The Boom & The Boom

Mapping the Field : The Boom and the Boom

There certainly seems to be something of a boom.

– China Miéville, in an interview with Andrew M. Butler

Back in the fall of 2018, when I just arrived in London as a newly enrolled doctoral student embarking on a project on science fiction (sf), I was told there was one place I simply cannot afford to miss – the sf megastore Forbidden Planet in Holborn, which was a wise idea. I ventured to the store and, not long after, my attention was captured by a book bearing an intriguing title: The City & The City, authored by China Miéville. Published in 2009, this novel introduces an unusual duality of two cities Besźel and Ul Qoma. They share pretty much the same geographical space but remain invisible to each other. This invisibility is the result of a long-term socialization, where citizens of each city are disciplined from childhood to unsee their neighbours from the other city, even when walking the same streets. Any contact or interaction, unless officially authorized, is considered a serious felony.

This setting feels extraordinary to me. Out of curiosity, I set out on a quest to learn more about its author Miéville. I noticed that long before The City & The City, he had already gained reputation for his earlier works, regarded as one of the pioneers whose writings are well known for the “liquefaction of generic frontiers” between sf, fantasy, detective fiction and others (Edwards and Venezia, “Unintroduction” 6). These achievements have made him unique in the latest resurgence of British sf – “something of a boom” in his own words as he spoke to Andrew M. Butler during an interview in 2002 (Butler, “Beyond” 7; emphasis added). At that moment, Miéville found himself unable to pinpoint the exact nature of the “boom-ness” or “boomtitude” he alluded to, leaving his discussion suspended with a rather ambiguous declaration: “[T]‌he fact that everyone’s talking about it is to a certain extent definitional of the fact that something’s going on” (Butler, “Beyond” 7). One year later, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. offered a gentle reminder that whatever the boom refers to, it is “not a writer’s or critic’s term” (“Editorial” 353). Instead, it is borrowed from the domain of economics, representing a surge in the cultural marketplace of intellectual capital, which not only brings commercial gains but also sparks a burst of creativity in British sf.

This “boom” that had come into spotlight at the turn of the twenty-first century is now termed the British SF Boom, though there are several dates suggested for the Boom’s first ignition. It could be the time when Interzone came into being in spring 1982, a quality magazine where British sf writers could “present their new works unhindered by the too often myopic demands of sf magazines in the US” (Carr 37), “one that contributed significantly to the culture of science fiction in Britain” with the support of a new generation of British authors (Ashley 133). It could also be the publication of Iain M. Banks’s Consider Phlebas in 1987 which drew “non-traditional readers into the genre” (Bould, “Bould” 308). Apart from those early hints of the Boom, Mark Bould claims that the Boom began in 1990, “the richest year in terms of symbolic events” (Bould, “Bould” 308). Among these events was the release of the steampunk novel The Difference Machine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, which not only takes place in a British setting but also has a British first edition and a pre-publication excerpt featured in Interzone (Bould, “Bould” 308). Another noteworthy event in that same year was the publication of Colin Greenland’s Take Back Plenty, marking the first British novel to secure the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Meanwhile, Interzone, already solidifying its status as an essential platform for British sf and being held in high regard alongside its prestigious American counterparts such as Asimov’s, F&SF and Analog in terms of both quality and influence (Ashley 134), changed to a monthly publishing schedule. For Andrew M. Butler, the pivotal year of the British Boom was 1995, highlighting Jeff Noon’s victory in the John W. Campbell Award for best new sf writer and the release of Ken MacLeod’s The Star Fraction (qtd. in Bould, “Bould” 309). This intricacy in defining the Boom provides a unique space to investigate the historical transition in the UK during the long 1990s – or, to use terms with political savvy, during the Thatcherite and post-Thatcherite eras.

Nevertheless, just like Besźel and Ul Qoma in Miéville’s The City & The City, the British SF Boom did not see its neighbour – another boom of sf emerging rather simultaneously in China in the 1990s. This “Chinese SF Boom” is initially known as the “Chinese SF New Wave” (Song M., “After 1989” 8), shaped by the tremendous and continuous contributions of “New-born Generation” sf writers during the past three decades (Wu Y. et al. 52). Though the term “Chinese New Wave” is not coined to relate to the Anglo-American new wave in the mid-1960s and the 1970s when Song Mingwei first proposed it, he contends in his 2023 monograph Fear of Seeing that these two distinct “new waves” converge in their capacity to unveil the “invisible” realms of reality. The notion of the “invisible” persists as a symbolic motif, signifying domains that transcend our conventional perception, providing a vehicle to portray our fears and aspirations, and also challenging established ethical norms and political ideologies.

