fiction in the Twenty-First Century,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures, ed. Carlos Rojas and Andrea Bachner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 546–566.
- 30.
See Gwennaël Gaffric, “Chinese Dreams: (Self-)Orientalism and Post-Orientalism in the Reception and Translation of Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Trilogy,” Journal of Translation Studies 3, no. 1 (2019): 117–37.
- 31.
Peter Khost, Rhetor Response: A Theory and Practice of Literary Affordance (Louisville, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2018): 3.
- 32.
Song Mingwei 宋明煒, “‘Kuangren riji’ shi kehuan xiaoshuo ma?” 〈狂人日記〉是科幻小說嗎?, in Xia Zhiqing, Li Oufan, Liu Zaifu: Dangdai renwen de san ge fangxiang 夏志清，李歐梵，劉再復:當代人文的三個方向, ed. David Der-wei Wang, Ji Jin, and Liu Jianmei (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 2020), 277.
- 33.
Chu Seo-young, Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep: A Science-fictional Theory of Representation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010): 2 and 73.
- 34.
Terry Eagleton, “The Contradictions of Postmodernism,” New Literary History 28, no. 1 (1997): 3.
- 35.
On late-imperial China’s condition of semi-colonial subjugation, see e.g. Jürgen Osterhammel, “Semi-colonialism and Informal Empire in Twentieth-century China: Towards a Framework of Analysis,” in Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities, ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986): 290–314.
- 36.
Yan Fu 嚴復, “Jiuwang jue lun” 救亡決論 (On our salvation); translation by Shen Guowei in “Francis Bacon in Yan Fu’s Tianyan lun,” Journal of Cultural Interaction in East Asia 7 (2016): 53.
- 37.
Wang Hui, “The Fate of ‘Mr. Science’ in China: The Concept of Science and Its Application in Modern Chinese Thought,” in Tani Barlow (ed.), Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia (New York: Duke University Press, 1997): 72.
- 38.
Ibid.
- 39.
Chu, Metaphors, 3.
- 40.
“The novum in Suvin’s formulation is principally a cognitive event; it changes the way the world is understood.” Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008): 147.
- 41.
Csicsery-Ronay Jr., Seven Beauties, 5, 146, and 161.
- 42.
A reference to the four modes of birth (Sisheng 四生; Sanskrit: Catur yoni चतुर्योनि) through which life arises according to traditional Buddhist teachings.
- 43.
Kang, Zhutian jiang, 43.
- 44.
Kang, Zhutian jiang, 44.
- 45.
Patricia Kerslake, Science Fiction and Empire (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 8 passim.
- 46.
Lowell quoted in Hsiao Kung-chuan, “Kang Yu-wei’s Excursion into Science: Lectures on the Heavens,” in Lo, Symposium, 385. As Hsiao remarks: “K’ang’s overenthusiastic acceptance of Lowell’s view was no more credulous than the ‘Mars mania’ which infested European scientists as well as laymen in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the Italian astronomer, G. V. Schiaparelli (1835–1910), announced the existence of canali on the planet… What K’ang says in his Lectures is hardly more fantastic than Schiaparelli’s theory.”
- 47.
Kang, Zhutian jiang, 117–119; translation adapted from Hsiao, “Excursion,” 384.
- 48.
Kang, Zhutian jiang, 3.
- 49.
On the cultural impact of NASA’s “Earthrise” photo and Heidegger’s notion of world picture (Weltbild), see e.g. Benjamin Lazier, “Earthrise; or, The Globalization of the World Picture,” The American Historical Review 116, no. 3 (2011): 602–630; on the necessity to conceive of the “viewpoint of a geologist viewing sequences thousands or millions of years in the future” in order to grasp the magnitude of the imprint of human activity on our planet, see Eric W. Wolff, “Ice Sheets and the Anthropocene,” Geological Society, London, Special Publications 395 (2014): 255.
- 50.
Shaoling Ma, “‘A Tale of New Mr. Braggadocio’: Narrative Subjectivity and Brain Electricity in Late Qing Science Fiction,” Science Fiction Studies 40, no. 1 (2013): 69.
- 51.
Huangjiang Diaosou 荒江釣叟, Yueqiu zhimindi xiaoshuo 月球殖民地小説, Xiuxiang xiaoshuo 59 (1904): chapter 32 [pagination not available]; reprinted in Wang Jiquan 王繼權 et al., Zhongguo jindai xiaoshuo daxi 中國近代小說大系 (Nanchang: Jiangxi renmin chubanshe, 1989): 415. Translation adapted from Loïc Aloisio, “A Response to an ‘Alien Invasion’: The Rise of Chinese Science Fiction,” Ming Qing Studies (2019): 10.
- 52.
In the novel Xin shitou ji, Wu Jianren imagines a “civilized country” (wenming guo 文明國) so vast as to encompass the entirety of our planet into one wholesome community. On the political geography of this utopian entity, see Lorenzo Andolfatto, “Utopia/Wutuobang as a Travelling Marker of Time,” The Historical Journal 64, no. 1 (2021): 137–138.
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Andolfatto, L. (2024). Kang Youwei’s Book of the Heavens and the Porous Epistemological Grounds of Early-modern Chinese Science Fiction. In: Song, M., Isaacson, N., Li, H. (eds) Chinese Science Fiction. Studies in Global Science Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53541-3_2
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