By Angus Stewart

I first met Lyu Guangzhao in Leeds, England. We were the two early birds in the room that would host the initial mingling session for a fairly low-key symposium on Chinese genre fiction. Sci-fi, crime, wuxia, and web novels were the topics for the weekend. Lyu shared that he wasn’t strictly a scholar of Chinese sci-fi: he was working on a PhD that compared the ongoing “boom” in Chinese sci-fi with the new wave of British sci-fi that started in the nineties and fizzled out in the noughties. Those studies are now complete, and were published as The Boom & The Boom: Historical Rupture and Political Economy in Contemporary British and Chinese Science Fiction.

Lyu’s first contact with science fiction was a children’s edition of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (which itself parallels another first contact: Verne was one of the first science fiction writers to reach late Qing Dynasty China, via Russian and Japanese translations). From there, he was hooked, and eventually penned his undergraduate thesis on the English translation of The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. Next came a master’s thesis comparing “big Liu” with Arthur C. Clarke.

In the interview below, I question Guangzhao about what followed: his study of the two “booms” and the strange sociopolitical resonances that make them, arguably, “twins.”

Angus Stewart: Are there many scholarly works on Chinese sci-fi?

Lyu Guangzhao: While digging through the research for my PhD, I realized that, as of 2017, there were very few English-language academic studies on Chinese sf. There were a few key texts, like Wu Dingbo’s 1989 introduction to Science Fiction from China, the 2013 Science Fiction Studies special issue, and some brilliant work by scholars like Mingwei Song and Hua Li, but overall, it was still a pretty underdeveloped field. I thought, well, maybe I can actually contribute something here. Of course, I wasn’t the only one thinking that. Since then, more and more researchers have jumped into the field, and the work being done now is incredibly exciting. On the one hand, that’s amazing—it’s energizing to be part of such a growing conversation—but on the other hand, it’s also a little intimidating. I often find myself wondering: What’s the unique value of my research? What am I really adding to the mix?

Stewart: How did you find a way to contribute?

Lyu: I circled back to a lens I used during my undergraduate studies: looking at broader historical and social transformations. That’s how I ended up framing my PhD: using science fiction as a kind of window into the shifting cultural discourses in China and the UK since the 1990s. The deeper I got into it, the more convinced I became that we can’t really study science fiction in a vacuum. We need to consider its historical context, and we also need to ask bigger questions. Like, what does studying “Chinese science fiction” actually tell us about China? What can “British science fiction” tell us about Britain? And when we talk about things like the Golden Age, the New Wave, or Cyberpunk, are we also thinking about the histories and cultural forces behind those movements? These are what I tried to answer in The Boom & The Boom.

Stewart: So what are the two booms?

Lyu: The two “booms” in my title refer to what’s often called the British SF Boom and the Chinese SF New Wave. Both of these started around the late 1980s and early 1990s, and both marked a major resurgence of science fiction writing, but in very different ways, and in very different contexts.

In the UK, the British SF Boom came as a response to the neoliberal shift under Thatcher. Writers like Iain M. Banks, Ken MacLeod, Gwyneth Jones, and China Miéville used science fiction as a space to push back: imagining post-capitalist futures, critiquing inequality, and challenging the dominant ideology. What’s really interesting is that sci-fi, unlike a lot of other cultural forms, wasn’t fully absorbed into the state-sponsored or commercialized cultural machine. It managed to stay just under the radar—one of the few forms of popular culture at the time that wasn’t taken over by neoliberal cultural politics. That gave it room to develop a strong leftist, even utopian voice.

On the other hand, the Chinese SF New Wave—or the Chinese SF Boom as I would call it— grew out of a totally different environment. In the 1990s, as China shifted toward a market economy, the old top-down Enlightenment-style discourse—dominated by intellectual elites—started to lose its influence. What replaced it was a more commercially driven, mass-oriented culture. Chinese science fiction re-emerged in this new landscape, not as a tool of elite ideology, but more as a bottom-up response to it. Writers like Liu Cixin, Han Song, and Chen Qiufan began using SF to explore the psychological and social impacts of this massive transformation—things like technological anxiety, identity crisis, and the feeling of dislocation in a rapidly changing society.

