Abstract
In this talk, I want to introduce some important current American science fiction movements to a Chinese audience. After establishing a baseline understanding of the popular science fiction tradition, I will briefly review the development of Cyberpunk, Steampunk, Solarpunk, and Afrofuturism (and indigenous futurisms), as well as their manifestations across all mediums. These science fiction movements revolve around ideas and discussions regarding technology and its role in the modern world. Finally, I will touch upon the current state of Chinese science fiction narratives based on my observations and share my interpretation of punk.
In this talk, I want to outline for a Chinese audience some core contemporary American science fiction movements. Not all of these movements will necessarily be shaping contemporary Chinese science fiction, but they will provide the context for understanding science fiction texts which have made their way here. After introducing a baseline understanding of the pop science fiction tradition, I will outline in admittedly broad strokes some of the core science fiction movements today, from Cyberpunk, Steampunk, and Solarpunk, to Afrofuturism (and indigenous futurisms). All of these are movements that go beyond the literary and cut across all mediums—film, television, comics, book design, but also fashion, architecture, and painting. They center around ideas and debates about technology and its place in the modern world. These movements provide templates for artists and writers, but they also provide interpretive heuristics for readers. They express not only abstract ideas about potential futures but also give us a recurring sense of what the future might look and feel like.
The Origins of the American Science Fiction Tradition
Hugo Gernsback is recognized as the father of modern American science fiction. As an immigrant from Belgium, Gernsback began his career as an entrepreneur in the electronics industry. He significantly contributed to the development as well as the popularization of walkie-talkies and remote radio communication. In the early 20th century, there was a grassroots movement of radio sweeping across the nation, in which people believed there would be as many transmitters of radio signals as there were receivers. Ergo, radio was widely conceived to be a participatory communication channel. Bertolt Brecht’s essay (1986) on the radio described, from a German perspective, the same phenomenon that radio would not be an institution of bureaucracy or a corporate entity, but a deeply participatory channel of communication.
Gernsback joined the grassroots radio movement by starting editing magazines for radio enthusiasts. He also edited popular science magazines and discovered that when he put tech-centered fiction in his popular science magazines, people got the most excited and had heated debates, flooding the magazines’ letter columns. At that time he realized that there was a need for a new kind of fiction that merged science and fiction—what he called scientifiction—and started publishing science fiction magazines.
His vision was that the public was undergoing rapid technological changes in America in the early part of the 20th century. Science and the major decisions that were going to affect everyday people’s lives were not supposed to solely rely on elites (e.g., scientists and bureaucrats). Gernsback saw science fiction stories as introducing cutting-edge science to the general public and thus, making a contribution to the democratization of technological decision-making. With that purpose, he found himself trying to gather pop science and pulp fiction writers, who can tell stories together with scientists and engineers from places like MIT, Caltech, Stanford, and other emerging technological institutions. The MIT Science Fiction Society now maintains one of the largest publicly accessible libraries of science fiction collections in America. It started in the mid-20th century when Gernsback recruited writers from there. John W. Campbell was recruited from MIT to become the person who followed Gernsback as the important editor of science fiction magazines.
These editors and writers created a space for telling stories about the future. The beginning of science fiction conventions can be traced back to when people gathered at local science fiction clubs just to debate the stories in magazines. It constitutes a cultural public sphere as well as a political public sphere, similar to the coffee house that Habermas wrote about. Michael Saler (2012), a historian, describes early science fiction fandom as a public sphere of the imagination, a place where ideas that might be too hard to put into words directly, yet could be expressed through imaginary worlds.
From the covers of science fiction magazines that Gernsback edited, we recognize a classical imagination of science fiction at that time. The elements, including rocket ships, ray guns, women in tight spacesuits, bug-eyed monsters, and jet packs are images of a particular relationship to technology. These pulp magazine stories promoted an approach that is rational, white, male-dominant, and American-style and excluded a broader range of voices and perspectives from the conversations. Meanwhile, people’s interest was mostly in technology rather than human experience or social science, and the technologies that mattered first and foremost were those of communication and transportation. The core premise of some American science fiction stories then is that the world would become a technological utopia as a result of improvements in communication, transportation, and the ability to have a universal translator; it is possible for us to understand each other, rid the world of wars, rid the individuals of pain and struggle; we would live in a more perfect society. Star Trek has based its ever-expanding franchise around this same premise.
