Spicy Gwailo Stories
Somebody give Jess Nevins a Sidewise Award. Like, now. On the spot.
Fanqi Mieville’s Mengzi Street Station (4698). Mengzi Street Station may be a controversial choice. Mieville seems to have as many detractors, or at least readers who are unable to derive any enjoyment from his work, as devotees. But Mieville is the leading figure in what might be called the New Decadence. It’s hardly a movement — there’s no agenda or even particular, outspoken proponents ala the New Mundane movement — but there are any number of authors who are working in this mode, from Lu Juan Yu and his City Impenetrable stories, to Wei Shi Tian and her superb “Palimpset,” to Tong Hang Ling and his robbed-of-the-ZGFA Vellum, and they all followed Mieville. Similarly, Mengzi Street Station’s grotesque New Crobuzon began the trend in portraying cities as twisted, nightmarish iterations of Shanghai. (All cyberpunk cities can be said to be copies of Kong Wang Lian’s GuangHuang sprawl or his Beijing; all decadent cities are copies of Mieville’s New Crobuzon). And Mengzi Street Station led the way in showing readers and authors that fantasy could be more than the nth copy of Romance of the Three Kingdoms or Water Margin.
I don’t think anyone needs to write an alternate history of science fiction now ever again.
May 19th, 2007 at 6:50 am
Huh. Actually this sort of annoyed me. Trying to puzzle out why. I guess the ratio of actual-opinions-on-regular-SF-history-with-names-modified to daring-leaps-of-reimagining was way too high. What is the point of having a Chinese-dominated world and skiffy history if it turns out to be precisely the same as the one we’ve got already.
Of course I may just have missed all the sinological cleverness.
But I rather preferred the Victor Hugo awards introduction.
May 19th, 2007 at 12:56 pm
What is the point… if it turns out to be precisely the same as the one we’ve got already.
Tell it to Pierre Menard.
May 19th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
This reminds me of the discussion Ben and I had in the comments thread of this post.
May 19th, 2007 at 8:29 pm
Except that in the previous discussion you were both basically right by the time you got to the bottom. Whereas in this case Ben is simply missing/mistaking the point of the exercise.
May 20th, 2007 at 2:24 am
Or just saying, “you’re boring me, talk about this instead!” (It wouldn’t be the first time.)
May 20th, 2007 at 7:37 am
No, I don’t think so… I’ll let him speak for himself, obviously, but my read on Benjamin’s comment is that he is mistaking Nevins’ post for alternate history. When it is in fact functioning as something a lot closer to satire.
(If it were NOT satire, then yes: I would also be feeling somewhat irritable about the thin veneer of Mandarin-colored paint slapped over a blatantly white ethnic history. And while I was at it, I probably would take Nevins to town for his complete lack of female authors… however, I’m currently reading that parenthetical disclaimer as a big blinky road sign announcing “SATIRE, NEXT 2 MILES.”)
May 20th, 2007 at 7:37 pm
I would also say that length has a lot to do with it. This is witty and fun at its current length. At 9,000 words, it would be deadly. I’m afraid I read it as a delightful, well developed bit of whimsy and found that there were just enough bits of underlying Chinese culture–that I caught and I’m not really very sharp on Chinese culture–to make it more than just the names changed. (Chinese opera has a great judge who is just, and to see a version of him turned into Sherlock Holmes–well, that was delgihtful, you know?)
May 20th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
Yeah, I was only chuckling till I got to “Judge Bao Begs To Differ”.
May 21st, 2007 at 7:20 pm
That was the one bit that seemed like an interesting mashup, but I hadn’t heard of Judge Bao, so didn’t grab me, alas.
I am willing to be educated though. Is it in fact the sinological fun that I am missing? Or is the satire trenchant as a satire of SF history?
Anyway, thank you, Jackie, for linking to a discussion where I sounded more interesting and less petulant than I do in this one.
(I was going to say that I hadn’t missed the irony and mistaken it for AH, but rather, as David implied, was banging my rattle on the ground and demanding we “talk about this instead!” However it occurs to me that I *did* actually miss the satirical import of David’s comment “I don’t think anyone needs to write an alternate history of science fiction now ever again”…)
May 22nd, 2007 at 4:51 pm
Yeah, I’ll take credit for what Ted said. No problem.
Ben, I think I saw you throwing around the term “hard alternate history” at one point. In which case, maybe what I should have said is that you were mistaking Nevins’ post for “hard” AH. I mean, the satire certainly uses some of the techniques/assumptions of AH to accomplish its satirical business…. maybe even the assumption that the reader knows about AH. But it’s definitely not “hard” AH.
But yeah. Perhaps we’re just getting different bits of sinological (argh, I keep wanting to write “sinusoidal”) fun out of it? (I didn’t know about Judge Bao, but “Fanqi Mieville” gave me giggle fits.)
And ditto on what Maureen said about word count.
Tell you what: let’s argue about this in a day or two. Just, um, remind me to knock down a double espresso a quarter hour beforehand, or I won’t be able to keep up.
May 22nd, 2007 at 7:34 pm
Ack! I mean thank you Ted!
Maybe I should not blog comment when my brain is in the “off” position?