Guest Post: Unite Sci-Fi Fans Around The World

We are pleased to share a guest blog post from Hugo-winning fanzine editor RiverFlow. 

Hello science fiction fans attending the 2024 World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow. First of all, have you heard of Chinese sci-fi fandom? If so, what examples can you give?

Hugo-winning fanzine
Zero Gravity News.

Science fiction fans in China were excited when Zero Gravity News won the Hugo Award for Best Fanzine last year. See “Introducing Chinese sci-fi fanzine Zero Gravity News” to learn more about the fanzine.

Yes, in fact, there is a very large group of science fiction fans in China, but few people have collected and collated their materials. I have been working on this since 2020, and have written some articles to introduce the collection.

The earliest Chinese Fanzine was born in 1988. In the 1990s, many science fiction fans were employed and writing in their leisure time, but in the 21st century, these contributions were mainly completed by students. Because workers are busy with their lives and families, it is difficult to find time to organize related activities. So I wrote a book, History of Chinese University Science Fiction Association, to introduce Chinese science fiction fans to the rest of the world. The thousands of photos and hundreds of thousands of words are enough to prove the rich history of this group.

The Chinese Science Fiction Fan Association organizes articles, comments and other activities, runs its own Fanzine (I have more than 200 kinds of statistics about this history), and initiates fan organizations (I have more than 350 records of the establishment of student groups and more than 200 social meeting groups). But like most organizations around the world, these organizations have a short life span, and although there are a lot of them, few are longstanding, which I will describe in several subsequent articles.

The magazine you are seeing now is machine translated from the 10th issue of Zero Gravity Newspaper, which includes many young Chinese science fiction fans’ review and understanding of their science fiction experience. How do Chinese science fiction fans discover and learn about science fiction? What did science fiction bring to them? What did they gain? You can read about it in their memories. Because time is limited, only a small number of articles are included, and they are all machine translated, but this is much better than before, so that Chinese science fiction fans are seen, which is important.

At the same time, I am also doing one thing, which is to collect science fiction information and materials from all over the world, translate them into Chinese, and introduce them to Chinese science fiction fans. After I finished my self-summary of Chinese sci-fi fans, I thought I’d look outside. Chinese scholar Sanfeng said in the first issue of World Science Fiction News, a magazine introducing foreign science fiction information in China, “View the world science fiction and build a science fiction world view”, which I think is very reasonable.

At present, I have found 202 articles from 108 countries and organized Chinese science fiction fans to translate them. Now I can say that every continent in the world has a wealth of science fiction conferences, science fiction works, science fiction organizations, science fiction magazines, etc. Most of the other half of countries and regions are either economically poor or have small populations.

In the context of the history of different countries, different languages and peoples will unite with each other/accept foreign languages for historical reasons. You can see the competition between Turkish and Russian in Central Asia, the prevalence of French and Arabic in some African countries, the exchange of Spanish in Latin American countries, and the anger of Southeast Asian countries over the loss of their own cultural traditions. The Dutch and Belgian languages are common, and the former Yugoslavia regularly hosts science fiction conventions to unite fans from several other countries.

The world science fiction center is probably found currently in the United Kingdom and the United States, since so many works are translated into English. Almost all science fiction writers in continental countries are seeking the English publication of their works, eager to be seen by the British and American world and incorporated into the mainstream discourse system.

The question of whether the world’s science fiction center will shift will take a long time to answer, but at this stage, the relationship between English-speaking science fiction and non-English-speaking science fiction is like the relationship between mainstream literature and genre literature, and genre literature is to be absorbed by mainstream literature, and that is the situation. That doesn’t change just because you have a World Science Fiction Convention (which is essentially a gathering of science fiction fans, right?). At best, it gives the authorities some reason to bring together science fiction institutions and science fiction awards that were originally scattered around the world to promote dialogue and cooperation.

In this world, there are many people engaged in science fiction organizations, science fiction conferences, science fiction publishing, science fiction translation, and science fiction research, including in languages other than those that are dominant. But in most cases, unless there is a British-American nationality/an international speaker of English who has connections in the United Kingdom and the United States, it is possible to use their status to make a voice for their own country.

