An Alternate History of Chinese Science-Fiction

I am simply not smart or well-read enough to dissect every dermal layer of genius in this Alternate History of Chinese Science Fiction... a "What If?" style post in which a universe of familiar sci-fi classics are written by hoary Chinese writers with strange, alien-sounding names.

Here's Call of Cthulhu:

Liu Hui Wen's "The Call of Cthulhu" (4625). Look, you can poke fun at Liu's style all you want. Anyone can imitate him, in mediocre fashion, by tossing around words like "glabrous" and "foetor." You can point at the decades of bad Liu imitations as having had a deleterious effect on horror writing. But what you can't do is say that there wasn't anything to the stories, or that they weren't very good. As Professor Han Kuang Ning has repeatedly pointed out, there's a lot of good writing--not good prose, good writing, which is different--and solid idea-work in Liu's stories.

More to the point, the meme that started me on this calls for the “most representative and influential” of the decade, which Liu’s work is, and the best known, most representative, and most influential of Liu’s oeuvre is “Call of Cthulhu.” Hell, its famous first line, “the most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to awaken from the sleep of ignorance,” is quoted in the Tsinghua Book of Quotations, and being quoted there means that you've entered the canon.

Inexplicable and remarkable. Worth clicking just for the gorgeous remixes of the novel covers alone. Bruce Sterling says it best: "This is so strangely intricate in its fanboy parodism that one can only stare."

An Alternate History of Chinese Science Fiction [No Fear of the Future]