Book Review: Celestial Empire: The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction by Nathaniel Isaacson

Nathaniel Isaacson’s Celestial Empire is a long-awaited and very necessary work on a neglected area of China’s literary history. As he states, “what follows is meant to demonstrate that Chinese cultural studies and SF studies have much to offer each other” (27). For Isaacson, the “relationship between SF and Orientalist discourse is a defining feature of the genre in early twentieth-century China” (1). His aim is to show how Chinese science fiction of this period reflected the political and cultural problems that China faced at the historical moment when Western science was being translated into the Chinese context. As he argues, “in the context of the colonial threat, a profound pessimism emerged about China’s fate as a nation, and this pessimism permeates discourses on science and works of SF from this period” (1). Most interestingly, Isaacson establishes early on that “‘science fiction’ was arguably a concrete publishing category in China before it was in the West, even as it predominately featured translations of Western works”; the collocation of the two terms, borrowed from Japanese, was introduced very early in the twentieth century. In fact, the term “began to appear regularly as a literary genre category associated with specific stories in publications in China (c.1904) before it did in the English-language press” (7)