However, after the relevant people step down, the situation may turn to another way, as the old saying goes, maybe this is how the world works, but if each person can leave something in his term of office, I think it will definitely be more and more rich. It should be said that the internationalization of science fiction in non-English speaking countries is currently dominated by established international communicators of British and American English.

The transfer of power over discourse is a long process, which requires writers with enough strength, readers and communities with enough interest, theorists with enough power to subvert the current system, and science fiction activities for writers, readers and scholars to communicate with each other. None of these things is easy.

It’s just that there’s a chain of disdain that seems to be happening all over the world, first of all defining science fiction as a type of children’s literature, and then defining science fiction as secondary literature, so reading a recent comment from a Nepalese science fiction reader on a collection of their own science fiction, it’s not children’s literature, it’s science fiction, I think this kind of reflection is very good. When can science fiction literature really stand up and no longer be subject to contempt, but can be regarded as both adult literature and children’s literature.

Anyway, I hope that Chinese science fiction fans can be more united, but also hope that the world science fiction fans can be more united, there are really many people in the world who agree with science fiction, I hope that we can keep in touch, find each other, in the process of viewing the world science fiction to establish their own science fiction world view.

Have fun in Glasgow!

The Path Of Peace

Image via Goodreads

Given the timelines involved in publishing a novel, there was no way to predict that The Siege of Burning Grass would hit bookshelves at a time when the tensions it explores are playing out on North American campuses.

But Premee Mohamed’s philosophical and nuanced new book, which explores ideas of pacifism and to what degree citizens are responsible for the actions of their governments, is a novel that fits the zeitgeist. It is the right novel to read while contemplating the courage it takes for those with no political authority to speak out against state-sanctioned violence.

“I've said in more than one of my books that if you claim you’re not picking a side, you’ve just picked one: the side of the oppressor,” Mohamed says. “Those students are acting more nobly than anyone I can think of right now.”

The novel follows conscientious objector Aelfret, who has been imprisoned for refusing to take part in a war between his country of Varkal and the Empire of Med’ariz. After years of brutal treatment at the hands of his captors, he’s dragooned into an underhanded scheme to bring an end to the conflict. Having lost a leg during his capture, he’s confined to crutches and accompanied by wasps that tend to his wounds.

Along with a captor-soldier named Qhudur, Aelfret embarks on a journey across battlefields and conquered provinces to reach enemy territory on a secret mission. Throughout, Aelfret’s avowed pacifism is challenged and Qhudur is forced to confront the limits of his war-mongering ideology.

“I think it’s inevitable that no philosophy of any kind has ever had a completely ‘pure’ implementation of its ideals,” Mohamed says. “People are complicated, history is complicated, the physical world complicates things.”

This is Mohamed’s best book on almost every level. Her prose is elevated by subtle rhetorical twists, the world is engaging and distinctive, and Aelfret is likely her most memorable protagonist. While the crippled pacifist’s doubts, epistemological angst, and constant questioning of his own motivations can be occasionally frustrating, it also makes him relatable, believable, and an interesting foil to Qhudur, whose narrow worldview and military training have produced in him an implacable certitude.

“I didn't start off wanting to write a story about pacifism per se,” Mohamed explains. “I wanted to show Alefret (the main character) as someone still learning, still at the start of his educational arc, about pacifism, nonviolence, militarism, and his own relationship to those things based on his personality and history. If he had not been who he was, he would have been a very different pacifist.”

A government policy specialist with degrees in molecular biology and environmental sciences, Mohamed has become well-known as the author of science fiction and fantasy able to weave themes based on ecological challenges into her stories. The Siege of Burning Grass has some of these themes, but the book also revels in weirdness. This is a world in which war is fought with assault Pteranodons, talking birds are used as spies, and in which nurse wasps rend flesh in service of medical experiments.

In some ways, the book could be read as the exact mirror image of Starship Troopers. While many authors have written thinly veiled rebuttals of the controversial classic, they’ve usually been playing in the sandbox that Heinlein built; The Forever War, Old Man’s War, Ender’s Game may all critique Starship Troopers … but they’re still playing with the same toys. Mohamed has rejected the entire paradigm, and consequently is able to tackle the same subjects without being bound by the assumptions that underlie most military SFF. It’s worth remembering that Starship Troopers arrived at a time when Americans were just beginning to grapple with their country’s increasing military involvement in Vietnam, and many of the novels engaging with Heinlein’s classic were informed by campus protests.

