It was amazing, and it was such a startling, yet “obvious-in-hindsight” way of packaging the potential isolation imposed by the sheer scale of the universe. The sense of dread, loss, and ultimately hope was almost overwhelming. I feel lucky to be alive at a time when I can hear on a website about a book written in China, find a digital copy of the whole trilogy professionally translated, and then discuss the experience on another site full of like-minded people.

This is one of the reasons I devoured the trilogy and started looking for more: a whole different set of expectations and norms that are subtly different. I think scifi audiences might be primed for that?

I hate that story so much. It’s practically the platonic ideal of engineer written fiction without the tiniest patina of knowledge of social science. A story about monstrous people and three worlds occupying one space over the course of a day in fantasy, good. As something vaguely purporting to be a plausible depiction of a possible reality it is absolute garbage. It makes no sense on a political, sociological or economic level. The machinery described is insanely complex and would be very, very expensive and all to get a tiny bit more use out of space when you could do as well by building skyscrapers, or going underground, or expanding the city. Beijing is big but there’s plenty of flat land to expand around it.

If you can turn off all knowledge of how things work and just look at the human story of love, loss and sacrifice the translation and writing is excellent.

Rabbit hole: one of the acknowledged magazine supporters is the creator of a verbless language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kēlen

(4 or 5 clicks and a search/name check, must get a grip ...)

I don't know if you read the article, but the investment in science fiction is state sponsored:

> A big clue comes from the author Neil Gaiman’s collection of non-fiction essays, The View from the Cheap Seats, where he relates an anecdote from the time he attended the 2007 China SF/Fantasy Conference in Chengdu:

> “A few years ago, in 2007, I went to China for the first-ever, I believe, state-sponsored science fiction convention, and at some point I remember talking to a party official who was there and I said, ‘Up until now I have read in Locus that your lot disapprove of science fiction and you disapprove of science fiction conventions and these things have not been deliberately encouraged. What’s changed? Why did you permit this thing? Why are we here?’

> ‘And he said, ‘Oh you know for years, we’ve been making wonderful things. We make your iPods. We make phones. We make them better than anybody else, but we don’t come up with any of these ideas. So we went on a tour of America talking to people at Microsoft, at Google, at Apple, and we asked them a lot of questions about themselves, just the people working there. And we discovered they all read science fiction… so we think maybe it’s a good thing.”

> The more things change, the more they remain the same. Lu Xun in 1903 had written that ‘science fiction could play a crucial role in the advancement of the Chinese nation’ and 104 years later, the purpose of the 2007 Chengdu SF/F Conference seems to have been no different for it was described as ‘an ambitious Chinese effort designed to inspire public creativity toward future scientific and technological development as well as promote national insight for scientific exploration’. A laudable step towards sparking the imagination and fostering innovation, but the state support of science fiction is also about advancing China’s soft power. As the writer Chen Quifan said in a speech (co-written by the organisers) at the eighth Chinese Nebula Awards in November 2017, saying that the purpose of Chinese science fiction was to, “grasp what General Secretary Xi has put forward, and advance the establishment of the power of the international spread of the culture of socialism with Chinese characteristics, in order to tell the China story.”

Still plenty heavy though. Infamously, one of Strugatsky's books was censored because it described an alien totalitarian society ruled by "The Unknown Fathers"; the censors demanded that the label be changed, among other things. Then there was Efremov, who had trouble publishing some of his stuff at all, despite it being heavily ideologically communist.

the official party line is that the Cultural Revolution caused "the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the country, and the people since the founding of the People's Republic". many Communist party leaders suffered horribly at the hands of the Red Guards.

criticizing Mao is pretty dangerous but as far as I can tell it's pretty safe to criticize the Cultural Revolution.

Maybe the primacy of individualism/freedoms as the only path to collective prosperity? Like, what if the Chinese model really is the best way to run a country (not an endorsement, btw)?

Not "taboo," persay, but it's something thing that's not really seriously considered by most westerners (not the ones I know, at least).

The ones we may not realise are worth talking about.

Just because this new wave of non-Western science fiction has issues, this doesn't mean it cannot contribute some novel richness to a genre that has so far been dominated by white Westerners.

Innovation doesn't lie in perfect solutions, and that's especially true for art.

I found western science fictions tends to promote heroism in some way, and whatever obstacle the main character faces, they fight off their enemies in the end. Chinese novels indeed feel different in many ways.

As a westerner, I'm not the right person to ask.

Can you think of a Western science fiction novel that portrays eugenics in a positive light?

Sterling’s Shapers come to mind, but it’s not common.

An Anti-Enlightenment message would be one. There's a lot to unpack there.

Perhaps we have fewer children to make our ongoing existence sustainable.