Ideas - What Chinese Science Fiction Has to Tell Us

Episode Date: September 2, 2025

With vengeful alien civilizations, virtual realities and hologram wives, Chinese science fiction is in its heyday — not just in China but around the globe. Renowned author Cixin Liu is at the forefront of the movement. His book, The Three-Body Problem is a Netflix's series. IDEAS explores what we can learn about China through it's science fiction.

It's summer, and it's going to be a hot one in Canadian politics. I'm Catherine Cullen. Join me and some of CBC's best political reporters as we bring you all new summer programming, focused on everything from negotiating with Donald Trump to Canada's climate goals, to the future of the Senate, and more. We'll talk to the chief of the defense staff and a top senator. We'll visit the Maritimes to learn about the future of energy production there. Catch the House Saturdays wherever you get your podcasts. B.C. podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad.

A young Chinese woman, dressed in a drab gray uniform, watches an old-style computer monitor, the kind that shows only the color green. It's attached to a massive machine. We see the screws holding it together, and the big control knobs and dials. It looks like maybe it's the 1960s. Suddenly, the monitor perks up. The woman is alarmed. She rushes over to another part of the machine, flicks some switches, and the message appears.

in Chinese letters it reads signal coherence rating followed by the Roman letter A five times in a row we don't know much at this point the woman turns her head sharply a military guard snoozes in his chair behind her no one else knows what this woman just saw That's a scene from the sci-fi thriller, The Three Body Problem, Netflix's number one series from the spring of 2024. The show's budget was huge, measured per episode. It was more than any other Netflix series. The eight episodes cost a quarter of.

of a billion dollars. And the reason why Netflix bet so confidently on this one series? Because it was based on China's most popular work of science fiction, a book credited with unleashing a giant wave of sci-fi fandom in that country, propelling its author, Cichun Liu, to iconic status at home and international stardom. Science fiction is different from traditional literature and that it can only prosper in those fastest developing modernizing countries. In the past 15 years,

Chinese science fiction has really reached unprecedented stage of popularity. This is Zishuan God. He's a sci-fi fan from Fujian province in Southeast China. Zishuan is currently doing his. Ph.D. in comparative literature at the University of Toronto. My thesis is tentatively titled, When Technology Meets Death. Today on Ideas, what we can learn from reading Chinese science fiction with superfan Zishuan Gan as our guide.

In Chinese science fiction, I observed a very significant phenomenon, a convergence of representations of new technology with themes about death. This episode is part of our series, Ideas from the Trenches, featuring the innovative work of PhD students from across the country. It's produced by Tom Howell and Nicola Luxchich. I want to argue that this convergence is a critique of technological fetishism. Technological fetishism. What exactly is technological fetishism?

Yeah, I define it as a tendency to view technology as something detached from society, something immaterial, something magical. Zishwan's writing his Ph.D. in his fourth language, English. His master's degree he completed in French at the University of Montreal, and he completed his undergraduate degree at a university in China, where the language was Mandarin. But he grew up speaking his mother tongue, which is a local language in Fujian province. languages, it allows me to explore different social contexts, like talking to local people in local language. That's how you get to know a culture. And because of this exposure to multiple cultures, I guess, I'm always, like, my research is always driven by my curiosity about the unknown, like what I do not know, but also like what the current existing scholarship cannot answer. John grew up with a sense that he saw the world differently from most of his peers. In the environment where I grew up, there used to be a huge optimism about technology,

like digital technology really promised a better future. I don't know, I just don't buy it. I always have reservations and critiques. I grew up in southeastern province, in the region. China. And, like, when I graduate from high school, like, everyone wanted to learn computer science, like, want to go to tech programs. But I just never felt attracted to those kind of programs. Southern China provinces used to be, like, an electronic waste dump place. Like, you know, many electronic waste from Western countries were transported to China, because, like,

this waste recycling industry is not very, it doesn't have that much profit. Developed countries just transport these waste to China in order to process this waste. But the problem for this industry is it can cause a lot of local pollution. I mean, to me, it is a counterpoint to these universal technological progress, this course, Because you see, like, in this weight processing industry, you see a complete different image. You see, like, how the ocean is polluted, how trees were cut to build, you know, like, those, I don't know how it's called, like, to burn garbage, the kind of places. As a teenager, Zishwan's skeptical attitude towards the promise of new technology was also partly what drove his love of science fiction. It tells me that, oh, there are also some other people who see this world differently, just like how I see this word.