The Siege of Burning Grass is a novel that matches its moment, and should inspire discussion, debate, and reflection about the moral responsibilities of citizens. Very few novels this ambitious succeed as fully. This book deserves your consideration for every award for which it is eligible.

Planet of Lysenkoism

Cover Design by Lauren Panepinto
Cover Illustration by Yuko Shimizu
(Image via Orbit Books)

Early in the 20th century, the Soviet Union’s government rejected the theory of natural selection and genetic heredity in favour of Trofim Lysenko’s pseudoscience which proclaimed a Marxist class-oriented evolution. Over the course of two decades, reaching into the 1950s, Russian scientists who disagreed with Lysenkoism were imprisoned — even executed — because their experiments and research provided data which contradicted the party line.

It’s a fact that kept coming to mind as we read Alien Clay, the impressive new novel from Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Set in a distant future in which the entirety of the human race lives under the yoke of a world government called “The Mandate,” the novel centres on exobiologist Arton Daghdev, whose research has led him to dispute orthodox theories about the human species’ place in the cosmos. The Mandate’s mantra — summing up their anthropic principle-driven view of the universe — is that “The universe has a direction, and that direction is us.”

“The Mandate in Alien Clay is the most irredeemably authoritarian State I've ever written about … that phrase ‘The universe has a direction’ conveys a point of view that is phenomenally self-important, this belief that Humanity must kind of be the point of everything,” Tchaikovsky explains. “For the main character — who was a scientist — that phrase is the core of why the Mandate is a personal problem for him.”

There’s a deceptive, corrosive elegance to a well-constructed thought-terminating cliche: “history conforms to a dialectical pattern,” “there is no alternative,” or “make America great again.” All these examples convey a worldview that is served by reducing complex issues to simple, misleading statements that dismiss analysis and intellectual exploration. “The universe has a direction,” fits well into this tradition. This sort of coded language helps reinforce the status quo by shutting down further communication and debate. It is implied that to disagree with the cliche doesn’t even warrant consideration.

Daghdev begins the novel having been put on trial for daring to challenge the central ideological tenet of the Mandate. In the opening chapter, he arrives at an extrasolar penal colony on the planet Kiln, dozens of light years from Earth. It’s a fecund planet filled with riotous, chaotic, life whose biology is utterly unlike anything humanity has previously encountered. An exobiologist by training, Daghdev had long sought to study alien life up close, though preferably under less dangerous conditions. It quickly becomes apparent that Kiln’s ancient and alien artefacts provide a counter narrative of experience that undermines the central myth used by the Mandate to justify its authority.

Robert Jay Lifton coined the term
'thought-terminating cliche' to 
describe how authoritarians
manipulate language.
(Image via Wikipedia)

“Authoritarian dictatorships have this colossal fundamental insecurity to them,” Adrian Tchaikovsky muses. “It doesn’t matter if they have the secret police and all the guns and complete control over people's lives … they feel the need to justify why that situation exists. They need some external Authority to show why they are at the top and why they are allowed to treat other people like they do.”

Much like the Soviet regime’s destructive dismissal of verifiable evidence for gene-based evolution, the Mandate punishes anyone with the temerity to challenge an unscientific worldview that shapes its social policy. This is the most compelling (and painful) theme in the novel, and one that seems particularly relevant at a time when many countries are seeing declines in democracy and a repression of fact-based analysis.

The ecology of Kiln revolves around horizontal gene transfer and complex chains of symbiosis, parasitism, and complex colonies of organisms. At times, it is difficult to wrap one's head around how this ecosystem is supposed to work, though this is a minor quibble, and intellectual puzzles won’t be new to Tchaikovsky’s readership. Kiln is a dangerous planet; all organisms are trying to infect or alter everything with which they come in contact. Consequently, Daghdev spends the novel caught between Scylla and Charybdis; on one side the danger of the planet, and on the other the danger of the authoritarian government and the prison institution that embodies it. This provides an interesting tension, and an excellent way to explore chaos and order.

This is among Tchaikovsky’s most interesting works to date, and also among his most timely. Alien Clay is a parable about the tension between scientific exploration and top-down government control; one imagines that Troyfim Lysenko would have been at home in the Mandate … as would too many of today’s political leaders.