Star Wars & Sc-Fi Talk
- Thread starter bd popeye
- Start date
AssassinsMace
Lieutenant General
I understand fully what I'm talking about. You were the one that didn't understand. You're the one that blew a gasket because you didn't like what I wrote. What did I blame Star Wars and Star Trek for? Both producers want Chinese watching them. If the Chinese aren't interested, why are they complaining? Why is that so hard for you to understand? You're the one trying to blame the Chinese... For what? They aren't complaining hence why they're not watching. They're not interested. All I did was suggest what they may have to do to get Chinese to watch. When Star Wars didn't interest the Chinese, it was Americans that were insulted that the Chinese didn't follow what they do like a lemming proving to themselves of their superior tastes.
You think in your arrogance Star Wars and Star Trek aren't popular with Chinese because they're in some protest for not being included. They're just not interested. All I did was point out what they probably have to do to get Chinese interested. Guess what? Star Wars and Star Trek aren't these precious objects that you make them out to be that shows off the importance of the West. They're so the studios and producers can make money. It's a business and if they want more customers, they'll have to cater to who they want to make money from. Why is that so hard to understand?
This discussion is about woke casting. Are you white or wanna be white? If you are then I can understand why you're so protective of what's white staying white. You want everyone to acknowledge the superiority of whites. You're the one with the problem if you think non-whites are suppose to like what you like. Didn't I say a Star Trek series for China only? I'm not like you where you want to impose your tastes onto others whether they like it or not. If you like Star Wars then the Chinese better like Star Wars... By white anti-woke logic, Star Wars should be an all Japanese cast because it was a rip-off of Kurasawa's, The Fortress. Yeah it's okay for whites to make Japanese characters be white. They do what they don't want being done to them.
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First paragraph, Of course the producers want to market their shows to China, for money. And they're complaining that the marketing is not work. That's natural. I don't really care if Chinese people like Star Trek or not. I don't even tell you to like Star Trek, so why I complain about people in China doesn't like Star Trek. As I know that Star Trek is a tool of American propaganda to convey their political view and how they see into the future. China is not America, so who care about nobody in China like Star Trek.
What I complain is that the entertainment industry in China doesn't evolve, or shift into more about the future. But always stick into the past. You, or Chinese can hate or ignore Star Trek or Star Wars, but you have admit it, that Star Trek has inspire American people to become more innovative, and better in technology. There are even technologies that the vision inspired from Star Trek and Star Wars. Like Quantum Entanglement, Hand Phone (not Smart Phone), robots, etc. Even Bill Gates admitted that he got inspired from Star trek when he was young. And today, there are American Scientists who still use the fictitious idea from Sci-Fi like Star treks and Star Wars for their research. They even have several scientists who research for Warp theory and teleporter technologies. Their research may end with failure, but that's not a problem. Because it can still bring another result that can give benefit to American future weapons.
What about China, where is the inspiration to progress the technologies? What happen after China become the leader of technology in the world? Would they stop to innovated just because nobody has some imagination / clue on how to move forward into the future? China excel in make something that already exist better. But what about something that not existed yet? Or do you prefer to become the follower forever and avoid to be the leader in term of technology in the world?
Like it or not sci-fi is a tool that can inspire the youth, and make them a person who have abundant creativity. They can always take American Sci-fi like Star Trek or Star Wars, but it won't benefit China as a country, because a show like Star Trek is full of propaganda. So to avoid that, China needs to make their own sci-fi show. Something that can spark imagination and inspiration to the youth; but still think the government in high regard.
Paragraph 2: Lol, I'm not even an American. I'm not even protective to Star Wars to Star Trek. I like Liu Cixin, but I'm sad that China has only one Liu Cixin that can make a good sci-fi. The other entertainers can only make another Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, Condor Heroes to TV. They don't even touch Sci-fi or Space Opera. It is really weird for a Tech Giant and Space Faring country like China to still ignorant about the genre, when their youth need the fire to spark their creativity and innovation.