I never feel appealed to technological optimism. Zishuan describes his family background as working class. None of my family members work in academia, and I'm the first one who got a master's degree in my family, like even in my extended family. parents, they didn't, they were not able to go to college. Like, they only finished their high school degree because of poverty. Like, they didn't have money to go to college. Back in the 70s, 80s, China was a very, very poor country. I'm from a very small city.

And my parents used to live in a rural area, so that it was even worse. They were not able to receive higher education, but they fully supported me. And you know, like once my mom even told me, like, even if you don't have, like for your PhD, even if you did not have funding, we can like sell our house to support your study. I said, no, that's too much. But I mean, luckily I have full funding at your own tea. An important scholarship should speak to people's everyday life. It shouldn't be just something produced in ivory tower. Zishuan is probably correct when he says the best way to understand a culture is to learn the local language and spend years speaking with local people.

But since that's not usually an option, the traditional and much faster method of getting to know a place is to read its literature. Sishuan's PhD project aims to help us understand what's beneath the surface of recently published science. fiction by Chinese authors who are subject to state oversight. The Chinese government does have a reputation of being quite keen on censorship of things that might be considered subversive or anti-state in some way. And yet, this genre is allowed to flourish. Yeah, yeah, that's a very interesting, I mean, I would say it's still like an ongoing phenomenon that we still need to observe

because after Chinese science fiction has gained recognition from the state well some Chinese authors embraced this change they think all this can really bring them resources to write also to produce movies and so on but like also like there are also a lot of

authors who are more critical about this state intervention because it indeed can restrain their freedom of creativity The Chinese government holds ultimate power over what may or may not be published in the country.

The general administration of press and publication reviews literature before it can be sold on the mass market. It has the authority to censor and ban books deemed to be critical of the government or books that promote what it sees as Western values. Nevertheless, reading through the mountain of new books in the science fiction genre, Zishuan-Fer.

finds layers of insights. Literature allows me to do philosophical inquiries in a more grounded way. Because like literary texts, they are not just old philosophers, lecturing people. It's about people's everyday lives. But it also has a lot of philosophical reflections in its storytelling. There is a very hot discussion about how Chinese science fiction is inherently non-binary, not only in the sense of gender, like not just two genders,

but also in a way we think about things. I would say it is related to China's social context after the 80s. You see a lot of multiple competing forces in China. Chinese society. For example, the state and the market, well, usually people would assume that they are kind of like two opposite force, right? They cannot really work together. No, in China's context, the state works with the market to promote its own agenda. And also the market like corporations, they also need state policies to support their global expansion. One book that can tune us into the non-binary nature of Chinese sci-fi

is the most famous one of them all. It actually flags its non-binaryness in the title. This planet is part of a three-body star system. We can take Lu Su Xin's three-body problem as an example. The three-body problem, refers to a famous enigma in scientific theory. When you've got two bodies in space orbiting each other, you can predict what they're going to do.

You just plug in some info about where they started, how heavy they are, how fast they're going, and, with the right equation, hey presto, the rest is predictable. But three bodies orbiting each other is of a different order. And to be clear, body just means a sphere here. We're not talking about human bodies floating in space, not usually.

But you'd think that three bodies orbiting each other sounds like the kind of thing that science would have an equation for as well. But it doesn't. In fact, the results are often chaotic and unpredictable, depending on the starting conditions. And keeping with the theme of threes, the blockbuster three-body problem is a trilogy of books. The first one, published in 2006,

was later translated into, to English and became the first work of Chinese fiction to win the Hugo Award, essentially the Nobel Prize for Science Fiction. And its author, Liu Xichin, has amazingly never spoken on Canadian radio until now. My name is Liu Xichin. I'm a science fiction writer from China. We reached Mr. Liu at his home in Tianjin, a city about 140 kilometers south. southwest of Beijing. You could say I'm part of China's first generation of science fiction fans.

