Rebecca F. Kuang: belief

Transcript context

…If you had to describe in general terms how you think Chinese science fiction is different from Western science fiction, how would you explain that to an educated Western reading audience? I really resist these broad generalizations of national literatures because you always find a lot more diversity within a genre, within a national literature, than you do differences between two national literatures, I think. So, it’s really hard to talk about significant ways in which Chinese science fiction is different from American science fiction because there’s no broad quality that you could subscribe to American science fiction, either. There’s also a lot more transpacific movement than people realize. There’s so much translation going back and forth, and authors are mutually influenced by one another. It’s well documented that Liu Cixin was heavily influenced by the golden age of anglophone science fiction like Arthur C. Clarke. My fiancé is reading 2001: A Space Odyssey right now and its sequels, and he was a big fan of Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem trilogy, and he’s telling me he can see where the Clarke influence comes from. As somebody who really likes to get into the nitty-gritty of how literary movements come to be and those specific transpacific multicultural influences, I hate making claims like, “Oh, all Chinese fiction is this way,” when clearly, it’s not. And so many writers within those movements occupy very different social positions, have very different prose styles, and have different concerns with what they’re trying to accomplish in their fiction. Why is “Folding Beijing” an important short story?…

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