Paragraph 3: And why do you even care about Wokeness? Wokeness is the American weakness today. Nobody needs to throw a water to wake them up from their dream.
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Wow, you're so ignorant. I'm not even an American. So who care about them. What I care is why China movie industries can't even make a descent sci-fi / space opera like Star Wars and Star Trek. For a tech giant and space faring country, your entertainment industries are still like a backwater country. Who care only about the past, but never touch the future. Look at the shows in your countries. They are all about Three Kingdoms, Condor Heroes, Journey to the West, some Civil War era historical shows, and then repeat. The only show that tell about Alien is Liu Cixin masterpiece, Three Body Problem.
Well yes, Star Trek is a political driven show, and a semi propaganda machine that used by American to convey their political view. But it also give a lot of inspiration and imagination to the American youth since 1966. You can say that China is good at AI innovation, but think about it, how did people find about AI? They get it from some old American sci-fi. What about robot? From Star Wars. And how about Quantum entanglement theory? From Star Trek. Laser weapon? Once again, from an old American Sci-fi
AssassinsMace
Lieutenant General
You're a part of the problem you're talking about. What do we have here is a thread about science fiction and we're talking about the people being angry about taking traditionally white characters and making them not white for what ever reason. Now enter your arguments. What the discussion is about has nothing to do with your ravings. What does that say is you want to control the conversation. It's people like you that perpetuate the problems you're talking about. You want to tell everyone what to think. Where's the creativity in that? You don't want people to think for themselves. If you're such a genius and you know everything because you're not like everyone else in here, tell us about your accomplishments you achieved. I can already tell you have none and the reason why you have none is hypocritical to what you're complaining about in here.
Look at how much anger you have just because people are not doing what you want where you need to insult. You praise Western culture because they're doing what you say Chinese are not doing yet we're discussing what's being talked about in the West. You sound like an old member in this forum that just showed up again here after 20 years. He's as pissy and as critically insulting of others as you are. Is that you but using a different name or are you being a typical carbon copy Asian meaning you're no different...
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AssassinsMace
Lieutenant General
What anger you have, Aquauant. Why don’t you go over to the knitting thread and scream at everyone for talking about what kind of yarn they buy?
I'd like to build on an argument that I made some time ago (but now can't find the post). I wrote a one-off comment but I never stopped thinking about it because I am fascinated by cultural evolution and now I want to re-iterate it because I think I have even better understanding of it.
The argument is why China sucks at sci-fi. The iteration is why West sucks at sci-fi now.
Originally I claimed that China doesn't have sci-fi because sci-fi is an "uniquely western" type of storytelling emerging from the extent that the industrial revolution influenced western culture. I consider science fiction to be little more than technology-themed mythology and science-themed fantasy.
One of the most "hard" and well-known science fiction novels and stories is Carl Sagan's "Contact" which isn't about science at all but about resolving the philosophical dilemma of faith vs rationality and religion vs science. The science in the story is more competent but it's hardly the focus. Not even "The Martian" has science as its main focus. It's a feel-good, can-do motivational story. It's a self-help manual in space.
And that's because ultimately art is about managing emotional states through cognitive metaphor. Art is about affecting emotion, not the rational mind. Science fiction doesn't inspire us for scientific development which in reality is mundane and mostly requiring tremendous expenditure of time, effort and patience and very rarely - if ever - progresses through genuine leaps of innovation. On the other hand civilisation does progress through leaps of innovation (it's called "punctuated equilibrium" in evolutionary theory) because the propagation of information in population is identical to propagation of information through any medium.
Literally Einstein's relativity applies - just think of noosphere as spacetime.
My point is that the reason why China doesn't have good sci-fi is because it never had a quantum leap of cultural consciousness between stages of technological development which would require Chinese culture to resolve negative emotional states concerning uncertainty and fear of future that the change of the world brings.
Now what I consider the fascinating hypothesis is this:
Every civilisation consists of two general "spaces" where change takes place - the spiritual/cultural and the physical/material.