My interest in science fiction started very early. During my childhood, I came across a novel by the French science fiction author, Jules Verne. Journey to the Center of the Earth. At the time, I was in elementary school, and it was during China's culture. It was during China's Cultural Revolution, a period when such books could never be published. This book was actually published during the relatively open 1950s, and I discovered it in the 1970s. The young Lu Shishin found the old copy of Journey to the Center of the Earth under his parents' bed. And, as you should always do, when you find a book hidden under your parents' bed, he read it.

This book was very different from any literature I had encountered before. Verne's writing style was quite realistic, rooted in 18th century adventure novels. When I first read it, I thought it depicted a real world, which deeply shocked me. Later, my father explained to me that everything in the book was. imagined and that the full name of this genre was scientific imagination novel. I was even more amazed, realizing human imagination could create such a vividly realistic, yet non-existent world. It was this book that genuinely sparked my interest in science fiction. It was this book that genuinely sparked my interest in science fiction.

How do you explain the popularity of science fiction in China right now? What's behind it? If we look at the history of science fiction, we can actually find an explanation for this. First of all, let's look at the birth of science fiction literature about two centuries ago. It was born in Britain when the British Empire was in its heyday, when it was the Empire on which the Sun never sets, and when it was at its most powerful era. Later, when Britain gradually declined in the world, the center of science fiction gradually moved from Britain to the United States,

and at that time, the United States was the fastest growing country, and it was at this time that the center of science fiction came to the United States. Now, the prosperity of science fiction is happening in China, which is closely related to China's rapid modernization. Therefore, I'd say that the prosperity of science fiction in China should be inseparable from the background of China's rapid development, and it is the major force that is driving it. Let me add that in China's current process of modernization, life is changing rapidly all around us. It was once said that for people like me, who were born in the 60s in China, it is likely that the social changes we witnessed from childhood to adulthood were probably the greatest in human history.

This is not an exaggeration. The world around us during our childhood and adolescence is totally two worlds, and now Chinese society is still in rapid development, which makes Chinese society full of a very very, strong futuristic feeling, and this feeling provides a fertile soil for the development of science fiction literature. The plot of the three-body problem is rooted in the first of what Chichin calls China's two worlds, the time of the 1960s Cultural Revolution. In the international translations, but interestingly not in the Chinese language version,

the story opens with a brutal scene of a notable physicist on a stage being publicly used. shamed by his former students and members of the Red Guard. They accuse him of teaching counter-revolutionary theories like Einstein's theory of relativity. The Jainteu'un has been wu-li-sure of book-stead-li-lion. The jrudeau

can't not set-e you-h-h-h-h-h-hose-Tanthew-Nay-Shi-Ney-Neh-Synehury. The jeering crowd brandishes their copies of Mao Te-Tong's little red book as the young communist

bludgeoned the physics professor to death. The scientist's daughter, who's also a brilliant physicist herself, is in the crowd and she watches all this in utter horror. Afterwards, she's rounded up and sent to a labor camp where she's ordered to help cut down forests. This relentless destruction is so horrible that she gradually loses her faith in humanity. Fast forward a bit, and the Chinese Communist Party plucks her out of the labor camp

because suddenly they need her expertise. So she's now locked in a top-secret radio tower on a remote mountain where they're trying to contact life on other planets. And this scientist, she was just so disillusioned about human societies because she has seen so many darkness of humanity. So she thinks maybe aliens can save humanity. So she reached out, in the end, she sent a message to the whole universe. she received a response.

From the aliens? From the aliens. Yeah, but very interesting, the response to humans is, do not answer. Do not answer. Do not answer. Do not answer. The whole universe is kind of like a dark forest,

like Darwin's jungle. Every civilization hunts each other. Like, why this alien told human to not answer? Because once you send the message again, other civilizations will be able to identify where you are. So they can send, I don't know, like spaceships to colonize Earth. I'm a pacifist of this world. It is so lucky for your civilization that I am the first to receive this message.

