Introduction: In the Age of Transnational Science Fiction

We used to know what Science Fiction meant. With Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells as the literary grandparents in the nineteenth century; Hugo Gernsback, a Luxenbourgish-American engineer, invented science fiction as a literary genre with his edited magazine The Amazing Stories published in 1926, in the heyday of the Jazz Age. While the early science fiction writers were obsessed with future prediction, it was the distinguished editor John W. Campbell who brought up Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and Theodore Sturgeon from the 1930s through the 1940s to expand the sociological possibilities of the genre. Hence, the golden age of science fiction that coincided with Pax Americana in postwar years. However, it is ironic that the space race of the Cold War age, as climaxed by Apollo 11’s moon landing in July 1969, did not seduce these writers to pursue the dream of “outer space.” The New Wave Movement in the 1960s as represented by J. G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Harlan Ellison, Philip K. Dick, Samuel Delany, and Stanislaw Lem started to explore not outer space but “inner space,” by making use of Freudian psychoanalysis, Levi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology, and Bretonian surrealist poetics. These New Wave writers came to prefer the term “Speculative Fiction,” coined by Heinlein to the term “Science Fiction” in the Gernsbackian sense.

The 1970s saw the rise of feminist speculative fictionists such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, and James Tiptree Jr., aka Alice Sheldon, who all found “gender space” as a new frontier. And the 1980s saw the Cyberpunk Movement as championed by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, Lewis Shiner, Rudy Rucker, and Pat Cadigan whose works, coinciding with the development of internet technology, cultivated what Gibson called “cyberspace” and had a tremendous impact on not only American Literature but also World Literature from the 1980s through the 2020s. This is the reason why PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association), the most significant journal of World Literature in the United States, once featured the special topic “Science Fiction and Literary Studies: The Next Millennium” in its May 2004 issue with noted science fiction scholar-critics Marleen Barr and Carl Freedman as the guest editors.

However, the science fiction we used to know came to be gradually metamorphosed into something else in the wake of cyberpunkish techno-orientalism coinciding with the discourses of “Japan as No. 1,” “Pax Japonica,” and “Cool Japan” in the past four decades. As fin de siècle Western literature enjoyed the taste of Japonisme around the year of 1900, the late twentieth century saw the rise of the “Asian,” and especially “Japanesque” mode in science fiction, empowering Japanese science fiction as such and transgressing the generic boundaries between prose, manga, anime, and gaming. For the cutting edge of this trans-generic deconstruction, please read Alexandre Paquet’s splendid article on videogame narratology “Automata Collective,” included in the present issue.

Historically speaking, the literary subgenre of Japanese science fiction started with the inauguration of the first commercial monthly of science fiction in Japan, Hayakawa’s SF Magazine in December 1959, with Fukushima Masami (1929– 1976) as the original editor-in-chief. Of course, as the origin of Euro-American science fiction could be traced back to the nineteenth century, the ancestors of Japanese science fiction could be rediscovered in the Meiji Era (1868–1912), as Denis Taillandier precisely explained in his article “Literary Science Fiction in Japan: The Story of a Secret Infiltration” included here. However, it is true that as Amazing Stories powerfully created the market of this new literary subgenre, Hayakawa’s SF Magazine skillfully pioneered the science fiction market in Japan that would have otherwise collapsed immediately.

Since then Japanese science fiction produced a number of talented writers ranging from the first-generation writers such as Hoshi Shin’ichi (1926–1997), Komatsu Sakyō (1931–2011), Tsutsui Yasutaka (1934–), Toyoda Aritsune (1938–), Hirai Kazumasa (1938–2015), Mitsuse Ryu 1928– 1999), Mayumura Taku (1934– 2019), Aramaki Yoshio (1933– ), and Yamano Koichi (1939– 2017); the second-generation writers such as Tanaka Koji (1941...