If both these spaces change at the same rate then the mass consciousness of the population understands the change and doesn't need to process fear or uncertainty regarding it to the same extent that it usually does with more "human" issues like social conflict or the existential challenges of every individual.
When the two spaces change at different rates then the emotional fallout causes the culture to produce narratives resolving the negative emotions caused by either encounter with the unknown (e.g. contact with a more developed civilisation) or loss of things known (collapse of existing civilisation).
Culture which have not experienced such shifts will not produce narratives and therefore the culture will not have an intuitive understanding of the narrative and whenever it tries to work with such genre it will feel inauthentic or shallow.
Note that Japan - the only Eastern country that has embraced a radical cultural shift that mirrored Western industrial revolution - has fairly competent sci-fi that often outmatches Western stories. (It also has one of the best mythological re-tellings with Gojira).
So why hasn't China been affected? The answer - and the reason why I re-iterate this argument - lies in how culture is produced and disseminated.
Cultural production is affected by the same economic factors as any other form of production. Everything we do - industry or culture - is information transformation in a medium. Language evolution is no different from evolution of biotechnology or semiconductor engineering. Therefore as long as producers of culture and cultural artifacts are both preserved the progress is linear. When one is missing it becomes chaotic. When both are missing we have total extinction.
If cultural production is not disturbed then it is a linear progress. because innovation and inertia will be almost at equilibrium If cultural production is disturbed then it becomes more chaotic and we have "quantum leaps" of cultural "extinction" and "explosion".
And if culture undergoes extinction then the next explosion occurs without prior context and therefore it produces uncertainty and consequently strong emotions - fear, excitement etc.
China is extremely stable in civilisational terms. There are hardly any technological or demographic shifts. The subsequent generations of cultural and political structures mostly occur in the same geographical space and the size of population preserves past culture so that cultural shift caused by demographic change is slow.
West is extremely chaotic in civilisational terms. The subsequent generations occur in different places and the populations are small so demographic change leads to fast changes. Cultural production is constantly disrupted. Bronze Age collapse. Islamic conquests. Mongol invasions wiping out ME civilisations. Black Death. Colonisation of Americas.
Nothing comparable exists in China's history, Even Mongols failed against the sheer size of China's population.
So to close off my argument:
Western science-fiction is a mythological tale of a rural traditional religious world encountering urban revolutionary materialistic world.
It made sense in the West because large cities and mass production did not exist in the West between late antiquity and the industrial era and technological progress was heavily intertwined with religious practice as monasteries and religious schools were centers of learning and innovation until the "Enlightenment".
In China the opposite was true. Large cities and large scale industry as well as large "middle class" existed already during Tang dynasty.
In the West Rome had 1m people, then Constantinople had 0,5m and then cities became comparatively tiny - 50 thousand or less. Baghdad was the greatest near city (and it produces its own stories from the era!). At the same time China has many large cities and the imperial centres (Chang'an, Hangzou etc) are 1m or more.
Western sci-fi makes sense because it communicates how a farmer's son deals with industrial civilisation - it's sheer scale and rate of change - and that was the experience of majority of population both in 19th century Europe and 20th century America (baby boom).
That's why Europe's sci-fi is best at turn of 19/20th century and America has best sci-fi from 20th. The golden age of sci-fi corresponds with population boom because sci-fi is a fairytale. Robots are monsters. Spaceships are sailships. Astronauts are sailors. Planets are countries. Aliens are other cultures. Etc.
What is there that China's history doesn't already have? Huge ships? Zhang He. Huge cities? Chang'an. Innovation? Commercially available in imperial centres to any peasant who can pay. Great construction? Everywhere around. And importantly: learning is not religiously restricted but creates foundation of civil hierarchy!
Finally let's not forget that to Archimedes most of modern technology wouldn't seem like magic at all until late 20th century. Antikythera mechanism baffles people and it was invented in antiquity. Romans had stories of travel to the moon!
