The Boom & the Boom: Historical Rupture and Political Economy in Contemporary British and Chinese Science Fiction

The Boom & the Boom, like China Miéville’s The City and the City, presents a puzzle involving two parallel worlds. It builds a bridge for both worlds, forms mutually stimulating mirror images for both cultures, and creates a beautiful structure of discursive exploration of the multiplicity of contemporary science fiction beyond national boundaries.

(Mingwei Song, author of Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction (2023), SFRA Book Award Winner)

Twenty-five years ago, many of us thought we were in a period of growth: the British SF Boom. Lyu’s very readable book locates this radical sf in its political and economic contexts, but his genius is to discuss a parallel event: the Chinese SF Boom. This is a brilliant exploration of the genre outside the Gernsback-Campbell Continuum of American SF.

(Andrew M. Butler, Managing Editor, Extrapolation)

This is a thoughtful and thought-provoking analysis of two sf booms, one in Britain, one in China, which until now seemed invisible to each other. LYU Guangzhao’s carefully paired readings of key novels show that sf is a global phenomenon but that, like economic globalisation itself, it takes distinctive local forms. Let a hundred schools of thought contend and a hundred science fictions boom!

(Mark Bould, Professor of Film and Literature, UWE Bristol)

The Boom & The Boom provides a comparative study of the recent science fiction renaissances in the UK and China, known as the British and Chinese SF Booms, which emerged in the late 1980s. It contextualizes the two booms within the transformative political and cultural histories of both countries, characterized by the politico-economic shifts initiated by Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping. In an era marked by the state’s retreat from society and the redefinition of social subjects through market competition, science fiction assumes a crucial counter position for cultural critique, envisioning alternatives and possibilities embodied in utopian hopes.

LYU Guangzhao is a lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at Fudan University, Shanghai. He completed his PhD in Comparative Literature at University College London and received the «Support a New Scholar» grant (2021-2022) sponsored by Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA).