Veronica Hollinger historicizes the emergent understanding of SF as a “mode” rather than a genre, offering that “mode implies not a kind but a method, a way of getting something done. In [the case of William Gibson], in a way of thinking and speaking about contemporary reality so that SF becomes integrated with other discourses about late-capitalist global-techno-culture” (Hollinger 2014, 140). Borrowing Raymond Williams’s concept of a “structure of feeling” and analysis of the cultural apparatus, Andrew Milner argues that SF should be understood as (a) a form conditioned by relations between social modes, and (b) specifiable material practices within which those relations are enacted (Milner 2012). In a similar vein, John Rieder has argued that SF might be understood in terms of Wittgenstein’s concept of “family resemblance” and Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizomatic assemblage to describe genres in general and SF in particular as a gradually articulated, nebulous assemblage of texts that cannot be reduced to a single historical progenitor or formal type (Rieder 2010). This and other rubrics understand SF variously as a convergence of media, genres, forms, or modes, emphasizing its diffusion and diversity of the objects and modes of cultural production. These works span literary production, fan clubs and other practices of audience participation, film, radio, music, poetry, role-playing games, newspaper comic strips, comic books, and toys. These cultural apparatuses bleed over into political culture at the level of space programs and military defense, emerging religious practices (e.g., scientology), and practices of display evident in museums and world expos (Luckhurst, 10; Telotte, 162–182; Milner 2012, 7). Alongside the expansion of media practices included under the umbrella of SF is an expansion of the analytical frame beyond national borders in recognition of the intensification of global exchange in the culture industry.
Milner argues that SF can be visualized as a distribution of tropes across the media landscape using Bourdieu’s notion of the field of literary and cultural production (Bourdieu 1993). Bourdieu maps literary production as a continuum of profitability vs. artistic license on its horizontal axis, high vs. low cultural status on its vertical axis, and diagonally in terms of its political conservatism. Milner suggests that SF in various media can be identified throughout the field. Having placed SF within the cultural field in general, Milner goes on to argue that a more or less isomorphic map may be used more specifically to illustrate the relationships between various mediated iterations of SF narratives and subgenres (e.g., cyberpunk fiction, art-house cinema, SF criticism) (2011, 394–396; 2012, 42–47).
Critics of modern Chinese literature (see edited collection, Hockx 1999) have shown how Bourdieu’s cultural field can also be used productively in understanding modern Chinese literary production, leading Michel Hockx to suggest that a map of the Chinese field of cultural production include a third axis that accounts for the political capital of a work. Hockx also notes that a China-specific map of mutual relations between “institutions of material and symbolic production” would necessarily entail certain reconfigurations given the different cultural landscape and different historical trajectories (17–19). In like manner, Paola Iovene’s Tales of Futures Past (2014) understands modern Chinese literature as an assemblage of texts, social practices, editorial strategies, and experiences of reading (13–14). In sum, recent reconfigurations of genre theory have led to an approach regarding SF as a selective tradition best understood as a mode of reading and interpretation. At the same time, scholars of modern Chinese culture have applied these same observations of cultural production and genre to understanding their area of research. Without attempting to completely reconfigure the above observations in service of constructing a “cultural SF field with Chinese characteristics,” it should be noted that late Qing literature was in many ways distinguished by an increasingly central role for fiction (as opposed to poetry) and a contestation of whether the classical language or the modern vernacular best suited the mode. To borrow a scientific (or SF) metaphor, we might add to our three-dimensional figure—depicting symbolic, political, and economic capital—a fourth dimension, permitting us to see the ways that individual elements of the cultural field shifted over time.
Almost immediately after the first Sino-Japanese War, fiction came to be understood as a key battleground in the quest for reform (Huters 1988, 262). For a number of late Qing intellectuals, the vernacular novel was a new form that incorporated a wide variety of new ideas and narrative techniques, a form that could reach a broader audience and make that audience aware of the severity of the crisis China faced (Huters 2005, 100–120).3 SF was understood as one of a number of genres that, through the literary form of the new novel, could help to espouse lasting social change. This was in part a consequence of the wide range of issues that authors sought to address in their work. Characters travel both domestically and abroad, encounter natural, supernatural, and technological anomalies, have extended dialogues on political thought (that more closely resemble manifestos than fiction), meet great philosophers of Eastern and Western traditions, and often participate in any of the above activities in a dream. Fiction monthlies often included extended treatises on the history of civilization, or the rise of the Western world. Many instances of these works were loose translations of unattributed Western and Japanese works. The generic and epistemological pluralism seen in the pages of late Qing fiction is a reflection of the social and cultural hybridity of China’s burgeoning urban, semicolonial centers, and of the multitudinous problems and solutions that late Qing intellectuals grappled with in their writings.
The turmoil engendered by the presence of foreign material and intellectual culture widened the cracks in the foundations of Chinese society through which new ideas flooded in. Culturally hybrid spaces such as Shanghai gave birth to a new worldview that attempted to reconcile radically different approaches to the pursuit of knowledge and government. Literature was no exception. The late Qing intellectual “atmosphere of crisis and utopian hope” (Huters 2005, 132) heralded the introduction of new literary forms and genres. The enthusiasm for the “new novel” represents a rare point of unity in the otherwise politically fractious intellectual atmosphere of early twentieth-century China. Probably the clearest justification for the new focus of the novel was the idea that the form could accommodate two urgent requirements: a larger audience for writing, and the potential to effectively represent to this larger audience the full dimensions of the crisis China faced (Huters 2005, 24–25; 1988, 261). This vision of literary purpose would be adopted by May Fourth literati, and its echoes continue to reverberate in the contemporary period.
Geographically, Milner also considers the applicability of world systems theory in understanding the development of SF, applying Franco Moretti’s concept of core, periphery, and semi-periphery developed in “Conjectures on World Literature” and Atlas of the European Novel to the development of SF. Milner argues that “what is true for the novel in general is also true for SF. Conceived in England and France, at the core of the nineteenth-century world literary system (Shelley, Bulwer-Lytton and, above all, Verne and Wells), it continued in both countries throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries” (Milner 2012, 165). Milner describes a largely European semi-periphery, arguing that the United States and Japan transformed from semi-peripheral to core SF countries during the twentieth century. The global periphery of Milner’s selective tradition consists of those countries that predominately translated works from core countries into their target languages, and which did not contribute to the global tradition. This parallels the emergence of Sinophone studies, a mode of analysis that understands Chinese-language cultural production as the product of core-periphery relationships betwixt and between a number of local and global empires (Shih 2007; Shih, Bernards, and Tsai 2013).
These approaches help demonstrate that SF is much more than any single Platonic prototype, neatly bound within the borders of a national literary tradition. All reflect a turn toward a historical approach to genre that understands the literary field as the product of global relations of economic and political power. John Rieder observes that “sf’s identity is a differentially articulated position in an historical and mutable field of genres,” and that furthermore SF fits