Monster Brains Showcases Postwar German Science Fiction Covers

Over at the very cool Monster Brains blog, Aeron Alfrey has a gallery of covers from the old postwar German science fiction publications Utopia (which came out in magazine format and in book format over a number of years in the 1950s and 1960s).

The thought that came to my mind while scanning some of the lurid covers was that there were so many of them that featured stories by American writers. Nothing inherently wrong about that, of course. American SF was at one of its peaks during the postwar period, as was aggressive American promotion of its culture around the world.

But it brings to mind something I heard once about Japanese science fiction, in which there is seldom a story by Japanese writers in which it is the Japanese who are leading a spacecraft or a space mission. It was always a united international effort or it was led by another country.

In Germany, the longest-running science-fiction franchise (and perhaps the longest-running SF franchise anywhere in the world) is the pulp series Perry Rhodan, which is still going strong with magazines and books and multimedia (including an oft-promised new film). There's no way I could summarize in one sentence a series that has run for more than 40 years, but here's the pertinent information: It stars an astronaut from Earth who gets in all sorts of adventures in time and space; that hero, Perry Rhodan, is an American astronaut.

If you looked at German science fiction from before the war, you see a different situation, especially if you go back to the fertile time period before the first world war, where German writers such as Kurd Lasswitz were producing some groundbreaking science fiction, such as Two Planets.

On the other hand, the interwar period is kind of a different and difficult situation, at least in print. If you're up for an at-times-academic book on a fascinating subject, I suggest you check out Peter S. Fisher's Fantasy and Politics: Visions of the Future in the Weimar Republic (University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), which shows how much interwar German SF was created to serve horrid racial and political revenge fantasies that make Hitler's eventual crimes seem in the spirit of the moment.

Naturally, I think we're all glad that the interwar nightmares of German science fiction are no more. But I do think we're poorer for losing the brave and humane writing of the Lasswitz generation. I for one get sick of Americans leading every space trip, sick of English-speaking people who look like you see them at Wal-Mart being the same ones establishing space colonies or dealing with aliens. Science fiction is a genre that deals with widening people's experiences and minds, and they should certainly be able to deal with a truly mixed cast of characters, or an SF story from a truly Chinese point of view.

These Utopia covers on Monster Brains are from the decade or two right after World War II. But the situation has not changed dramatically today. Unfortunately. The Germans are poorer for the inability to punch its considerable weight in the SF market. American readers are poorer for not getting other viewpoints. And science fiction as a genre is poorer for not living up to its potential.

Socially Relevant Science Fiction in China: The Prosperous Time: China 2013

I wouldn't want to be author Chen Guanzhong when the Chinese government comes knocking at his door, but for now I think everyone who's interested in China developing into a prosperous and free country would be interested in this article from Foreign Policy.

Writer Xujun Eberlein describes the book The Prosperous Time: China 2013, which is a pretty rough critique of the Chinese communist political system and the people's acquiescence and complicity in the authoritarian system. A rare social science-fiction story in a country where SF tends to shy away from commenting on political matters, The Prosperous Time was first published in Hong Kong and then offered by the offer free of charge to mainland readers.

It's of interest to anyone concerned with Chinese science fiction, which has had a turbulent century or so, notes Eberlein – and it continues to be turbulent, as recent turmoil at its leading SF magazine has shown.

China's New Super-Bus. Or, Why Isn't America Building the Future Anymore?

In her landmark science-fiction novel China Mountain Zhang, writer Maureen F. McHugh takes her young hero to China, where he rides a fantastic public bus that assembles and disassembles its separated cars depending on their individual destinations. When they're all together as one, they make up a large, multi-car, double-decker bus, but each car will go soaring off on its own route, or will join up with the rest of the bus as their routes merge.

From my sloppy description, that might be hard to imagine. I heartily recommend McHugh's very good book to you if you want to get her idea in better form. But the key point is that in the book, China has become the leading power in the world, the United States reduced to a near vassal-like status. All of the innovation and energy in the world comes from China.

I think it would be overstating things to say that that's becoming the situation today. But when I heard about proposals for a Chinese super-bus that would coast over other vehicles on the road, I thought, Isn't that the kind of so-crazy-it-might-work futuristic idea that America is supposed to create? Or Germany created before it went kablooey last century?

When I lived in Chicago a decade ago, the city buses were being fitted with technology that would let them prolong a green light if they were approaching an intersection. This was expected to speed up bus service, where buses were averaging something like a mere 13 mph in city traffic.

Now watch the video below for an illustration of the Chinese concept for speeding up urban transportation. The video is in Chinese, but even those of us who don't know Mandarin or Cantonese can still get the gist of the idea from the video. (If the embedded video doesn't work, you can watch it here.)



China Mountain Zhang aside, China's ascendancy to the pinnacle of world power is not likely in the near future, but it is rapidly ascending to the height of economic power. This year it became the number-one user of energy on the planet, outdoing even us profligate energy-wasters in America. Last year it overtook Germany as the world's third-largest economy, and this year it is claiming to have supplanted Japan as the world's second-largest economy, though many people are disputing that claim. (Not a big deal if it's wrong, because it'll be true soon enough.)

I'm not afraid of a wealthy and powerful China. I would prefer it be a democratic and free China, rather than the authoritarian and sometimes brutal China that it is. But it is no longer a Maoist China, thank god, and its rise – along with India's – will help counterbalance the threat of violent extremism in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Also, China is unlikely to supplant America as the world's most influential and powerful nation any time soon. Or possibly any time. China faces incredible internal pressures from economic dislocations, income disparities that surpass an American Republican's wildest dreams, and widespread corrupt officials, and it's surrounded by often pliant but also nervous neighboring nations. No country rises so far without tremendous disruptions. The United States tore itself in two with its civil war.  England went through horrific civil wars and persecutions. France invented modern state terror and marauded across Europe. Germany lost control of its crazies and thereby lost control of its civilization. Japan turned itself over to brutal imperialist leaders who left mass murder in their wake. And the list goes on. I hate to say it, because I'd much rather see eternal peace and freedom and prosperity, but China is just as likely to hit the wall of its internal contradictions at some point. We can only hope it comes out of it freer and more peaceful than it came out of the horrors of the Maoist period.

But until that happens, we've got the possibility of giant buses soaring along Chinese streets. America should be building those, or dreaming those dreams. Instead, we're busy entertaining our populist crazies, we're spending ourselves into long-term oblivion (and no, I don't mean the stimulus spending, that's a different, temporary, and necessary profligacy), and we're fighting wars we should be handling differently.

I want the buses.

Happy Result at Chinese Science Fiction Magazine Science Fiction World?

There's an update on the turmoil at Chinese SF magazine Science Fiction World. As reported in an earlier blog post, the whole staff of that magazine -- the world's largest science-fiction magazine -- had demanded that the magazine's leader leave. They were protesting his moves such as requiring the staff (and not professional freelancers) write the stories in the magazine and create the art, and replacing the magazine's stunning cover art with advertisements.

Science Fiction Blog reports that the leader in question was fired at the beginning of this month. The writer notes that such a unified act by the staff of resisting an authority is rare in China.

For a more in-depth report, read the World SF News Blog.