Asimov's SF, September 2010 Read Online Free Page A

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    Why is that? An explanation can be offered by taking historical parallels. At the time of the Tang dynasty (seventh to tenth century AD), China exported its culture across to Japan and Korea: aside from the obvious impact of Buddhism, Chinese influence can clearly be seen in the Japanese art of the period, which emulated China—and, of course, in the Japanese kanji, which are Chinese ideograms. Back in the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, China similarly exported its ideology and administrative system to Vietnam, centering the state around Confucian ideology and mandarins. But China itself took precious little in, either from Japan or Vietnam.
    And, back in the eighteenth century, French was the diplomatic language in most European courts, and French-style meals the epitome of refinement.
    The common point between those situations is that the countries exporting their cultures were all economically or politically strong at the time. Associated with this is an aura subtler than a military invasion: that of cultural influence. Not only is the dominant culture exported, but people in the non-dominant countries will strive to imitate it with various degrees of success, sometimes denigrating their own culture in the process. For most of the twentieth century (which coincides with most of the history of speculative fiction), the US has been the dominant world power, and therefore US—and by extension Western Anglophone—speculative fiction is the one that determines the market; the one that is talked about, the one that is emulated, the one that is translated and exported.
    A frequent side effect of cultural domination is isolationism, especially after the period of growth is over: the paradigm is not voiced in so many words, but the implication is that if a culture can be so widely adopted, it is because it is somehow superior. Therefore, the dominant culture tends to make far fewer efforts to import anything from abroad (late Imperial China is pretty much a textbook example of this).
    To a large extent, this means that what we consider international SF today, what we think of as good stories, as unforgettable narratives, are in fact shaped by Western Anglophone culture—and above all by US culture, just as our movie-making is permeated by Hollywood, and our television is strongly influenced by American programs.
    Does this make SF in other countries derivative? We might argue at first sight that it does. Many of the tropes of science fiction are Western or even American: the biggest one, arguably, is the scientific approach itself, which as we have seen originates from the West, and has often been imported wholesale (countries such as Japan are an amazing exception). But there are others, like the exploration of space and stories of first contact, which in classic SF are a thinly-disguised retread of either the colonization process or the American conquest of the West.
    But the effect is more pernicious yet: the grammar of storytelling itself, the SF novel, whether it be adventure or literary stories, is very much a product of its time and place. The novel, and especially the commercial novel as we understand it today, is a Western construct. To take only one example, even late Chinese prose literature is radically different from what was developing in the Western world in the same time period. The great novels of the Ming and Qing dynasty (fourteenth century to twentieth century) are not plot or character-centered, and do not have a neat, tidy resolution or a climax. Rather, they aim to present a variety of images, themes, and personalities, what sinologist Richard J. Smith[13] calls “infinite overlapping and alternation,” a feeling of endlessness that is not rooted in some underlying meaning of the world. This is a very different aesthetic from Western novels, where a crescendo of plot has to climax and lead into an emotionally charged denouement.
    Therefore, to ask of other countries that they write SF novels