There's nothing that Western civilisation has that China - both its intellectual elites and society as a whole - fears because it doesn't understand it. On the other hand the population explosion in the West enabled by technological progress creates many new people who overwhelm the culture that has adapted to smaller numbers of cultural consumers.
And that leaves many of these new people like abandoned children and abandoned children create fairytales to deal with fear.
And that's where sci-fi comes from. If you haven't experienced that type of childhood you will never be able to create the art that resolves the trauma.
Western mastery of sci-fi and China's failure at it is not about technology but about population shifts over time.
And that is also surprisingly aptly represented in Liu Cixin's "Three Body Problem" which is a horrible sci-fi story because it isn't a sci-fi story. It's a "sci-fi" metaphor about the clash of China and West. The three suns of Trisolaris aren't suns. They're cultural centers: North America, Europe and Japan. The rise and fall of Trisolaran civilisations represents the chaotic evolution of western culture.
China - much like Eearth in TBP - understood the concept of Western technological advancement on an emotional level. It just couldn't replicate it in time to respond in kind. Therefore Chinese sci-fi could only reflect frustration rather than fear.
Unlike fear frustration makes for poor storytelling so unless frustrated people are in charge of culture (like the "woke" parasitic elite) nobody produces such art because nobody wants to consume it. China is not frustrated because China is on the way up while America (the cultural center of the west) is on the way down. It's reflected in the art.
And that's why China's sci-fi sucks and new Western sci-fi sucks but old Western sci-fi is amazing.
Which is why both the "woke" and "anti-woke" cultural products are so dumb, infuriating and boring. Just as your pointless exchanges. So stop them. Nobody is interested in it other than the frustrated people.
Anyway...where was I? Ah... ironing the laundry. Now that's a frustrating task...
The argument is why China sucks at sci-fi. The iteration is why West sucks at sci-fi now.
Originally I claimed that China doesn't have sci-fi because sci-fi is an "uniquely western" type of storytelling emerging from the extent that the industrial revolution influenced western culture. I consider science fiction to be little more than technology-themed mythology and science-themed fantasy.
One of the most "hard" and well-known science fiction novels and stories is Carl Sagan's "Contact" which isn't about science at all but about resolving the philosophical dilemma of faith vs rationality and religion vs science. The science in the story is more competent but it's hardly the focus. Not even "The Martian" has science as its main focus. It's a feel-good, can-do motivational story. It's a self-help manual in space.
And that's because ultimately art is about managing emotional states through cognitive metaphor. Art is about affecting emotion, not the rational mind. Science fiction doesn't inspire us for scientific development which in reality is mundane and mostly requiring tremendous expenditure of time, effort and patience and very rarely - if ever - progresses through genuine leaps of innovation. On the other hand civilisation does progress through leaps of innovation (it's called "punctuated equilibrium" in evolutionary theory) because the propagation of information in population is identical to propagation of information through any medium.
Literally Einstein's relativity applies - just think of noosphere as spacetime.
My point is that the reason why China doesn't have good sci-fi is because it never had a quantum leap of cultural consciousness between stages of technological development which would require Chinese culture to resolve negative emotional states concerning uncertainty and fear of future that the change of the world brings.
Now what I consider the fascinating hypothesis is this:
Every civilisation consists of two general "spaces" where change takes place - the spiritual/cultural and the physical/material.
If both these spaces change at the same rate then the mass consciousness of the population understands the change and doesn't need to process fear or uncertainty regarding it to the same extent that it usually does with more "human" issues like social conflict or the existential challenges of every individual.
When the two spaces change at different rates then the emotional fallout causes the culture to produce narratives resolving the negative emotions caused by either encounter with the unknown (e.g. contact with a more developed civilisation) or loss of things known (collapse of existing civilisation).
Culture which have not experienced such shifts will not produce narratives and therefore the culture will not have an intuitive understanding of the narrative and whenever it tries to work with such genre it will feel inauthentic or shallow.