What’s really fascinating is that, even though these two movements were happening at the same time, they barely acknowledged each other. They were like parallel worlds, thus the title The Boom & The Boom, a parody of Miéville’s The City & The City in which two cities are located in the same place but not aware of the co-existence of the other. My work tries to bring them into the same frame, to ask: what can we learn by reading them side by side? Not to flatten their differences, but to see how sci-fi in both contexts reflects and resists the global forces reshaping the late 20th century.

Stewart: What new frontier(s) is this research heading into?

Lyu: The ultimate goal of The Boom & The Boom is to suggest a different way of thinking about comparative literature and world literature. Instead of tracing influence, I focus on “resonance”: how Chinese and British science fiction, though developed separately, respond to parallel global conditions with striking synchronicity.

Both the British SF Boom and the Chinese SF New Wave emerged out of social rupture: Thatcherite neoliberalism on one hand, post-socialist transformation on the other. In both contexts, science fiction became a tool not for escapism, but for confronting new realities: broken institutions, fragmented identities, ecological anxiety, and a future that felt increasingly unstable. These weren’t just local responses: they were part of a shared planetary condition.

This is where I draw on Timothy Morton’s idea of the hyperobject. Like climate change, world science fiction can be seen as a kind of hyperobject: vast, scattered, and impossible to grasp from a single vantage point. We encounter only fragments, shaped by language, culture, and politics. British and Chinese SF don’t mirror each other, but they each illuminate different aspects of this larger, global reality. In contrast to David Damrosch’s vision of world literature as works that circulate through translation, I suggest that translation alone isn’t enough. His “elliptical refraction” doesn’t guarantee understanding. Often, translated works are filtered through expectations of “Chineseness” or exotic difference. That reinforces a center-periphery model, where non-Western texts are valued for how they satisfy Western curiosities.

So rather than asking whether a work “represents” a culture or meets the standards of world literature, we should ask what questions it’s posing about our shared world. In that sense, Chinese and British SF both challenge the global order, not by aligning with a universal standard, but by showing how different local experiences can resonate across borders. That kind of resonance is more revealing than influence, and more powerful than inclusion. It’s what makes science fiction essential to imagining the future, and to rethinking world literature from the ground up.

Stewart: Do you want to topple any particular assumptions?

Lyu: Yes. I think one key assumption I want to challenge is the idea that national allegory only applies to so-called “Third World” literatures. Fredric Jameson’s early formulation—that all third-world texts are necessarily allegorical of the nation—has been heavily criticized for reducing diverse narratives to a single political reading. But what I’m suggesting in The Boom & The Boom is that this same allegorical function operates in “First World” science fiction, too, and perhaps especially so. The book takes the view that all literature, especially science fiction, carries with it a kind of national allegorical charge, in the sense that it reflects the position of a given society within the shifting structures of global capitalism. So when we read British or Chinese SF, we’re not just reading speculative futures or imagined worlds—we’re also encountering narratives deeply rooted in historical, political, and economic contexts.

For instance, Iain M. Banks’s Culture series imagines a post-scarcity utopia, but that vision can also be read as a reflection on Britain’s post-imperial identity and its desire to reimagine a role in a world where its former geopolitical power has faded. Similarly, Hao Jingfang’s Vagabonds sets up a utopia-dystopia dialectic that mirrors the social contradictions of China after the decades of “Reform and Opening-up.” These texts aren’t just about “the future”; they’re also about how nations negotiate their place in a global order marked by inequality, dependency, and technological change.

So, in a way, I’m pushing back against two assumptions: first, that national allegory only belongs to the Global South; and second, that speculative fiction, especially in the Global North, can be “universal” or ideologically neutral.

In reality, both “First World” and “Third World” texts use science fiction to negotiate historical traumas, future anxieties, and shifting national identities. And in doing so, they don’t just represent national concerns. These stories reflect how nations, individuals, and cultures are positioned—and often constrained—within the larger systems of global capitalism and technological modernity.

Stewart: A major parallel in the UK and China of the novels you analyze is a socioeconomic move away from socialism and toward capitalism. So where did that leave the readers, the writers, and the publishers?

Lyu: I believe what’s crucial—and perhaps more revealing—is that this shift wasn’t just ideological. It was also deeply institutional and infrastructural, particularly in terms of how literature was produced, published, and circulated. In both cases, writers had to navigate an increasingly commercialized cultural field, but their strategies, and the spaces available to them, looked very different.