While I essentially agree with “Chinese New Wave,” I wish to propose an alternative name: Chinese SF Boom. This choice of term holds a twofold intention. Firstly, it mirrors the nomenclature of the British SF Boom, enabling a comparative reading of the two sf booms that were previously ignorant of each other. Secondly, analogous to the British SF Boom that signifies the rise of British sf over its American counterpart in the global sf market, the term “Chinese SF Boom” also resounds with the remarkable success of Chinese sf in the commercial field since the 1990s. This not only emphasizes on its market prowess but also invites scholarly inquiry to explore the socio-political context behind its burgeoning popularity.

This popularity has even transcended boundaries and borders, with Chinese sf attracting worldwide attention. A watershed moment arrived in 2015 when Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, translated into English by Ken Liu, won the Hugo Award for Best Novel – a historic milestone as the first non-English work to receive such acclaim. Subsequently, stories of the Chinese SF Boom, old and new alike, have been translated one after another for non-Chinese-speaking readers, collected in anthologies and magazines, introduced in sf conventions and conferences and discussed in academic journals.¹ Despite its unprecedented popularity both among and beyond Chinese readership in very recent years, the Chinese Boom, whether dating from 1989 or 1991 from different perspectives to be discussed later, is in fact deeply rooted in, and even nurtured by, the fundamental social and cultural shifts during the 1990s in China. It is a historical transition away from the discourse of new enlightenment and elitism of the 1980s to a post-socialist condition where “the constant noise of commercialization in the background and the ever-evolving institutional and conceptual changes that have accompanied economic reforms” (Kong 3) can never be neglected.

Although the two sf booms in China and the UK were cultivated in an epoch of transition and rupture, of breaking with the past and travelling to the new (if the “newness” can ever be reached), their unawareness of each other is not surprising – especially given the preference of Chinese readers for American sf works. An exception might be Arthur C. Clarke, who is perhaps the most well-known British sf writer familiar to Chinese fandom (alongside Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, among others). His influence in China goes even higher nowadays as the “mentor” of the Hugo-winning Liu Cixin. But still, Clarke is usually viewed as “the British writer who comes closest to the American model of sf promoted by Campbell” (Luckhurst, Science Fiction 133; emphasis added) and his stories are best accepted with features echoing the American Golden Age. Therefore, during the 1990s, China was celebrated for a wide-spreading interest in the American sf, which accounts for “at least one third of all titles in translation” (Jiang 123), whereas writers of the British Boom remained voiceless in the Chinese market.

In the meantime, Chinese sf also encountered an equal invisibility in the UK. Back then, Chinese sf works were largely marginalized by the mainstream Chinese literature, “never given recognition as ‘serious’ writing” (Pohl viii), and rarely translated into English at all. Even in the few occasions where they did appear in translation, “they seldom reached a wide audience” (vii). According to Fei Dao, one of the Chinese Boom authors, Chinese sf was like “a hidden lonely army […] laid low in the wilderness where nobody really cared to look at it” (see Song M., “Introduction” xi), but this, of course, is now changing. Signed copies of the latest translations of Liu Cixin, Chen Qiufan, Hao Jingfang and Han Song found themselves side by side with those written by Adrian Tchaikovsky, Ian McDonald, Neal Asher, Tade Thompson and others. And concurrently, classical works of the British SF Boom that have also been translated into Chinese – including those of Iain M. Banks, China Miéville, Alastair Reynolds and Charles Stross – have also managed to create a favourable readership in China, though still a long way from their American counterparts.

Of course, the simultaneous emergence of these two sf booms is not merely a historical coincidence. They were both conceived and nurtured amidst profound socio-cultural transformations within the two countries, brought about by a myriad of reforms in political economy orchestrated by Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping. Since the Thatcher decade, the increasing tension at the heart of British culture indicates “a break with the past and the apparent shininess of all things new, on the one hand, and an aching acknowledgement of the still powerful and destructive effects of the past on the other” (Tew et al. 16). Similarly, over the same time, China made every endeavour to adapt to a different economic structure and a cultural narrative shaped by epochal shifts. These years of change for both the UK and China, spanning from the late twentieth century onwards, have not only borne witness to but also propelled the rejuvenation of sf in the two countries – an era defined by a succession of robust economic reforms geared towards privatization and commodification.