Against Annihilation: Science Fiction in East Asia

On 19 July 1969, the American spacecraft Apollo 11 entered lunar orbit. As the world held its breath, awaiting the historic moon landing that would happen the next day, a curious exchange took place between the astronauts and mission control: 

CAPCOM: Among the large headlines concerning Apollo this morning, there’s one asking that you watch for a lovely girl with a big rabbit. An ancient legend says a beautiful Chinese girl called Changho [sic] has been living there for 4,000 years. It seems she was banished to the moon because she stole the pill of immortality from her husband. You might also look for her companion, a large Chinese rabbit, who is easy to spot since he is always standing on his hind feet in the shade of a cinnamon tree. The name of the rabbit is not reported.

BUZZ ALDRIN: Okay, we’ll keep a close eye for the bunny girl.ⁱ

Today, most of us in Asia read this as a charming moment. How flattering, we think, that in the midst of one of the greatest scientific achievements in history, NASA acknowledged an icon of Chinese heritage: the moon goddess Chang’e (嫦娥), whose story is still retold every year at the Mid-Autumn Festival.

But there’s a darker way to interpret this episode. Here, Asia isn’t being invoked as the birthplace of great inventions and influential philosophies, but as the source of mere myth, all for the sake of a goofy joke. Neil Armstrong’s “one giant leap for mankind” wasn’t just a triumph for the human species, it was also a massive display of the technological superiority of the American empire, leaving the planet’s other cultures stranded in the dust.

I’m sharing this story because it highlights how there’s more than one way to talk about East Asia and science fiction. On one hand, there’s the embrace of Asian aesthetics and iconography in Western pop culture. You’ll see this in the techno-Orientalism of George Lucas’s Star Wars movies, with their samurai-inspired Jedi, and the Japanese cyberpunk setting of William Gibson’s Neuromancer. It’s also highly visible in Asian American works in the form of cultural reclamation: the silkpunk sagas of Ken Liu’s Dandelion Dynasty series and the Korean folklore-influenced space opera of Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire.

On the other hand, if we look at science fiction created in East Asia itself, what we get in abundance are echoes of historical trauma: anxieties of annihilation and horror at the destructive power of technology. We see it in Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem (三体), Kim Bo-Young’s I’m Waiting For You (당신을 기다리고 있어), and of course, Tomohiro Maekawa’s The Sun (太陽): a common sense of anguish, foreboding and desperate hope.

It’s this second theme I want to explore this essay. Much of the region’s sci-fi reveals East Asia as a site that once saw itself as the centre of world civilisation, then realised, at a deadly cost, that it had been superseded by the West. What’s emerged since then is a literary and cinematic tradition crafted by those who, until recently, saw themselves as the losers of modern world history, wounded but healing from disasters, radically transforming parts of themselves to survive. These artists understand what it means not only to be the beneficiaries of scientific progress, but also its victims. 

An age of eclipse: The 19th and 20th centuries

Let’s go back to the beginnings of the genre.ⁱⁱ In the 19th century, both China and Japan were forced to make humiliating concessions to European powers due to the military supremacy of the West: the Opium Wars (1839–42, 1856–60) in the case of China; the Perry Expedition (1852–1853 and 1854–1855), also called the Arrival of the Black Ships, in the case of Japan. Following this, intellectuals from both cultures began to see the pursuit of Western scientific knowledge as the only route to progress.

These calls for reform were the impetus for the earliest works of original East Asian sci-fi.ⁱⁱⁱ Some were utopian visions, such as Iwagaki Gesshu’s A Feel Good Tale of Conquering the West (西征快心編, 1857), imagining a fictional nation rallying China and India together to overthrow the British empire with steamships. Likewise, Wu Jianren’s New Story of the Stone (新石头记, 1905) presents itself as a sequel to the 18th century classic Dream of the Red Chamber, where the protagonist Jia Baoyu time-travels, first to the late Qing Dynasty of the author’s present, then to a high-tech future China. Some, however, were profoundly dystopian, like Lao She’s Cat Country (猫城记, 1933), wherein an astronaut lands on Mars and discovers a city of cat-faced aliens whose society is on the brink of collapse: a satire of Republican era China.

The mid-20th century brought an era of horrific violence to the region as it endured the depredations of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), the Chinese Civil War (1945–49) and the Korean War (1950–53). Among the innumerable atrocities, one event left an indelible imprint on the sci-fi landscape: the American deployment of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, marking the beginning of the Nuclear Age.

Perhaps the most iconic work inspired by this was Ishiro Honda’s film Godzilla (ゴジラ, 1954), the story of a gargantuan monster awakened by nuclear testing, able to destroy cities with a swoop of its reptilian tail. This spawned dozens of sequels and adaptations in cinema, television, print fiction, comics and games, resulting in the introduction of the term “kaiju” (怪獣) into the English language, a word used to describe further colossal beasts from the Japanese imagination such as Mothra, Gamera, Mecha-Godzilla, and the endless alien antagonists of the Ultraman TV series (ウルトラマン, 1966 onwards).^iv

Meanwhile, other Japanese writers processed the nuclear threat in their own way. Comic artist Osamu Tezuka, for example, strove to imagine how this form of energy might be harnessed for good, creating Astro Boy (1952–1968), the tale of a child-shaped android fuelled by atomic power.^v (Notably, his Japanese name, 鉄腕アトム, literally translates as “The Mighty Atom.”) In the world of literary fiction, Yukio Mishima wrote Beautiful Star (美しい星, 1962), about a family who believe themselves to be aliens and form a society to warn humans of the apocalyptic potential of the Cold War. And again in the world of comics, Katsuhiro Otomo created AKIRA (アキラ, manga 1982-90; film 1988), which begins with the complete obliteration of Tokyo at the start of World War III. In one of its most memorable sequences, the motorcycle gangster Tetsuo experiences sudden grotesque physical mutations that swallow up his companions: a reimagining of the cancerous lesions of the hibakusha (被爆者), survivors of the original atomic attacks.

