In the West , you ordinarily pick up scientific discipline fable authors claiming that it ’s impossible to write about the near time to come — the marchland of engineering and the rise of new advances make prediction a futile endeavour . But Taiwanese scientific discipline fiction has no such inhibition , accord toa Modern article in the L.A. Times — and for the most part , Chinese SF authors are boldly predicting a Earth in which China has become the world ’s only superpower and the United States has fallen into degeneracy .
Top image : HTTP2007 on Flickr .
The Times babble out to Han Song , author of 2066 : Red Star Over America , in which China flourishes while the U.S. strike into fiscal ruining and civil warfare . A Chinese deputation comes to the U.S. to hear and furbish up civilization by teaching us to play the Taiwanese board game Go — but then terrorists strike . ( really , the terrorist strike the World Trade Center , since this was written before 9/11 . A new revised edition came out of late . Says Han :
I went to America to lay out my ideas , but they thought that the portrayal of China ’s superpower status was an overstatement . Americans think that America can not be ruin . They express joy at this idea . They did n’t believe in me .
There ’s also The Fat Years by Chan Koonchung , which we ’ve covered on io9 before — and it also shows a resurgent , loaded China , but at a mellow cost . As one subject matter plug-in commenter quoted by the Times piece says , “ Everybody [ in “ The Fat Years ” ] is happy , but this felicity is out of a sort of numbness and indifference , which is more frightful than Fascism . ” [ L.A. Times ]
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