Slouching · Towards · Bethlehem

All I can think of is, "Welcome to the Nevins family, Henry. We hope you survive the experience." But that's because I'm a comics geek.

His mother wants me to add that he has big eyes, a bow-shaped mouth, curly light brown hair, and a cone head. And perfect skin.

(Picture to follow when I get close to the camera).

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Taken from Stefan Landsberger's Chinese Propaganda Poster Pages, which I'm resentful of not knowing about until now. Thankfully, Alan Baumler at Frog in a Well took care of that.

Many more images, equally good.

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"...the Indonesian wüxia pulps of the 1920s and 1930s, including Kiam Hiap Monthly Magazine (1931-1936?), Jianxia Xiaoshuo Yuekan (1931-1935?), Boe Hiap (1936-1942), Tjerita Silat dan Gaib (1936-1937), Gie Hiap (1937-1942), and Semangat Silat (1938-1940), are held in fragmentary numbers in the Jakarta Museum, but nowhere else..."

Wüxia pulps! Gone, alas, forever. Damn.

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Current Music:	"Angelina," Louis Prima

(Seriously--look at this line-up of authors: Michael Chabon, Neal Stephenson, James P. Blaylock, Joe R. Lansdale, Mary Gentle, Ted Chiang, Michael Moorcock, Jay Lake, Molly Brown, Stepan Chapman, Ian R. MacLeod, Rachel Pollack, Paul Di Filippo, Rick Klaw, Jess Nevins, Bill Baker. Never mind that I'm in the "and puppet show"/"one of these things is not like the other" category here. Isn't that a killer array? And for only $14.95, too! So, buy, already!)

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Current Music:	"Narcolepsy," Ben Folds

Pulp Heroes has now surpassed Victoriana in word count, and I haven't written the appendices yet, and my research isn't over. (Indian popular literature is, not surprisingly, vast, and even with the language barrier there are many books to go through before I can be satisfied that I've done due diligence as far as the subcontinent's popular culture is concerned).

Uh-oh.

Fortunately, Pulp Heroes can be put in two columns, with a smaller point font, without hurting the book or making it less readable, which wasn't the case with Victoriana, so Pulp Heroes will still be 150-200 pages less than Victoriana. Still...oy.

Numbers: 5,563 entries, with 1,503 of those from 42 countries other than the U.S. or England. (I finally got to add something from Mongolia with this last entry. Still working on Korea, though, and sub-Saharan Africa remains mostly unrepresented).

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Found on Airminded.

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I'm reading Literary Migrations: Traditional Chinese Fiction in Asia (17-20th centuries) (Claudine Salmon ed, 1987, Beijing: International Culture Publishing Corporation), a far-more-interesting-than-it-sounds treatment of the influence of Chinese fiction on Asian countries--seriously, it's full of tantalizing stuff that is once again making me gnash my teeth over not being able to read anything but Romance languages--and in Boris Riftin's "Mongolian Translations of Old Chinese Novels and Stories" there's an anecdote about two Russian academics traveling to the "Lamaist monastery Songzhu si in Peking" to buy copies of "the much sought-after manuscripts of Mongolian novels [that is, of Chinese novels translated into Mongolian]." See, Chinese novels translated into Mongolian were hot commodities in Mongolia and had been since the mid-17th century. (Only in manuscript form, however--there wasn't a Mongolian publishing industry as such until the 1920s).

Only problem for the Russian academics is that a) the translated novels were such hot commodities that the Russian academics were forced into a bidding war with other buyers, both Russian, Mongolian, Chinese, and others, to get the manuscripts, and b) getting the manuscripts back to Mongolia to sell would be difficult, since there was a very real chance they'd be attacked on the way back by bandits wanting to get the manuscripts and sell them for themselves.

Two-fisted manuscript acquisition in the Far East! Soviet librarians versus Mongolian bandits and rogue booksellers on the steppes of Mongolia! Tell me your heart doesn't sing at the prospect.

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Current Music:	"Funk D*void," Carl Cox

My relevant story is "An Alternate History of Chinese Science Fiction", which I really should have come up with a better title for but oh well.

As they say, the honor is to be nominated, and I'm in excellent company.

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I scanned twenty images from Haruki Inoue's Nihon Robotto Soseiki and put them up as a gallery, since the photos are...well, see for yourself. And because Haruki's book, if it were published in English, would be on most geeks' bookshelves.

I mean, just look at them. I want to know the context to all of these, don't you?

Now, it's understandable that this is a recurring theme in modern Chinese popular culture, as the Ming were Han and the Qing were Manchu, and since most Chinese are Han, and the Manchus were seen as alien invaders and occupiers--a phrase that lingered for centuries (literally) was "Fan Qing, Fu Ming," or "Overthrow the Qing, Restore the Ming"--it makes sense that popular culture was produced for the demographic majority. That's how popular culture works, after all.

But, comparatively speaking, there is a marked lack of popular culture produced in the post-American Civil War South about heroic Confederate veterans and loyalists fighting against malign Yankee occupiers. (I agree with Scalzi, in case you're wondering).

Not to say there's none: Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind is the most obvious example. But there aren't really that many. William S. Hayward wrote three books--The Black Angel (1863), The Star of the South (1864), and The Rebel Privateer (1870)--about a heroic Confederate privateer, but Hayward was English, not from the South. And Blue and Gray Weekly ran sixteen stories, 1904-1905, about Will Prentiss, a teenaged Confederate soldier on the staff of Jefferson Davis.

