Come, join me as I travel through time...
February 22, 2024:
The Conversation publishes an article titled “Guide to the classics: Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian novel We inspired Orwell and influenced the Western imagination”. Written by Sheila Fitzpatrick, Professor of History at the Australian Catholic University's Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, the article introduces the life and work of Zamyatin and the circumstances in which he wrote We in 1920.
As We was first published as an English translation in 1924, this year marks the centenary of the novel, although it was not until 1952 that the original Russian text was published. Fitzpatrick describes the novel as a major influence on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was published in 1949. “Both novels portray a state in which the individual has been merged into the collective: 'I' has become indistinguishable from 'we'. In both novels, falling in love is the fateful assertion of an 'I' that is not part of 'we'.”
November 28, 2016:
In their renowned blog “Fantasy Literature”, Tadiana Jones, Kat Hooper and Jana Nyman review Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation, which was edited and translated by Ken Liu. Tadiana points out that among the stories collected in this book, “The City of Silence” by Ma Boyong (“Ma” being the surname) is “evidently inspired by George Orwell's 1984”. In her words:
“The City of Silence” takes the concept of thought police and applies it to a technological age. As one of the character comments, “technology is neutral. But the progress of technology will cause a free world to become freer, and a totalitarian world to become even more repressive”. [The protagonist] Arvardan and his friends know and can still think the words that the State now deems unhealthy, but one wonders what will become of the next generation in Ma Boyong's nightmarish society.
June 8-9, 2019:
Continuum 15: Other Worlds, or the 58th National Australian Speculative Fiction Convention, takes place in Melbourne. Continuum is Melbourne's annual fan-run speculative fiction and pop culture convention, and I am here because Ken Liu is a guest of honour (and the other GoH is Kate Elliott). In his keynote, Liu talks about his writing journey and how judgement summaries are often the best way to understand legal cases. He also speaks about science fiction and the fate of humanity.
Afterwards, I join a long queue of people waiting to get Liu's autograph. While many of my fellow sci-fi and fantasy fans have Liu's The Grace of Kings and The Wall of Storms and even Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem in their hands, I have The Invisible Planets. Alas, Liu is not in Melbourne to talk about issues relating to translation.
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May 2005:
Ma Boyong's “The City of Silence” is published in Volume 5 of the Science Fiction World magazine in China, with parts of it censored “for well-known reasons”. It goes on to win that year's Galaxy Award as a reader-nominated title. (Side Note: That year's Most Popular Foreign Writer is Douglas Adams.)
“The City of Silence” begins with a quote from “The Sound of Silence” by Simon & Garfunkel:
And in the naked light I saw / Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking / People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
No one dare / Disturb the sound of silence
And the story is set in New York City, U.S.A., in 2015. Terms such as the “American Government”, “FBI” and “Long Live America” are frequently used. Meanwhile, the name of the man who talks to Arvardan at the bus stop is Stoic.
March 8, 2024:
In the Epub edition of The Invisible Plants downloaded to my phone via Libby, “The City of Silence” begins like this:
The year was 2046, the place the Capital of the State.
The State needed no name because other than it, there were no states. It was just as the Department of Propaganda kept emphasising: there are no other states besides the State, It is who It is, and It always has been and always will be.
And the name of the man who talks to Arvardan at the bus stop is Hiroshi Watanabe, “the name of a present-day Japanese animator”. WHY???
November 1, 2016:
The hardcover edition of The Invisible Planets is published by Tor Books in the U.S. The Kindle edition, as well as the Epub and Mobi editions, are published by Head of Zeus, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, in the U.K.
September 7, 2017:
The paperback edition of The Invisible Plants is published by Head of Zeus in the U.K.
August 21, 2018:
The paperback edition of The Invisible Plants is published by Tor Books in the U.S.
August 21, 2015:
“The City of Silence” is included in The Apex Book of World SF: Volume 3 edited by Lavie Tidhar and published by Apex Book Company. It is part of the 5-book series “Apex World of Speculative Fiction”. Also included in the volume is Xia Jia's “A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight”.
January 2, 2015:
Reader “Rick” writes in the reading group EDCMOOC in GoodReads: “This work reminds me of 'The Machine Stops' where human contact is limited and people live isolated lives connected via the web. Although in The City of Silence the web is limiting rather than open.”
E.M. Foster published “The Machine Stops” in The Oxford and Cambridge Review in November 1909. According to Wikipedia: “The story, set in a world where humanity lives underground and relies on a giant machine to provide its needs, predicted technologies similar to instant messaging and the Internet.”
November 10, 2020:
“The City of Silence” reminds me of a science fiction story I read in Chinese a long time ago. In that story, a man is sentenced to become invisible for a year because he doesn't show emotions. But after a year of social isolation, he shows too much emotion and is punished again.
I don't know who wrote the story and start doing research. Eventually I discover “To See the Invisible Man”, whose Traditional Chinese edition was published in Taiwan in 1982 as part of the second volume of the “Selected Latest American Science Fiction Writings” series published by China Times Publishing Co.
(Side Note: That particular volume, also titled “To See the Invisible Man”, contains another science fiction story whose Chinese title can be literally translated as “The Eternal Spring”. But what is the story's English title, and who is its author? I'll have to jump to another timeline to find it.)
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January 31, 1986:
The 16th episode of Season 1 of The Twilight Zone contains a segment called “To See the Invisible Man”, based on the short story of the same name by Robert Silverberg.
August 19, 2021:
Robert Silverberg republishes “To See the Invisible Man” as a Kindle book. In the ebook's Introduction, he writes:
This story, written in June of 1962, marks the beginning of my real career as a science-fiction writer, I think. My earlier stories are respectable professional work, but most of them could have been written by just about anyone. Now, however, I began to reach deeper and deeper. In “To See the Invisible Man” the distinctive Silverberg fictional voice is on display for just about the first time.
(The voice of another and greater writer can be heard in the background, though. I found the idea for my story in the opening paragraph of Jorge Luis Borges' “The Babylon Lottery”, where he says, “Like all men in Babylon I have been a proconsul; like all, a slave... During one lunar year, I have been declared invisible; I shrieked and was not heard, I stole my bread and was not decapitated.” Borges choose to do no more with the theme of statutory invisibility in that story – it was, for him, nothing more than an embellishment in a story about something else entirely. So I feel upon the notion and developed it to explore its practical implications, thus doing the job Borges had left undone.)
The story appeared in the first issue, dated April 1963, of a new magazine, Worlds of Tomorrow, edited by Frederik Pohl. Many years later it was adapted for television's Twilight Zone program, with a superb screenplay by Steve Barnes.
Some time in 1962:
Grove Press publishes the English edition of Ficciones by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. One of the stories collected in the book is Borges's fantasy short story "La lotería en Babilonia", which was originally published in Spanish in a literary magazine in 1941. Translated as “The Babylon Lottery” or “The Lottery in Babylon”, the story “describes a mythical Babylon in which all activities are dictated by an all-encompassing lottery, which people must live by, and has full control over many's lives, a metaphor for the role of chance in one's life”.
March 14, 2024:
The journey through time continues as I recall one of my all-time favourite short stories, “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, which was first published in The New Yorker on June 26, 1948. I studied the story back in 1993 or 1994, where the professor spent quite a bit of time explaining the significance of the name “Mr Graves”.
(Side Note: Also studied in that class was William Faulkner's 1930 short story “A Rose for Emily”. I always associate that story with Frank De Felitta's 1975 horror novel Audrey Rose. But, now that I think of it, I should also relate that story to the 2005 horror film The Exorcism of Emily Rose. There goes another timeline...)