By 1939, these stories had started building up a genre vocabulary for thinking about the future. The 1939 New York World’s Fair is a landmark because it built the physical environment these magazines have depicted and put it on the national agenda. It was a physical space of utopian architectural experimentation and presented buildings that looked and felt like the future in those popular magazines. It billed itself as “the world of tomorrow.” In the Futurama attraction, for example, people rode vehicles that allowed them to look down at the city of tomorrow t replicating what Edward Bellamy wrote in Looking Backwards as his “sleeper” stands on his Boston balcony and looked out over a harmonious technological utopian future.
Alongside the stories, the pulp magazine covers, and the World’s Fair, we should consider the definitive science fiction films of the early 20th century, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and Things to Come, the H. G. Wells film made in Britain by the Kordas. Metropolis is mostly a dystopian story, and Things to Come is a mixed story, where the dystopia presents itself in the plot that the barbarian warlords took over an Earth destroyed by war, and then the utopia displays in that the airmen, the men of science, rescued the world from the dark ages into a period of rapid technological advancement, a Renaissance Era, but there remain those who question science and worry over such rapid change, wanting to stabilize society.
At the same time, there were comic strips (which inspired both movie serials and radio dramas) taking up that imagery, such as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. At the center of Flash Gordon is an orientalist fear. Ming the Merciless, who is named after the Chinese dynasty, is the evil warlord from space that all American Flash Gordon battles, periodically rescuing damsels in distress and liberating planets. A future struggle between the white Western and the Asian future has been deeply embedded in this tradition of Western science fiction ever since.
Cyberpunk: Interzone, Hybrid Identity, and Neon Resistance
Sometime in the early 1980s, there was a new generation of science fiction writers who seek to reimagine and reinvent what science fiction can be. They call themselves the Cyberpunks. Austin Texas is the center of the Cyberpunk movement. They are strongly influenced by punk music, in particular. They want to create a mode of literary science fiction that scrapes away a lot of encrustations of the pulp magazine tradition.
Here’s what Bruce Sterling (1988) says in his introduction to the Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology: Like punk music, Cyberpunk is in some sense a return to roots. The cyberpunks are perhaps the first SF generation to grow up not only within the literary tradition of science fiction but in a truly science fiction world. For them, the techniques of classic “hard SF” extrapolation, technological literacy – are not just literary tools, but an aid to daily life. They are a means of understanding and highly valued.
Regarding music, we have two examples of musical groups whose visual and music aesthetics were seen as connected to the cyberpunk movement. One of them is Devo. The other one is Daft Punk. Both couple science fiction imagery with their music. Attending their concerts gave a powerful sense of what such a future might feel like.
These are also some of the key books that come out of the cyberpunk movement, Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, a novel that put cyberpunk on the map, and Pat Cadigan’s Mindplayeres. Cadigan was one of the few women in the very masculine cyberpunk movement. It is important to note that this book covers share something in common: the mix of metallic and neon colors.
Bruce Sterling (1988) wrote: The cyberpunks, being hybrids themselves, are fascinated by interzones: the area where, in the words of William Gibson, “the street finds its own use for things.” Roiling, irrepressible street graffiti from that classical industrial artifact, the spray can. The subversive potential of the home printer and the photocopier. Scratch music, whose ghetto innovators turned the photograph itself into an instrument, producing an archetypal Eighties music where funk meets the Burroughs cut-up method.
Cinematically, Blade Runner is the film that shapes the ways this generation of cyberpunk writers see the world. Their fiction strives for the density of information that you get at the most crowded moments in Blade Runner. Some of the visual arts coming out of the cyberpunk movement try to express the ways in which humans and machines are fusing, the ways that we become a hybrid of man and machine, and the kind of mix of fascination, pleasure, and pain that comes with the melding of man and machine. These images are beautiful and frightening at the same time, capturing this ambivalence about what happens as the world of humans becomes more and more an extension of the machine world. Here, we might think about the exploration of the cyborg identity by Donna Harroway (1991). In the 1980s imagination, and technology stuck to the skin. It is not that monumental technology that we associate with the 1930s and 1940s. Technology gets smaller and more intimate as we develop, but not bigger.