In China, the 1990s market reforms meant that most state-supported publishers and literary journals gradually lost their public funding and had to become financially self-sustaining. That forced editors and writers alike to ask a new set of questions: What kind of work are readers actually willing to pay for? What themes will resonate with a mass audience? As a result, Chinese science fiction—which had been largely sidelined during the elite-dominated Enlightenment discourse of the 1980s—began to re-emerge as part of a broader bottom-up popular culture. Writers became far more sensitive to market dynamics and reader expectations, and SF offered a creative, flexible way to reflect on the rapid technological and social transformations sweeping across the country.

Meanwhile in the UK, by the 1990s, a wave of “mainstreaming” had swept through popular culture, co-opting many formerly marginal or subcultural forms. But what’s fascinating about science fiction—particularly the British SF Boom—is that it somehow stayed just below the radar of dominant cultural politics (as Roger Luckhurst observes in his 2003 essay). Unlike many other genres, it wasn’t fully absorbed into the neoliberal cultural machine. That gave writers like Iain M. Banks, Ken MacLeod, and Gwyneth Jones a rare space in which to imagine alternatives—to critique capitalism, envision post-scarcity futures, and build radical, utopian counter-worlds.

Stewart: In each chapter of The Boom & The Boom, you pair a work and a writer from each country. Were these choices intuitive?

Lyu: I thought about each pairing rather carefully, structuring them around the two major conceptual threads in the book’s subtitle: “historical rupture” and “political economy.” In the first two chapters, I explore how science fiction helps us grasp, or narrate, moments of historical rupture. Both China and the UK experienced major systemic transitions in the 1970s and 1980s: the rise of neoliberalism in Britain and the shift toward marketization in China. In both cases, science fiction became a space to reimagine futures beyond or after these transformations, often drawing on utopian elements to do so.

Take, for example, Iain M Banks’s Culture series, an ambitious reconstruction of a communist-style galactic utopia that emerges precisely under the shadow of neoliberalism. His long-time friend Ken MacLeod similarly engages with utopian thinking, but with an eye toward ideological experimentation: what might lie beyond neoliberal hegemony? In China, we can also see thought experiments such as Han Song’s 2066: Red Star Over America, which uses a consciously utopian narrative form to explore how individuals reconfigure themselves amid the rapid social and psychological transformations of the 1990s. Hao Jingfang’s Vagabonds, deeply inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin, constructs a Mars/Earth binary to think through utopia as an unfolding process rather than a static destination.

Moving into the second half of the book, I turn to questions of political economy, specifically how SF in both countries interrogates the conditions of the present. What are the cultural logics of late capitalism? What structures are producing social violence, alienation, or inertia? In this section, the pairings explore SF as a means of diagnosing contemporary contradictions, often by staging allegories of power, race, migration, and commodification.

For instance, China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station confronts the racialized architectures of urban space and the complicity between government and market forces. The monstrous slake-moth, a creature that feeds on dreams and turns desire into paralysis, becomes a powerful symbol of late capitalist capture. (In fact, it inspired the book’s cover image.) On the Chinese side, Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide similarly centers on the structural violence enacted on marginalized bodies; in this case, migrant workers within China’s e-waste economy. Both novels use speculative horror to expose the unseen operations of global capitalism. The next chapter continues this line of inquiry through the theme of commodity spectacle. James Lovegrove’s Days and Long Yi’s Earth Province both explore the fusion of consumerism and governance. They imagine societies in which commodities no longer serve needs, but instead dictate entire structures of meaning and identity. In both cases, we see capitalism evolving into something more than an economic system: it becomes a totalizing cultural logic, a regime of desire, even a theology.

Finally, in the concluding chapter, I turn to the global success of Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, and especially its “Dark Forest” theory. While often read as a metaphor for interstellar survival, I suggest it also reflects on the logic of neoliberal subjectivity: an alienated vision of the self as permanently economized, strategic, and threatened. In this sense, the trilogy becomes a bleak representation of the individual’s position in global late capitalism. I place this against M. John Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, which offers a radically different model. Rather than fixity or fatalism, Harrison imagines a Deleuzian space of becoming, where bodies, identities, and meanings are in flux. His work resists systematization and embraces instability as a form of liberation.

Stewart: You also cite Chinese sci-fi’s fandom, and their online debates and trends. Do you feel that Western scholars ought to be better informed of how works such as The Three-Body Problem are received by domestic readers?