Not a whole lot more, however, and none that I'm aware of that were specifically produced in the South, for the South, the way that the Chinese movies and novels were produced for the non-Manchu audiences. And it's not because the production of popular culture was more centralized in America, post-Civil War, than it was in China--it wasn't. When Michael Crichton's Dr. Ian Grant says, in Jurassic Park, that "life will find a way," that's just gibberish, like so much of Crichton's work and opinions. But "popular culture will find a way" is a fact. If there is an audience for something, popular culture will be created for it, whether in work requiring money and infrastructure to produce (novels, movies) or through cheaper and more informally produced routes (dime novels, newspaper serials, ballads).

Presumably there would have been an audience for pop culture of this sort in the American South. Probably there still is. So why isn't there more Heroic Confederate pop culture in America? What am I missing?

Edit: And now I'm wondering if there's any or much American pop culture, produced 1866 to ~1914, about heroic Northerners fighting wicked Confederates in the South, as that would constitute the "heroic counterinsurgency" that princeofcairo was writing about the other day. Of course, he was interested in military sf rather than the post-Civil War stuff.

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Research Is Fun!

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Paper Cities is out now. Edited by our own squirrel_monkey, Paper Cities is a spiffy anthology of urban fantasy stories, and I was fortunate enough to be asked to write the introduction for it.

So, go, buy! It's well worth your money.

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I have occasionally touched on some of the more interesting things I've turned up from China, pre-World War Two--the Brain Tonic image, the Bad Girls post, and the Sifu-vs-Pope duel novel, among others.

The 1928 film Hangkong daxia, directed by Chen Tian, is another such. The main character, whose name has not survived, was loosely based on Zhang Huizan (a.k.a Zhang Huizhang, a.k.a. W.J. Chang) , "China's Lindbergh," the first Chinese pilot to successfully complete a long distance flight in Asia. (He was also a KMT general who Mao made an example of, after capturing him, in a particularly gruesome fashion). The film's hero is a wuxia, a wandering knight-errant who "practiced righteousness and observed loyalty" ("renxia haoyi") by flying around the Chinese countryside in his plane, seen above (in one of the few stills of the film to survive). In the film he rescues a lovely young woman from a bandit, nicknamed the "Flying Tiger." It turns out that the woman is a) a flying swordsman, like the film's hero, and b) his wife in the marriage arranged for him by his and her parents when he was a child.

The film ends--and this is really what caught my attention--with the pair of them flying off into the sunset: him in his plane, her on her own, using her kung fu to fly under her own power. Romantic image, no?

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Such coolness by the gate
as the tea-serving doll
brings another cup.

But Japanese robots really began with Tanaka Hisashige, a.k.a. "Japan’s Edison." Tanaka did a lot (as you’d expect with the Edison comparison) and created, among other things, the famous Yumihikidoji "boy archer" robot. But, more interestingly, he also created this:

That is the Mojikaki-ningyo, the "Writing Doll." Created by Tanaka sometime in the 1840s, it’s built without a single nail and can write four Chinese characters, including kotobuki, or "longevity." It’s a marvel of Edo craftsmanship and technology.

Naturally, it got stolen. Nobody knows how or when, exactly, but the Mojikaki-ningyo did turn up in 2003 in the collection of Harry Kellar, the "Dean of American Magicians," and Kellar did tour Japan in 1875/1876, so you can draw your own conclusions about just what happened.

Japan’s first modern robot was created in 1928 by Makoto Nishimura, as part of the formal celebration of Emperor Showa’s (a.k.a. Hirohito) ascension to the Chrysanthemum Throne.

The robot, Gakutensoku (or "learning from natural law"), was 7'8" tall, painted gold, could open and close its eyes, could smile, could puff out its cheeks, and at the beginning of each performance would touch its mace to its head and then begin to write. A novelist described one audience’s reaction:

"It started to write characters smoothly in a flowing hand. As if to express the agony of creation, it slowly shook his head from left to right. The movement was so natural it didn’t look like it was a machine. Unconsciously, the spectators began naturally imitating this movement, shaking their heads from left to right. This was funny because the humans looked like they were being controlled by the robot like marionettes."

Gakutensoku was exhibited in Kyoto in 1928 and then sent on tour to Germany. When it disappeared.

One of the starting points of the American otaku craze can be traced to the 1990 English translation of the three Yoshiyuki Tomino "Mobile Suit Gundam" novels.

What do all these things have in common?

Mojikaki-ningyo gets stolen by a white American in 1875. Japan shifts from undoing the unequal treaties forced on it by the white powers in the 1850s and 1860s to trying to make its military the equal of the white powers’. Japan begins sending spies into the Western countries. Japanese ultranationalism begins. The Black Ocean and Black Dragon Societies are founded. Meanwhile, Mojikaki-ningyo is brought to the U.S. in 1875 or 1876. The American management/labor clashes of the mid-1870s end shortly thereafter, as does the Panic of 1873. The U.S. lays the groundwork for its ascension as a world power in the 20th century.

Gakutensoku gets stolen by a white German in 1928. What follows in Japan is a domestic economic crisis, the lose of civilian power over the government, and the rise in power of the military.

The three "Mobile Suit Gundam" novels are translated into English in 1990s and snapped up by crazed American otakus. The Japanese bubble economy collapses soon thereafter, leading to the ushinawareta jūnen, the Japanese "lost decade." Meanwhile, the U.S. begins consuming Power Rangers, Pokemon, and a variety of J-Pop offerings. The English translation of the Gundam novels was one of the first official, licensed J-Pop products, which gave the imprimatur to the American otakus, who helped create the American craze for J-Pop, manga, and anime, so that there are more American consumers (numerically) of the latter than there are Japanese consumers. In other words, America, not Japan, is now the audience for J-Pop–it’s made for us, not its native audience. America has co-opted J-Pop.

It’s clear, isn’t it? When Japan makes a new robot, a white person steals it, and bad things happen to Japan. Japan, beware the white man! He will steal your best stuff and ruin your country!

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Who knows, someone may find this interesting.

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