Cyberpunk stories predominantly focus on what it is like to live in cities and the power struggles that take place in urban spaces between multinational corporations (which are indistinguishable from organized crime). In the world of cyberpunks, hackers, as cyber cowboys, often disrupt the system in order to liberate the subcultural masses. The core is heroic individualist and tied into the fantasy of resistance to multinational corporations.
Cyberpunks also embraced games from the very beginning. Cyberpunk, an early tabletop role-playing game following Dungeons and Dragons, dates back to the 1980s. Today we might look at Detroit and System Shoch. Anime is picking up those same things. There’s a dialog taking place between American media and Japanese media in particular. Akira, Battling Angels, and Ghost in the Shell … all these are examples of stories that build on cyberpunk.
Steampunk: A Reaction Against Contemporary Aesthetics
The next movement that emerges is the steampunk movement. The core premise of steampunk is “What if the digital revolution occurred in the 1890s or 1880s?” It almost did. British mathematicians Ada Lovelace and Charles Babdage were very close to developing their Analytical Engine, an all-purpose computer which used binary code.
What would change if Victorian society—the British Empire—had a different technological base? The writers imagine that society underwent that same process of digital transformation. That is the starting premise for their imaginative world-building, but really, Steampunk starts with a maker movement—people wanting to make things with their hands. Steampunk emerges bottom-up, and in some ways, the fandom emerges before the text. The fans created steampunk and became a market where science fiction writers and media makers produce things.
These ideas can be traced back to the aesthetic of Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Captain Nemo’s submarine, the Nautilus, with its stained glass, mahogany, and giant pipe organ, couples the trappings of the Victorian world with advanced technology. William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s, The Difference Engine and Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age are two books that helped to develop what a steampunk vision of science fiction might look like. But, in keeping with its origins in the Maker culture Rebecca Onion (2008) describes the subgenre in terms of its material practices: The steampunk ideology prizes glass, copper, wood, leather, and papier-mâché—the construction materials of this bygone time. Steampunks fetishize cogs, springs, sprockets, wheels, and hydraulic motion. They love the sight of the clouds of steam that arise during the operation of steam-powered technology. Many of the people who participate in this sub-culture see reading, constructing, and writing about steam technology as a highly liberatory counterculture practice (hence, the addition of the word “punk”). How did these technologies, once so reviled, enter back into the cultural lexicon as icons of a new utopian landscape?
Steampunk manifests itself again across a wide array of different media. Film examples include France’s City of Lost Children and Japan’s Steam Boy. Steampunk is also part of a larger cluster of retrofuturist movements which seek to explore “yestrday’s tomorrows,” past visions of the future. For example, Dean Motter has gone back to explore the “world of tomorrow” advanced at the 1939 World’s Fair in comics such as Mister X and Terminal City. Generally speaking, all retrofuturist movements tap the raw chord of discontent with contemporary technology.
Steampunk has come to regions other than the Western world. When steampunk comes to China, the fantasy has to be rethought, because the Victorian age was not a great time for Chinese people. Stories taking place in the midst of the opium wars and in the British colonies have forced science fiction fans to reflect upon colonialization, exploitation, and extraction. Therefore, steampunk has also become a vehicle for debating and critiquing the legacy of the British empire and for Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and African voices to speak back to the dominant Western fantasy in science fiction that steampunk initially represented. That’s a kind of counter-movement to the core ideas of steampunk.
Solarpunk: Rebuilding a Relationship With Natural World
Less well-known is the Solarpunk movement. Solarpunk starts from the desire to confront environmental damage. How do we come up with a vision of a postenvironmental, apocalyptic world that is developing a more sustainable relationship with the natural world? What are the technologies which allow human beings to prevent global warming and climate change? Solarpunk has been put together by writers all over the world and artists all over the world. For once, a science fiction subgenre doesn't start in America and radiate outward; it starts as a conversation between America and the BRIC countries (e.g., Brazil, Russia, India, China, but also Japan, and Korea).
