or a while I thought I was the wrong Prince, on the wrong side of the hedge, half-dead from thorns and a long way from snatching Beauty. I was part way through reading The City Trilogy, which may be the first Chinese SF novel to be translated into English and given us to read, and which may be—almost certainly for that reason—the most profoundly estranging SF text I have ever encountered; though there are lots of laughs, some of them boffo. But even with the laughs, partway through this vast book (400 big pages) I almost stopped, because reading it really did feel a bit like prying one's way through thorns, especially in the middle reaches of the middle volume, where useless acts of violence and warfare piled upon useless acts of violence and warfare like outtakes from Akira Kurosawa's great King Lear film Ran (1985), also released as Chaos. But maybe it was the thought of Kurosawa that kept me going: the knowledge that in Ran the utter feckless inutility of violence—of family against family, dynasty against dynasty, foul-cesspit nation state against foul-cesspit nation state—amounts in the end to an absolute epiphany of inutility, a tragically exalted paean to the uselessness of human life. Maybe it was something like that. Whatever the reason, this Prince kept prying away, and did, in the end, find Beauty.
It may be possible to suggest a few routes through the hedge. The City Trilogy was originally published in Taiwan as three separate but closely linked novels: Five Jade Disks (1984), Defenders of the Dragon City (1986) and Tale of a Feather (1991). The author, Chang Hsi-Kuo, we are told, is the dominant SF author in Taiwan; he is also, we are told, a professor of computer science, and director of the Center for Parallel, Distributed, and Intelligent Systems at the University of Pittsburgh: this is important.
The translation, by John Balcom, reads very smoothly in English, and its degree of adherence to the original may be deemed adequate—The City Trilogy appears from Columbia University Press as part of a list of Taiwanese literature in translation, under the professional supervision of an expert editorial board. Our difficulties do, however, begin with John Balcom, whose introduction to the volume starts a few hares it might be best to dodge, and dodges a few it might be best to chase down.
Estrangement from the city of SF
The main obfuscation arises from Balcom's entirely academic understanding of the nature of SF, which he defines exclusively in accordance with the critic Darko Suvin's first definition of science fiction (from a 1979 book) as "a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition ...", a definition lots of SF critics (me included) have balked at, because it describes the work of European non-genre SF writers like Stanislaw Lem an awful lot better than it describes 95 percent of the English-language SF most of us read all the time, and deal with, and love; because, in fact, it attempts to define that 95 percent as not really being SF at all; and because it doesn't say anything about how SF stories are actually told. Balcom ignores Suvin's later iteration of his formula, which incorporates the concept of a "novum," by which he means something like something new in the setting of the tale. It is an understanding of how SF works that might have helped him better understand Chang's extraordinary novum of a novel, but Balcom ignores the later, wiser Suvin almost certainly because he is ignorant—not only of the later, wiser Suvin, but of the history and theory of SF as a whole.
All of which has one thorny consequence: it causes John Balcom to miss the point of the book he has translated. The City Trilogy is a fable of Chinese history, translated into another planet. As Balcom does indicate, it incorporates various modes of story traditional to China—the mode most visible to Western eyes being, almost certainly, the martial-arts tale, with its brotherhoods unto death, its decalcomania and slogan-chanting, its humorlessness, its convulsions of political intrigue, its obsession with abstract justice—though readers may also be reminded, whether or not through an ignorance of Asian literatures, of Japanese models as well. Two come to my mind: Kurosawa, obviously, and The Water Margin, a 1975 TV series based in fact on a Chinese model: the 14th-century assemblage of traditional tales known as Shui Hu Chuan, which was translated by Pearl Buck as All Men Are Brothers (1933). What Balcom seems absolutely to miss is the double nature of the novum in all of this. For Western readers, the novum is the strangeness of the world as seen through the lens of SF, for that world is unlike any world any Western SF reader has ever encountered before. For Taiwanese readers, the novum is almost certainly the strangeness of SF as a mode of telling that world. In both cases, the novum lies not in the substance of the tale—because anyone familiar with any Eastern adventure saga will follow that tale without any difficulty at all—but in the way it is told.