Lyu: Rather than saying Western scholars ought to pay more attention to how works like The Three-Body Problem are received by domestic readers in China, I’d argue that this awareness is already happening organically—as the global significance of Chinese science fiction continues to grow, its fandom and reception context are naturally coming into view.

A good early example is the British Science Fiction Association’s critical journal, Vector, which published a special issue on Chinese SF in 2021, edited by Yen Ooi. That issue made important strides in introducing Chinese fan culture to Anglophone readers. In particular, Zhang Feng’s article offered a systematic overview of Chinese SF fandom, looking at its organizations and conventions, and showing how grassroots fan communities have helped propel the growth of the genre. Alongside it, Regina Kanyu Wang’s piece mapped out key Chinese publishers, giving readers a sense of the infrastructure behind the fandom. Both contributions are brief, but together they sketch a clear picture of China’s SF ecosystem and its dynamics.

Another essay that left a deep impression on me was Niall Harrison’s “Accelerated History: Chinese Short SF in the Twenty-First Century.” He points out that while few recent novels have matched the commercial success of The Three-Body Problem, Chinese short fiction has entered an extraordinarily vibrant phase. His analysis offers both close readings of key stories and a broader historical account of the field’s evolution. What’s particularly valuable is his critique of the representational bias in how Western readers engage with Chinese SF, often looking for a single author or title to stand in for a vast and complex literary field. Harrison rightly calls for more translation, but also for better translation practices, ones that can account for the diversity and depth of Chinese science fiction beyond its most famous exports.

At the same time, Chinese fandom itself is actively reaching outward. Under the leadership of editor River Flow, the Hugo-winning fanzine Zero Gravity SF has launched a bold and ambitious translation project over the past three years. This initiative isn’t just focused on translating English works into Chinese; it actively seeks out science fiction written in non-English languages, including Romanian, Hungarian, Vietnamese, Czech, Swedish, and others. What’s striking is that the project isn’t driven by a logic of literary prestige or cultural hierarchy; it’s driven by solidarity, by the belief that stories written in any language can contribute to a global imaginary.

Stewart: In your epilogue, you underline the value of taking the US out of the central “mediator” position in world culture, and the novelty of UK and Chinese sci-fi “finding” each other. Do you expect any particular fruits from, say, younger Chinese writers debating the merits of Iain M. Banks’s vision of space communism?

Lyu: Yes, I believe this rethinking of the US as the central “mediator” is exactly what River Flow is trying to do. In The Boom & The Boom, I argue that translation alone is not a neutral act; it always entails mediation, and that mediation is often structured by power, visibility, and market forces. For science fiction—which is often seen as a popular or commercial form—this kind of mediation can be decisive. A work must first be accepted by English-speaking readers in order to circulate globally. But if we shift our perspective—drawing on, for example, Timothy Morton’s notion of the hyperobject as I mentioned earlier—we begin to see world science fiction not as a flat marketplace of exchange, but as a distributed structure of locally situated voices, each offering a different angle on planetary conditions. These local visions don’t require validation from a dominant linguistic or cultural center. The hyperobject needs no endorsement. In many ways, non-English science fiction has often sought to join “world SF” by appealing to a universalist vision of human futures. But what may be even more urgent is the need to explore the particularities rooted in place, language, and historical context. That’s the deeper value I see in movements like Zero Gravity SF: they’re not just expanding the canon—they’re reshaping the very terms of inclusion, by insisting that global dialogue begins with local specificity.

It is true that Iain M. Banks is gradually gaining more visibility in China. One of the leading publishers is currently working to introduce the Culture series to Chinese readers, and I was fortunate enough to join a Culture-themed panel they organized at the 2023 Chengdu Worldcon. (I even tweeted about it; and to my surprise, Ken MacLeod reposted it, which made me incredibly happy!) But of course, Banks’s vision of space communism emerged in a very specific political and cultural moment—as a direct response to Thatcherism and the neoliberal restructuring of British society. His utopia wasn’t a blueprint, but a politically charged counter-narrative born out of historical struggle.

So while younger Chinese writers are becoming more aware of Banks and engaging with his ideas, I think what’s really interesting—and what I hope to see more of—is not just a one-way reception or “influence” narrative. What matters is how Chinese authors respond to their own historical conditions, how they wrestle with the contradictions of contemporary China and its position in a rapidly changing world. Literature isn’t just a product of authorial agency; it’s also a response summoned by material circumstances, a way of making sense of one’s moment. If Chinese SF writers debate or riff on Banks’s space communism, I hope it’s not in search of ideological alignment, but as part of a broader attempt to think through what futures feel possible or impossible in the here and now.