The aesthetics of Solarpunk merge the practical with the beautiful, the well-designed with the green and lush, and the bright and colorful with the earthy and solid. Solarpunk imagines futuristic architecture imagines new kinds of urban spaces and particularly uses lush greens, the bright colors of parrots, birds, and so forth, to create a very enticing vision of what a sustainable future might look like. Compared with cyberpunk and steampunk, Solarpunk is a more optimistic movement, a new kind of science fiction, which is, at its core, utopian rather than dystopian.
Duncombe and Peters (2012) notes utopia literally means no place. Utopian literature starts from a position that everyone knows is impossible and invites us to ask new questions and refresh our vision of the present. Can we agree on what the outline of a better world is? We cannot build a better world until we can imagine a better world. We need the capacity; we need a vision of a better world to measure where we are now and have yardsticks to think about the steps, we need to take to make our world better. Utopia, Duncombe and Peters (2012) notes, is a provocation, not a blueprint.
Then we turn to dystopia. Dystopia is a literature of critique, whereas utopia is a literature of advocacy and intervention. If we want to change the world, we need utopia. The interesting thing is that almost every dystopian novel has in it, some representation of a utopian movement. They may be cynical about it, like George Orwell’s 1984. There is still someone proposing an alternative to dystopia which helps the reader to understand what’s wrong with these cultures. Science fiction has a critique but also offers answers. I would argue that critical studies too often only give us dystopia without utopia.
Critique is useful as a means to an end. It is not useful in my eyes as an end to itself. Solarpunk tries to move us beyond the critique of cyberpunk into a kind of advocacy and intervention stance that helps us to build a more sustainable world. Solarpunk is a movement, especially in fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question: What does a sustainable civilization look like? And how can we get there? I like that connection between fiction, art, fashion, and activism. It is not only an artistic movement but a model for social change. It is conceived as generating activism from the very beginning and characterized by the landscape that is marred by extracted technologies, reclaiming itself and rebuilding a relationship with the natural world. For example, if we look at Solarpunk fashion, we see the use of plant-based imagery but also the use of sustainable materials that are often plant-based as opposed to synthetic materials.
The Solarpunk manifesto (The Solarpunk Community, n.d.) tells us that the visual aesthetic of Solarpunk springs from several sources, one of which is Studio Ghibli animation. In some ways, the plant world is essential to the story as the human–animal world in the ways that Studio Ghibli films are constructed. Another of which is the organicism of Art Nouveau architecture, something like the remarkable buildings which Gaudi built in Barcelona. Another is the Jugaad use of technology that scholars have observed across the Asian world.
Afrofuturism: A Way of Empowerment
Afrofuturism has been, in the last handful of years, maybe the most generative of the science fiction movements as African and African American writers have emerged as central voices in science fiction. In the last few years, Hugo Awards have been won by the Chinese for Three Body Problems and by lots of African and Afro-Caribbean women who come to America to publish science fiction—Nnedimma Nkemdili “Nnedi” Okorafor, N.K. Jemisin, Nalo Hopkinson, and others. Afrofuturism reflects a larger movement of so-called Blerds—black nerds. While white supremacist discourse has dismissed Black people as technologically backward and intellectually impoverished, the Blerds are trying to reverse those assumptions, calling attention to intelligent, technologically advanced Black people who want to change the world. Moreover, we see the borrowing of aesthetics from African countries, and contemporary African art, spilling over into contemporary science fiction across all varieties of media.
Black Panther has been the kind of watershed where this Afro-futurist aesthetic bubbles into greater public consciousness. It is a film that has explicitly anti-colonialist politics and a pan-African aesthetic. Black Panther represents a version of Africa. that most people have never seen on the screen before, an Africa that has never been colonized, an Africa that is high-tech, an Africa, where tribal communities have not been set against each other but have found peaceful ways of resolving differences and working together. It depicts an African society that combines elements of patrilineal and matrilineal culture, where there are strong women in leadership positions and an African country that is prepared to become a global power. Afrofuturist writers have come to realize that science fiction can be an important vehicle, for speaking to young black people about race and power.
There are other black Afrofuturist comics out there. Okorafor’s LaGuardia is a very good example—It is science fiction about a future society where Nigeria has become one of the central hubs of power on the planet. It deals with themes of immigration, diaspora, and social justice.
