A 'New Era' Rises in the East

摘要

A century ago, China had its first bout of science-fiction fever. There seem to have been three main reasons for this. One was literary, the translation into Chinese of various Western Utopian works, and of adventure stories such as Jules Verne's "Around the World in Eighty Days" and "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea." One was technological, a growing fascination with new developments in science and transportation, from chemistry and electricity to the balloon and the automobile. And one was political, based on the mounting certainty that the reigning dynasty, the Ching, was about to disintegrate under the combined weight of its own incompetence and the overwhelming firepower of the foreign aggressors.