And I'm warning you, do not answer. If you do answer, the source will be located. located right away. Your planet will be invaded, your world will be conquered. Do not answer. Do not answer. Do not answer. The scientist considers the warning and then thinks, eh, I'm not that into humanity anyway. She betrays humanity by exposing the position of the Earth to aliens. But she does it because she's deeply hurt by human cruelty because of the specificities of cultural revolution. Her actions are both terrifying and, in a way, I would say, understandable.

And I think Lu Su-Sin's point in this novel, is not to judge her, but to show how morality can be complicated, like to see how things work, instead of giving a too simplified moral judgment. That was the voice of PhD student Zishwangan, and this is ideas. Today's show is on Chinese science fiction and the questions of a young literary scholar at the University of Toronto. Zishwangan loves the way science fiction

can open up a space for thinking freely about the past and about the future. I feel like death is the only certain thing in the future, but I don't have any framework that can help me to understand this. I don't have any philosophical theories to help. me understand this, but also as a dysporic person. I often think about, like, for example, my parents, when they pass away, what would I do? Like, how can I grapple with this very cruel reality?

This is year 12 for the documentary series, ideas from the trenches, highlighting the work of exceptional PhD students from across Canada. If you're doing a PhD and would like to join the ranks of those featured on ideas, please write to Ideas at cbc.ca and tell us in a paragraph or two about who you are and what draws you to the topic you're investigating in your dissertation. I'm Nala Ayyed. Poetry has the power to connect our inner universe in the outer world. I'm Maggie Smith, poet and host of the Slavic.

a podcast from American Public Media. Each weekday, find time to take a breather from your to-do list or doom-scrolling for that matter and take in a moment of reflection with a hand-picked poem. Listen to The Slowdown, wherever you get podcasts. Before starting his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, Zishuan did his master's degree at the University of Montreal. At that time, his mind was full of questions about gender. I wrote a whole thesis on how gender is perceived in Chinese science fiction,

but also how gender is related to nation, like nation building in Chinese science fiction. Okay, so you worked through social construction of gender in your master's thesis and now onto your PhD where you're dealing with the big question. Yeah, that, yeah. Nicola Luxchic and Tom Howell are learning about Zishuan's scholarly, of Chinese science fiction to explore the big questions of life. Which is, why am I

here and I'm going to die? Yeah, the meaning of life like these very existential questions. Sichuan had mentioned that he grew up feeling different from his peers. Part of that had to do with coming to terms with his sexuality.

within a fairly conservative culture. Do you mind telling me a little bit more about your experience growing up queer in China? What was the source of much of the challenge there? Yeah, sure. So there was no violent repression of sexual minorities. It's not like in the United States, there used to be a very violent history of LGBTQ history, right?

But in China, it works in a different way. It's more like the heteronormative mainstream, structure, put you in silence. You would not dare to speak up. You will not dare to share your sexual orientations, even with your family. So because of this social environment, when I first realized that, oh, I was different than others, I hated myself for a very long time. My thoughts were like, why me? I did nothing wrong. Why I'm in this immoral group? I mean, because that's how how society portrayal, like, sexual minorities. Like, they are immoral, they are, like, dirty, they are, like, very negative.

Self-hatred is a very powerful emotion. I know that's not an easy thing to share. At what point were you able to climb out of that, very isolating feeling? Oh, there actually is somebody that I can name in this process. it was Lady Gaga actually In 2011 She had a song Very popular song called Born This Way

Born This Way Yeah Oh yeah It's a beautiful in my way Because I make no mistakes I'm on the right That baby I was born this way It's a very

Like gender or sexuality positive song Right It was quite kind of popular in China. You know, like in 2011, the environment was very different. Like, at that time, like, Chinese society was very friendly to, like, Western cultural productions. So, like, celebrities, like, Lady Gaga and also Katy Perry, like, they were also very popular in China. So, yeah, like, I got to know this song.