Thus, reclaiming a future with a black presence is an important part of the Afrofuturism movement. But this is not about erasing or ignoring history. It is about fusing history with a futuristic vision that allows Afrofuturism to work.
Indigenous futurism is what happens when Afrofuturism meets First Nation peoples who have the desire to tell their stories. The founders of the indigenous futurism movement include the critic, Grace Dillon. Dillon, in her interview with Marques (2021) would say that it is always
In some ways, Avatar is an embodiment of indigenous futurism. It is a story about indigenous people, but it did not involve any actual indigenous people in the telling of the story. There has been ongoing protest against James Cameron, for not bringing in Polynesian people as technical advisers on the most recent Avatar, whereas he is seemingly appropriating their culture. A better example of indigenous futurism is the film Pray, which is part of the Predator series. It is a film made by a Comanche woman set in a 19th-century tribal community, where a teenage girl battles with the predator, using traditional weapons and strategies. It is grounded in Comanche culture, but it is also part of a larger Hollywood franchise. Night Raiders is a more independent film in the indigenous futurist movement. It is about a society in which a totalitarian government takes away the children of indigenous people and trains them against their parents. It’s a way of getting viewers to think about the history of abductions of native children in some ways a dystopia that has already taken place as told by people who have already experienced it.
Indigenous artists claim imagery from science, fiction films, and television and use them to ground their own stories and to think about what their culture would be like if it adjusted to futuristic settings.
Science Fiction in China
During my visit here, I have had a few glimpses into the science fiction culture of China, and I want to understand it better. I am very interested in the Wandering Earth films, which at the core, I see as a Solarpunk narrative. It is about an environmental change and what the earth must do to survive. Wandering Earth mostly deals with this image of global cooperation that is going to bring about a different relationship to energy, technology, and the planet. Also, it depicts the meeting between a “strong and steady” central leadership versus an “unstable” democracy. The comparison between obedience versus volunteerism also reflects how people from different cultures make decisions.
Much of the film is about space. China is making a serious commitment to space travel and wants to be on the moon in the next couple of years. In fact, China and America are moving toward a space race. America is determined to go to Mars, and many American science fiction stories are about Mars. For All Mankind is a contemporary American science fiction series, which starts with an alternative history premise—what if the Russians were the first to walk on the moon, how would this impact America in the decades that followed. By season three, it is fantasizing about a Mars mission in a world which continued to move into space at a rapid pace rather than becoming complacent and taking its feet off the gas.
The other thing that’s going on in Wandering Earth 2 is a cyberpunk narrative. This whole notion of downloading our lives into a computer to hold onto our essence is straight out of cyberpunk fiction. In Wandering Earth 2, a space epic, a Solarpunk epic, and a Cyberpunk ethic are fusing to create something distinctively Chinese. Although I am not deep enough into the Three-Body Problem to totally get it, I sense that it deploys the Confucian philosophy to sort through the notion of the alien and how humans were related to alien bodies and alien intelligence.
The third Chinese science fiction text that I really like is Moon Man. Again, we can see the film promoting a space race ethos. If we get beyond the goofy buddy comedy about a man and his kangaroo friend, and romantic comedy stuff, what’s being asked is once again, how we rebuild after an environmental disaster.
Revisiting the Connections Between the Movements and the Definition of Punk
Foucault (1984) once elaborated on heterotopia, a very useful concept when we want to capture certain cultural, institutional, and discursive spaces in some science fiction works. The aforementioned interzone shares something in common with this heterotopia idea: they all describe a space where cultures bump up against each other and new hybrid forms of expression can emerge. It can be considered as either contained and enslaved to or free from the constraints of what came before.
Taken together, punk, in my point of view, is resistance and rebellion in some form. We can have an infinite number of punks, which are all about resisting the genre that came before. The evolution of genre and science fiction that always envision a future is reflected in the metaphorical nature of punk. Therefore, punk is cocky, refusing the past, and embracing the new. And punk is anchored to punk music, which strips it down to the basic building blocks of rock. The punk movements aim to achieve a visceral thrill in our bodies through a chord that shapes the way we perceive the world. That creates a sense of living in the future and feeling its density. In a way, it is a reaction to the excessively rational thinking of previous periods, aiming to create a science fiction that prioritizes feelings over rationality.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