Note that Japan - the only Eastern country that has embraced a radical cultural shift that mirrored Western industrial revolution - has fairly competent sci-fi that often outmatches Western stories. (It also has one of the best mythological re-tellings with Gojira).
So why hasn't China been affected? The answer - and the reason why I re-iterate this argument - lies in how culture is produced and disseminated.
Cultural production is affected by the same economic factors as any other form of production. Everything we do - industry or culture - is information transformation in a medium. Language evolution is no different from evolution of biotechnology or semiconductor engineering. Therefore as long as producers of culture and cultural artifacts are both preserved the progress is linear. When one is missing it becomes chaotic. When both are missing we have total extinction.
If cultural production is not disturbed then it is a linear progress. because innovation and inertia will be almost at equilibrium If cultural production is disturbed then it becomes more chaotic and we have "quantum leaps" of cultural "extinction" and "explosion".
And if culture undergoes extinction then the next explosion occurs without prior context and therefore it produces uncertainty and consequently strong emotions - fear, excitement etc.
China is extremely stable in civilisational terms. There are hardly any technological or demographic shifts. The subsequent generations of cultural and political structures mostly occur in the same geographical space and the size of population preserves past culture so that cultural shift caused by demographic change is slow.
West is extremely chaotic in civilisational terms. The subsequent generations occur in different places and the populations are small so demographic change leads to fast changes. Cultural production is constantly disrupted. Bronze Age collapse. Islamic conquests. Mongol invasions wiping out ME civilisations. Black Death. Colonisation of Americas.
Nothing comparable exists in China's history, Even Mongols failed against the sheer size of China's population.
So to close off my argument:
Western science-fiction is a mythological tale of a rural traditional religious world encountering urban revolutionary materialistic world.
It made sense in the West because large cities and mass production did not exist in the West between late antiquity and the industrial era and technological progress was heavily intertwined with religious practice as monasteries and religious schools were centers of learning and innovation until the "Enlightenment".
In China the opposite was true. Large cities and large scale industry as well as large "middle class" existed already during Tang dynasty.
In the West Rome had 1m people, then Constantinople had 0,5m and then cities became comparatively tiny - 50 thousand or less. Baghdad was the greatest near city (and it produces its own stories from the era!). At the same time China has many large cities and the imperial centres (Chang'an, Hangzou etc) are 1m or more.
Western sci-fi makes sense because it communicates how a farmer's son deals with industrial civilisation - it's sheer scale and rate of change - and that was the experience of majority of population both in 19th century Europe and 20th century America (baby boom).
That's why Europe's sci-fi is best at turn of 19/20th century and America has best sci-fi from 20th. The golden age of sci-fi corresponds with population boom because sci-fi is a fairytale. Robots are monsters. Spaceships are sailships. Astronauts are sailors. Planets are countries. Aliens are other cultures. Etc.
What is there that China's history doesn't already have? Huge ships? Zhang He. Huge cities? Chang'an. Innovation? Commercially available in imperial centres to any peasant who can pay. Great construction? Everywhere around. And importantly: learning is not religiously restricted but creates foundation of civil hierarchy!
Finally let's not forget that to Archimedes most of modern technology wouldn't seem like magic at all until late 20th century. Antikythera mechanism baffles people and it was invented in antiquity. Romans had stories of travel to the moon!
There's nothing that Western civilisation has that China - both its intellectual elites and society as a whole - fears because it doesn't understand it. On the other hand the population explosion in the West enabled by technological progress creates many new people who overwhelm the culture that has adapted to smaller numbers of cultural consumers.
And that leaves many of these new people like abandoned children and abandoned children create fairytales to deal with fear.
And that's where sci-fi comes from. If you haven't experienced that type of childhood you will never be able to create the art that resolves the trauma.
Western mastery of sci-fi and China's failure at it is not about technology but about population shifts over time.