And I was so surprised to know that, wow, like, wow, you can have such a huge success while seeing this kind of so, I don't know, non-manstring topics. At that moment, yeah, I realized that, oh, there are places where, like, people can just accept themselves. Wow. That's amazing. And it's cool that that video, I don't know if they were sharing the video in China. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's also very sci-fi. A government-owned alien territory in space. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So, I mean, I'm still a big fan, Flaniga, just because, like, how, yeah, like, her stage aesthetics is also very sci-fi in a way, right?

Like, all those monsters, all those, like, weird technologies, yeah, all together. Yeah, well, yeah, now it all makes sense. Hey, I was boneless way. I'm on the right track, baby, I was bomb this way. Same DNA. First, I want to say, I'm not going to go too much to consider my,

including, my work, also the three-tichung-be question. First, I must say that there's no need to overly focus on gender issues in my works, including the three-body problem. Lu Xishin, China's best-known science fiction author,

we asked him what he thinks his own books reveal about gender and sexuality. In all of all of the work, In all of my writing, the most central focus, the thing I devote the majority of my attention to, is the science fiction concepts, an imaginative design. As for the characters in the story, they are merely tools for telling the story. Their gender wasn't something I gave much thought to at the time, nor did I think it was important. I guess we got our answer.

You could swap their gender. and the story would still work. In fact, the protagonist in the third volume of the three-body problem was originally male, but was changed to female because the editor thought the story needed to balance gender representation. So to me, this issue is basically a non-issue. It didn't put much thought into it back then. Zishuan told us there were all kinds of interesting gender insights

throughout Liu Shishin's work, in line with Zishuan's claim about the uniquely non-binary theme, running through Chinese sci-fi. Take Lucia Shin's novel from the year 2000 called The Wandering Earth. The Earth is frozen. After the giant engine were built and the Earth was moved from the solar system, people have to live in the underground cities. So in these cities, traditional family life doesn't function the same way.

And people form new ways of caring for each other beyond the usual roles of mother, father, child. So, for instance, the protagonist parents are in a non-monogamous relationship. And I think this, very interestingly, these unexpected queerness resonate with queer ways of living. So we tried a second time to engage Lu Xishin on the non-binary question. Just a quick follow-up. In the wandering earth, the protagonist parents, they're not in a conventional monogamous relationship, but a kind of queer family structure.

And this doesn't show up in the film that was popularized in China. How do you feel about these kinds of adaptation choices? Similarly, I haven't paid much attention to this aspect. The idea of queer, you mentioned, didn't even occur to me while writing the Wandering Earth. As for the film adaptation, it likely aligns better with the viewing preferences of Chinese audiences. The kind of family relationships in the wandering earth is rather, in my imagination, a result of what happens when humanity faces an extinction-level disaster.

Their family structures and gender relationships are affected by that crisis, and those influences might lead things to evolve into a particular kind of state. This has, in fact, almost nothing to do with current popular social theories or gender theories. I think that's, I mean, he probably has to say that, and he probably says what he means. This is Ari Heinrich. I'm a professor of Chinese media and literature and culture here at the Australian National University in Canberra. I study a bunch of things, including science fiction history in China. Ari has also translated a number of Taiwanese sci-fi stories.

There's nothing like being in the writing of, of the actual fiction itself to kind of bring you closer to the experience. It's like the next best thing to being the author is to translating the author. Zishuan pointed us to Ari Heinrich as one of the big names in his scholarly field. We wanted Ari to give us a sense of the complexities and pitfalls awaiting Westerners who want to read and read into Chinese sci-fi. The author loses control of their work once it's out there. And that's one thing people will use, people will read it however they want.