Stewart: You return a few times to the theme of living in two planes at once, drawn apart by two poles. Earth/Mars. Capitalism/Socialism. Opportunity/Security. Britain/China. (City/City.) Did your personal experience of living overseas feed into this?

Lyu: I’ve always remembered that, in the induction session at UCL Comparative Literature—the very first seminar of my PhD—our module convenor introduced the idea of “comparative” literature as the art of “how to read one from the other.” That phrase stayed with me. In many ways, it helped shape how I think about science fiction, less as a genre that travels linearly across borders, and more as one that resonates differently depending on where you’re standing.

In fact, if I hadn’t come to the UK, I probably would never have even heard of the “British SF Boom.” The first time I encountered the term was in the office of my supervisor, James Kneale. He had several back issues of Science Fiction Studies on his bookshelf. What came into my attention was a bright yellow issue from Autumn 2003 that seemed to almost glow on the shelf. It was a special issue on “The British SF Boom,” and it introduced writers I had never heard of before. At the time, few of their works had been translated into Chinese, and British SF was largely absent from Chinese academic or literary discourse.

So yes, my experience of living between two cultural and political systems profoundly shaped my intellectual trajectory. It taught me not only how to read one from the other, but also how to recognize what had been invisible to me all along. In that sense, The Boom & The Boom isn’t just a comparative study; it’s also a reflection of that dislocation, the awareness that what counts as “important” literature often depends on where you stand. Over time, I came to realize that this in-betweenness—between China and the UK, between market and ideology, between language and translation—was not something to “resolve,” but something to work through. The book, in a way, is structured by that tension. I wanted to ask what happens when two distinct traditions respond to similar historical ruptures, yet do so without really acknowledging each other. What if we treated that silence not as absence, but as a kind of resonance?

Stewart: Besides British sci-fi, do you think the sci-fi of any other nation makes for a natural comparison/contrast with Chinese sci-fi?

Lyu: Yes, absolutely. I think one of the most urgent tasks for scholars of science fiction today is to move beyond the traditional Anglophone axis and to take seriously the dialogic, global dimensions of the genre. In this regard, I find Paul Kincaid’s 2020 review of The Cambridge History of Science Fiction particularly insightful. He praises the volume for challenging the American-centric historical narrative of science fiction, and for opening up space for the voices from the “unseen” worlds: China, South and Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. As he writes, “Despite the diverse array of SF writings disguised under the ostensible universality shaped largely by the American tradition, what is there is still there, waiting to be discovered and reinterpreted.” And then, crucially, he adds: “Once the will was there, it didn’t really take long to start unearthing them.”

That last line speaks to something I’ve experienced firsthand in my own research. For a long time, Anglophone science fiction was treated—both academically and commercially—as the center of gravity. Other traditions, even if rich and long-standing, were often rendered peripheral, translated only sporadically, or interpreted primarily in terms of how well they “fit” into existing Western paradigms. But the more I’ve explored, the more I’ve come to believe that there isn’t just one science fiction tradition—there are many. These various “booms” don’t radiate out from a single cultural epicenter; they pulse in parallel, each shaped by its own historical ruptures, linguistic idioms, and material conditions.

Stewart: And finally, what’s your vision for the future?

Lyu: First things first, I just hope to hang on in academia long enough to keep doing this work! But if I do get to keep going, there are two directions I’m especially excited about.

One is the “material turn” in science fiction: the shift toward thinking about objects, nonhumans, and the agency of things. SF has long imagined the world beyond the human: animals, plants, AI, landscapes, cities, planets, and even inanimate objects often emerge not just as narrative backdrops but as full-fledged actants. In this sense, the genre is already deeply entangled with post-humanist aesthetics and ethics. I’m especially interested in how this object-oriented poetics challenges anthropocentrism and proposes new epistemologies of coexistence. There’s still much to explore here, particularly in how Anglo-American science fiction has articulated (and complicated) these questions over time.

The other direction is science fiction and medical humanities. I’m fascinated by how sci-fi explores questions of illness, care, the body, and biopolitics—especially in works like Han Song’s Hospital trilogy, which imagines a world where even pain gets digitized. In an age of pandemics and algorithms, these stories feel uncannily relevant.