And that is also surprisingly aptly represented in Liu Cixin's "Three Body Problem" which is a horrible sci-fi story because it isn't a sci-fi story. It's a "sci-fi" metaphor about the clash of China and West. The three suns of Trisolaris aren't suns. They're cultural centers: North America, Europe and Japan. The rise and fall of Trisolaran civilisations represents the chaotic evolution of western culture.
China - much like Eearth in TBP - understood the concept of Western technological advancement on an emotional level. It just couldn't replicate it in time to respond in kind. Therefore Chinese sci-fi could only reflect frustration rather than fear.
Unlike fear frustration makes for poor storytelling so unless frustrated people are in charge of culture (like the "woke" parasitic elite) nobody produces such art because nobody wants to consume it. China is not frustrated because China is on the way up while America (the cultural center of the west) is on the way down. It's reflected in the art.
And that's why China's sci-fi sucks and new Western sci-fi sucks but old Western sci-fi is amazing.
Which is why both the "woke" and "anti-woke" cultural products are so dumb, infuriating and boring. Just as your pointless exchanges. So stop them. Nobody is interested in it other than the frustrated people.
Anyway...where was I? Ah... ironing the laundry. Now that's a frustrating task...
I enjoyed your general thought process and think it explains well the development of science fiction in the West and Japan.
But I think you’re missing a pretty basic factor: book sales. The production of any work of fiction is most immediately explained by market forces. There would be no science fiction if writers couldn’t sell their novels successfully.
The reason this matters is, Chinese writers spent decades basically being unable to publish anything that wasn’t Party approved during the Mao days. Then when China finally opened its economy, the West and Japan already had mature science fiction industries that just flooded the Chinese market with their seminal works & ideas, denying local writers of any chance to develop.
This is called first movers advantage and it works the same way as any other example of it, historically. It’s why China had to put a quota on imported films, shows, games, etc. in order to prevent local industries from being totally wiped out by them. With science fiction this was much harder to do because, being relatively niche to begin with, most fans just consumed them via internet piracy and boot legs which effectively got past the bans.
The end result is that there’s not much great science fiction in China today because the low hanging fruit ideas have already been picked by Western and Japanese creators. While the higher hanging fruits are just that much harder to reach so they come by far less frequently, which is also why you’re under the impression that Western science fiction sucks today. There’s only so many new ideas considering, as you said, we are no longer in the middle of a period as disruptive to society as the Industrial Revolution was.
But I think you’re missing a pretty basic factor: book sales. The production of any work of fiction is most immediately explained by market forces. There would be no science fiction if writers couldn’t sell their novels successfully.
The reason this matters is, Chinese writers spent decades basically being unable to publish anything that wasn’t Party approved during the Mao days. Then when China finally opened its economy, the West and Japan already had mature science fiction industries that just flooded the Chinese market with their seminal works & ideas, denying local writers of any chance to develop.
This is called first movers advantage and it works the same way as any other example of it, historically. It’s why China had to put a quota on imported films, shows, games, etc. in order to prevent local industries from being totally wiped out by them. With science fiction this was much harder to do because, being relatively niche to begin with, most fans just consumed them via internet piracy and boot legs which effectively got past the bans.
The end result is that there’s not much great science fiction in China today because the low hanging fruit ideas have already been picked by Western and Japanese creators. While the higher hanging fruits are just that much harder to reach so they come by far less frequently, which is also why you’re under the impression that Western science fiction sucks today. There’s only so many new ideas considering, as you said, we are no longer in the middle of a period as disruptive to society as the Industrial Revolution was.
Seriously, asking China to have sci-fi stuff like Star Wars and Ghost in the Shell, like the US and Japan in the pre-2010s, is delusional. We were busy trying to build a functioning society and a wealthy country first that would set us up for the future, no one had the time for such creativity.
Our creativity only bloomed after the mid-2010s because all the younger people grew up in a wealthier and better society. I can guarantee that none of you will speak about this issue by 2040. If anything, China will return to being the center of cultural export once it surpasses the US.