We can't control that. But I think there are structural reasons that some of his work could be, you could read queer subtexts into it or appropriate it for queer purposes. One example is, you had said something along the lines of, well, it's the end of the world. There has to be a way to reproduce. These family structures are produced by the conditions at the moment, which require them. In Liu Tzichin's work and other writers' work as well, and this is not a criticism. I think you could say there's like a default priority on propagating the human

species. We just assume while the earth is overheated, we're going to have to find somewhere else to live, and we're going to have to find another way to breed. So unfortunately, that's going to mean changing the family structure. So maybe Liocin inadvertently created the conditions for queers to build new worlds that are more queer friendly. Oh, interesting. Why do you think queer subtexts are allowed to be published and in mainstream science fiction? despite the government's promotion of more traditional or conservative values. I think as long as you don't label it that way, then people can use it however they like and they develop code words and code ideas.

I also think I would almost flip that question a little bit and ask, why is it that so much literature now focuses on reproduction and heterosexual norms? And the reason I ask that is that actually historically, again, going back to history, like Chinese science fiction and a lot of other popular literatures were not. not actually built on a default assumption of heteronormative family values. Ari traces the emergence of Chinese sci-fi to the intellectual seeds planted at the very end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century,

the end of the imperial period. It was a time of shock for that country. Everything was in turmoil. The dynasties had been in place for thousands. of years, suddenly they were crumbling. People didn't know what to do. Like, if you take away this big governmental body, even if it's not a great one, you have to replace it with something else. They said goodbye to their last emperor and established the new Republic of China. At that time, there were a lot of literary, a lot of writers and intellectuals who were

putting their whole hearts into trying to figure out what was the best way forward. And a A lot of them believed fully that literature was the answer. And so the intellectuals were, the writers were starting to think, oh, you know, people read romance novels. We should give them romance novels, but sneak in some good social values. Writers were inspired by intellectuals like Kang Yo Wei, who wrote the Book of Great Unity, calling for the abolition of private enterprise

and the abolition of the family unit, with families to be replaced by free love and collective child-rearing. And feminist anarchists like Hei and Jin, who wrote the feminist manifesto, calling for the overthrow of the institution of marriage. Back in that revolutionary period, when writers were trying to figure out

how can we change the world, they were trying everything on. That was also the same period when arranged marriage was being phased out. And people didn't just say, okay, arranged marriage is oppressive to women, so we'll just do, you know, man and woman marriage. Or like a regular marriage by choice, romantic love. They didn't accept it. some reformers thought that marriage between a man and woman is still oppressive to the woman.

Why would we choose that? And why are you tying romantic feelings to state values and legislation? Like, there's got to be a better way. So there's this whole group of anarchists and communists and writers who were advocating loudly for communal family raising, for destroying the idea of public property, for polyamory, for a woman who could have multiple husbands if she wanted, or opt out of marriage entirely, or they were very vocal about that. So that was part of the genesis of contemporary Chinese fiction. Ari Heinrich makes the point that sometimes Western readers who aren't conversant with the country's history can be a little overzealous in seeing hidden anti-government messages in the works of Chinese authors. There may be some stereotypes out there that any literature produced in China is restrictive. I don't think that's an accurate.

It's not a great way to look at it. In fact, it's very diverse. It's not that governments want to restrict free expression so much as they recognize the power of literature to create changes that won't serve national agendas. So there's a difference between saying that that creative force and production doesn't exist versus saying that it's out there but has to come out in less official ways. Otherwise, like some basic editorial constraints that people face, one would definitely have to do with sexuality. but that applies both to queer sexualities and to heteronormative ones. You're not going to find a lot of support for really detailed depictions of sexuality. It might feel superfluous to include that if it doesn't serve a political aim.

Another constraint that, again, might be a little bit different to what people are familiar with in Western literary traditions is against portrayals of individualism. I think that can be almost as offensive to a state government as portrayals of sexuality because you don't want to valorize a hero who goes against all odds and succeeds against the government, no matter what the police said, he's, you know, he is going to just do that thing that's so incredible. That kind of individualism is probably also going to be subject to censure as people are going to want to see that the literature is contributing in some way.

One of the main themes of Zishuan's PhD thesis is arguing that Chinese sci-fi provides a venue for criticizing something he calls techno-fetishism. A tendency to view technology as someday magical. So we tried pitching this idea to Lu Xuchin. How do you feel about the promise of technology to someday take care of problems or needs that we have today? First of all, I personally believe that science and technology are essential to the future of humankind, if humankind is to have a future.