We are on the Huhui planet, on the outskirts of one of several "galaxies" dominated by the evil Shan. (If Chang, a fully numerate high-level professional teacher and scientist, meant to refer to galaxies here rather than to solar systems, then he was playing some unparsable game with his original audience; but Balcom gives us no hint that something playful might have been intended, and the translation seems simply ignorant of any difference between a trillion stars and ten.) Huhui seems to have been visited, aeons earlier, by humans, for the dominant race on the planet seems to be human of Chinese stock; most of them live in the central city of Sunlon. Other species—all somehow derived from the original human visitors—include the chu people, telepath historians with faces at the tops of their heads; the centaurlike Leopard folk; the three-eye griffinesque Serpent folk; and the birdlike Feathered folk. The Gaiwenese, migrants from a lost planet, also inhabit Huhui, working as traders and spies. The evil Shan, who are not quite human but nearly, rule Huhui, whose great purple sun expands almost daily into heat death (again, Chang will have known very well that he is absurdly compressing the time span of the death of a sun; but again there's no sense Balcom has a clue). The peoples of Huhui, who mostly belong to one martial brotherhood or another, claim to have had enough of the evil Shan (no real evidence of the viciousness of the Shan is presented) and revolt.
That revolt occupies most of The City Trilogy, and by the end of the third novel the human culture of Huhui has been decimated, the central, deeply beloved city of Sunlon is burning, and almost all the characters whose adventures we've followed are dead—with the exception of one female protagonist, Miss Qi, who does little but observe carnage and weep, and one comic Gaiwenese, whose race has now perished, and a telepathic chu person, ditto. Although the Shan live in a vast interstellar spaceship, which is parked at the heart of Sunlon, and which is capable of vaporizing the vast city in an instant, they seem curiously ineffectual throughout—and are indeed invisible throughout the middle of the text, which is given over to dispiriting genocidal spats amongst the various Huhuan victors of the initial phase of the revolt.
Weapons—other than the unused (and quite possibly, dare one say it, nonexistent) WMDs of the Shan—include swords and lasers, all the jumble of paraphernalia typical of martial-arts movies. Little, however, is described directly, though almost every action, individual or strategic, is discussed at length in terms of Huhuan philosophy. Acts of "singular awareness" are more likely to succeed than acts entered upon unthinkingly: but singular awareness, in the end, cuts no ice. By the end of the novel, during which the cast has traversed the whole of the populated regions of the planet, nothing is left but sand rain (most of the planet is desert, and every night it rains sand) and burning.
Everything new is new again
As an enterprise, then, The City Trilogy is a tale of profound desolation; a chaos generated out of philosophy and greed and accident and old age and entropy. It is, or should be, utterly devastating—and there are moments toward the close of things when the reader is indeed gripped by a sudden presentness of the awful fate of being human in a world told wrong. But this wrongness of the telling of the world—which Chang conveys through his
use of SF modes to utterly estrange that telling from any comfort we might derive from being able to predict the gross outcome of events—is also the salvation of the novel, and the source of many of the genuinely good jokes that permeate the text.
More importantly in the end, it is through that distorted SF lens that we are able to get some grasp of the true aliens on the Huhui planet, or on any other planet in our ken. The aliens of The City Trilogy are, of course, us. The modes of SF—transmuted through exceedingly sophisticated games of genre that Chang seems to understand far more intimately than does his translator—are the spectacles through which we see ourselves.
The whole span of Huhuan life has been understood—by chu telepath historian philosophers, and by human visitors from Earth, who arrive by time machine and take notes—as exemplary. Life on Huhui has been lived according to precept. In the end, however, history itself has foundered. Flaws in the structure of Time itself, which Chang introduces with a casualness that once again reveals a deep cavalier knowledge of SF, mirror the chaos in the heart of each dying citizen of Huhui. The City Trilogy is gimmicky, repetitive, jokey, deadpan. It is also inexorable. It is new eyes. It makes SF seem new. It makes us see new. It makes the world, after so many tired visions of our beleaguered planet have bit the dust, seem seeable again.