In the rest of East Asia, sci-fi developed along different paths. In Hong Kong and Taiwan, it took on more light-hearted themes, as in the case of Ni Kuang’s Wisely adventure novels (衛斯理系列, 1963–2004, memorably adapted into comic form by Singaporean artist Wee Tian Beng) and Shi-Kuo Chang’s epic sci-fi fantasy saga The City Trilogy (城, 1983–91). In divided Korea, it became intensely politicised: in the South, writers critiqued the militarist government, with works like Bok Geo-il’s alternate history novel In Search of the Epitaph (비명을 찾아서, 1987), while in the North, they promoted “Juche science”^vi, hence Hwang Jeong-sang’s novella Green Ears of Rice (푸른 벼 이삭, 1988), in which scientists breed a plant that cures cancer.

In the People’s Republic of China, the genre had a peculiarly tumultuous history. Initially, it was approved as a branch of socialist literature that popularised scientific knowledge, with stories like Zheng Wenguang’s Capriccio for Communism (共产主义畅想, 1958) prophesying that within twenty years, technology would progress so rapidly that artificial suns might be deployed to melt glaciers and irrigate deserts. However, during the Cultural Revolution, sci-fi writers were regarded with deep suspicion due to fears that they were importing dangerous Western ideas. As late as 1983, a party newspaper accused them of “spreading pseudoscience and promoting decadent capitalist elements.”^vii

Sci-fi only blossomed after Deng Xiaoping’s economic liberalisation. One of the vanguard in this new wave was Liu Cixin, author of the nation’s first cyberpunk novel, China 2185 (中国2185, 1989). Here, he expresses his exhaustion at the warring ideologies of his youth, envisioning a future China, led by a democratic but morally vacuous administration, under attack by digital clones of Mao Zedong.

Liu’s early work was soon eclipsed by the runaway success of his Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy (地球往事, 2006-10), better known by the title of its first volume, The Three-Body Problem. Not coincidentally, the Cultural Revolution is fundamental to this tale, with its cruelties causing a key character to lose faith in the human species. The central plot, however, focuses on humanity’s struggle against alien beings determined to invade and destroy our civilisation through military and scientific supremacy. This, too, is history: the 19th century technological humiliation of East Asia, retold on a cosmic scale, unfolding across unfathomable expanses of time and space.

Lunar New Era: Sci-Fi in the 21st Century

On 24 October 2007, the Chinese National Space Administration launched an uncrewed spacecraft into orbit around the moon. The name of the craft was Chang’e 1 (嫦娥一号), a homage to the same goddess NASA astronauts had chuckled at four decades earlier. Following this mission, five further Chang’e spacecraft have been deployed, two of them paired with a lunar rover named Yutu (玉兔): the rabbit who serves as the moon goddess’s companion.

This is only one of numerous triumphs which have made commentators label the 21st century as the “Asian Century”, as the nations of the East rise in dominance, equalling and exceeding the power of the West. Today, China, South Korea and Japan are no longer regarded as backward cultures, but are widely admired as high-tech societies. Sci-fi flourishes in these countries—and, to a limited extent, also in Taiwan—with active communities of writers, readers, publishers and translators sharing new work across borders. Chinese sci-fi is particularly praised internationally, published not only through novels but also compilations of stellar short fiction: Invisible Planets and Broken Stars, edited and translated by Ken Liu; Sinopticon and the forthcoming China+100, edited and translated by Xueting Christine Ni.

It may seem bizarre that in a time of East Asian ascendancy, deep sorrow and trauma still resonate in the region’s sci-fi. Nevertheless, we still witness visions of civilisational collapse steeped in psychological horror, as in Han Song’s Tombs of the Universe (宇宙墓碑),  Junji Ito’s Hellstar Remina (地獄星レミナ) and Anton Hur’s Toward Eternity. High-density urbanism generates its own dystopian nightmares, as in Hao Jingfang’s Folding Beijing (北京折叠) and Bae Myung-Hoon’s Tower (타워), while threats of climate catastrophe inspire eco-fiction, such as Wu Ming-yi’s The Man with the Compound Eyes (複眼人) and Chen Qiufan’s The Waste Tide (荒潮). In addition, feminist works like Sayaka Murata’s The Vanishing World (消滅世界) and Bora Chung’s Your Utopia (그녀를 만나다) warn that scientific progress may not deliver us into a world free from sexual oppression.

In short, memories of the violence of modernity still haunt these cultures. This isn’t to say the region’s creators are lost in black holes of depression: the genre also burgeons with plenty of tales of heroism, action and laughter. It simply means that authors are unable to forget the chaos and atrocities of the past. This, I believe, is for the best. If Asia is destined to be the engine of the new millennium’s progress, our peoples are better off armed with lessons from yesteryear, however painful they may be.

It’s a marvellous thing to be able to send men and machines to the surface of the moon. But it’s wise to consider, as we do so, what monsters we may meet in the voids between us.

Watch an award-winning production of Tomohiro Maekawa's The Sun by 4 CHAIRS THEATRE (Taiwan) on 28 Feb & 1 Mar, as part of Huayi – Chinese Festival of Arts 2026.