Let's not say whether it is a good future or a bad future. If we want to have a future, we have to make sure that science and technology are constantly developing. In our modern society, in our modern human civilization, most of our needs are met by science and technology. And if science and technology were to disappear, a human society of our size could completely collapse in a week. But at the same time, it also brings about many problems, some of which are even dangerous and disastrous. This is a fact that we must also recognize.

Yet, I personally think that the only solutions to the issues and crises brought about by technology would probably also come from technology itself, not from other avenues. Thus, we must sustain technological development to address these problems that we have already got. I am optimistic about the development. I am optimistic about the development of science and technology. And I think that, although it brings a lot of problems, a general trend, which I think is very obvious, is that it will enable us human beings in the future

to spread out from the Earth to the whole universe. Our human civilization will spread out to the other planets in space, distant planets, to create new worlds. I think this is the only way for our human civilization to continue in the long run. So for science and technology, personally, I still cherish their existence. ...hingo, a long-to-singue, to create a new world. I think this is our human's the last, the long-year-endue, the only one way-eathe,

so, so, to, from my person to myself, I actually really, it's true, its' existence. Technology is not neutral. We often hear, I often hear that technology is just a tool, or the only thing that matters is how we use technology. But in reality, who designs technology and what purpose it serves all shape the final product. For example, robot technology, which is a very important topic in science fiction. It's often used to replace human workers, but not just any workers.

It often replaces low-wage, racialized labor. This means the design of robots isn't random. It's tied to economic systems that already have inequalities building. Who gets replaced by technology and who can benefit from technology? That's a question. And going back to what Liu Shishin was saying, because he was full of optimism, full of optimism. And then at one tiny little section,

he also acknowledged that technology could be dangerous and disastrous. So what do you make of him holding on to the optimism while at the same time holding a small, space for pessimism? I think we need to separate real technology from imagined future technology. I'm definitely in favor of using technologies to solve problems, but I'm more skeptical about the way people talk about future technologies and promises about future technology magically solving problems. Let's take AI as an example. Some people say that AI will soon take over boring human jobs and give everyone more freedom.

And these predictions are often used to justify huge investment in technology development systems that are actually harmful today. So, for example, those massive data center, they consume huge amount of water and electricity for AI cheney. So this massive environmental damage actually disqualifies AI as green technology that can benefit the whole humanity. So what I'm saying here is a lot of these imagined future technologies that are supposed to give us a better tomorrow, often end up getting delayed again and again. But the damage they cause to the environment, to the workers, to society is already happening.

I would say treating technology like a magical fix for every problem. It is dangerous. it turns technology into a fetish, a kind of fantasy that distract us from harder questions like justice and responsibility. My reading of Lu Suzine's works, but also his interview, is that technology may not always make us better people, but it is how we will get through the impossible. It's a kind of cruel hope. It's not about utopia, but it's about a kind of endurance. So I do think we should be hopeful about technology, but not blindly. I think that science fiction has the power to give ideas, to generate, to flesh out ideas that lead to change.

Ari agrees that sci-fi writing can draw attention to people's anxieties about how new technology is designed and used. He told us about a forthcoming work of sci-fi by Taiwanese author. Ninshing Hui, who's just a absolutely brilliant young Taiwan woman author. In her story, there's like a man marries a hologram. His wife is a hologram. And by the end of the story, I can't give it away, but he's transformed and becomes even more ethereal

and less substantial than his wife. And it's that emptiness that is so interesting because it's sort of saying we don't even, once you take the body out of the picture and you don't have to think about corporeality anymore, then we really have nothing left. to focus on but the social values and in this present moment everyone is married to their computer and we don't know what relationships mean anymore and the old ideas about what counts as a

natural relationship don't apply so what are we left with you know i think in mainland china but also in Taiwan and and Hong Kong in different degrees we're we're all addicted to our phones most transactions happen through the phone there's surveillance culture everywhere online life avatars historically that's relatively recent and people haven't had a chance to really grasp what it means and it leaves a there's a little jet lag there so I think that jet lag makes science fiction interesting because it tries to address some of those problems and understand or suggest all you're not alone in feeling like you're married to this hologram that feeling of things not being real is not just you there's a sense of community in that Arii thank you

so much for your time. This has been great. Oh, thank you so much for having me. Going back to our conversation with sci-fi author Lu Xichin, while we didn't gain much traction asking him to reflect on queer themes that Zishuan saw in his work, he did seem to like the ultimate focus of Zishuan's dissertation. Chishuan described to us a scene from your novella Wondering Earth where characters discuss the color of death there's a debate if it should be black or dazzlingly bright

and the narrator also says when that final bolt arrives the world will turn to vapor in an instant we would like to know you personally do you picture a color for death This is a very interesting This is indeed a very interesting question. In my perception, death isn't merely black, it's rich with colors, particularly so, within the imaginative realm of science fiction that I'm doing.

First, from the perspective of the entire universe, the whole human civilization, including every individual human being, ultimately faces many different kinds of endings, some even far beyond our imagination. I say that the color of death is rich and varied for another reason. In science fiction literature, there is a very unique perspective. In its vision and imagination, the end of human civilization, or even the end of the entire universe, is seen as something that is bound to happen according to objective laws. It is not a tragedy. For example, imagine a traditional literary story

that follows two people, a man and a woman, who live a happy life from birth, build a joyful family, and spend their whole lives in harmony and fulfillment. If the final sentence of that novel simply says they both died in the end of old age, would that be a tragedy? It shouldn't be, because death is just inevitable.

From the perspective of the universe, the end of human civilization and even the universe is destined to come. So this kind of ending, this grand ending about death, is not considered a tragic one in science fiction. And that's another reason why death appears in many colors within science fiction. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time today. I also thank you very much as well. Thank you. Thank you.

to the whole show so far. Welcome back. Hi. Okay, so we've covered a wide range of themes while exploring aspects of your thesis from gender to techno-fetishism. How did you come through all of this to land on this topic of death as central to your thesis? And how does that relate to the non-binary ideas that you're trying to explore? Yeah, I was thinking about this question when I was listening to the program. And I feel like, you know, when I do research, I usually first go by my instinct, like my scholarly instinct. And one of the impulses I often have is I want to think differently. For example, for my own gender identity, for a long time, I didn't come to turn with it. So I want to figure out what's the alternative. And for

science fiction, like how science fiction depicts human society or Chinese society, I also have many dissatisfactions about how grand narratives portray China. So I look at science fiction as a way to think differently. And now that, thinking about that, allows me to break away from those rigid meaning chains, like how I should live my life, how I should plan my life. There are like tons of norms about this. But, you know, that is something that cannot be, it's difficult to attribute. a meaning to death. So I guess this is my instinct, like, oh, that this is the thing that I can

use as my critique. And do you have to come up with a conclusion in your dissertation, or is this the work of years that you're going to need to nail a conclusion sort of three years from now or something? Yeah. How does that look? You know, I'm supposed to finish the first chapter of my dissertation by the end of this summer, but I've written nothing. So it's still Yeah, so it's still a work in progress. Right. So how long till we can call you a doctor of literature? I think at least two years. Two more years. Two more years of exploring these questions.

Yeah. Well, I look forward to seeing where the journey takes you, and we're very grateful for all the time you spent with us. Thank you. Thank you. This is such an amazing, exciting experience. You've been listening to What Chinese Science Fiction has to tell you, part of our series Ideas from the Trenches. It's produced by Tom Howell and Nicola Luxchich. Thank you to Sharon Wu for her live interpretation during Scycheon Liu's interview, and to Gabe Foreman for his reading of the English translation.

Thank you as well to Richard Goddard for reading the part of the alien. Do not answer. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for I. Technical production, Sam McNulty, Will Yard, Danielle Duval, and Emily Kiervezio. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC.com. c a slash podcasts