The Chinese film industry got a rocket boost in February with the phenomenal success of sci-fi saga The Wandering Earth . Released on February 5, it took more than US$600 million at the domestic box office, making it the second-highest grossing film in China after Wu Jing’s 2017 military action film Wolf Warrior 2 , which took US$854 million. The film has also been picked up by Netflix, putting it in front of a potentially huge international audience. The Wandering Earth could be the film to spark China’s science fiction moviemaking The success of The Wandering Earth is being touted as a quantum leap forward for China’s film industry. While kung fu epics and historical romances have achieved limited traction overseas beyond the film festival and art house circuits, the country is banking on the potential of a genre that it regarded, until recently, as niche. Based on Liu Cixin’s bestselling 2000 novel of the same name, The Wandering Earth tells the story of efforts to propel the planet out of the solar system to escape looming destruction by the sun. The film’s huge popularity would have been unthinkable just five years ago, says Alex Li Zhaoxin, an editor at the Future Affairs Administration (FAA), an independent organisation dedicated to the promotion of science fiction in China. “At that time there wasn’t a viable science fiction industry in China,” Li says. A breakthrough came in 2015, he notes, when the American Hugo Awards – given annually for the best science fiction or fantasy works – awarded Liu the best novel prize in 2015 for The Three-Body Problem . The book has been translated into more than 30 languages and led to a national conversation about science fiction in China. The following year, Hao Jingfang’s Folding Beijing won the Hugo Award for best novelette. Li, who formerly worked at e-commerce giant JD.com and retailer Suning, says there are relatively few science fiction authors in China. “While we might not expect the scale of the Chinese science fiction market to reach that of the US any time soon, we’re hoping it will grow to the scale of Japan and Britain, which each have more than 100 established science fiction authors,” he says. Li says the FAA has signed up more than 100 Chinese science fiction authors, including Liu and Hao, but the majority have not yet made a breakthrough. It has raised 70 million yuan (US$10.4 million) from investors and start-up funds, which it uses to host writing workshops and conferences, and transform authors’ works into bankable franchises such as movies, animations and video games. The sci-fi bug appears to be spreading. Last May, 40,000 people visited the inaugural Asia-Pacific Science Fiction Convention held at the China Science and Technology Museum in Beijing. Organised by the FAA, the two-day event featured talks by science fiction authors including Liu and Canada’s Peter Watts. Also there was Timo Vuorensola, Finnish director of 2012 cult hit Iron Sky . In addition to talks on wormholes, intergalactic space travel and light sabres, visitors also got the chance to converge in fan clubs devoted to sci-fi classics such as Doctor Who and Star Trek . The history of science fiction in China dates back at least 100 years. The genre was introduced by Qing dynasty scholar and reformer Liang Qichao, who at the turn of the 20th century wrote his own books and translated Western novels into Chinese. Around the same time, a leading light in modern Chinese literature, Zhou Shuren – who wrote under the pen name Lu Xun – was also promoting the genre, and translated Japanese science fiction and Western classics such as Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and Journey to the Centre of the Earth into Chinese. Sci-fi enjoyed a resurgence in the 1990s, with another wave of translations of Western classics by Chinese publishing houses. New golden age for science fiction in China, and what it has to offer “This was especially the case for royalty-free public domain books like those by H.G. Wells and Jules Verne,” Li says. “But when the publishers looked for home-grown science fiction works for publication, they couldn’t find any.” China’s new generation of enthusiasts are looking closer to home for inspiration, says Ji Shaoting, a former Xinhua News Agency tech reporter who founded the FAA in 2016. She says the group works with technology institutions including the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ lunar probe centre and AI voice recognition giant iFlytek to promote popular science among the public. “Authors can learn about the latest tech advancements by visiting these institutions and get inspiration for story ideas,” Ji says. “Three young authors went to see the Chang’e 4 lunar spacecraft’s blast-off at the end of last year, and we brought Liu Cixin to see the 500-metre Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope in Guizhou.” Scientists have shared research with sci-fi writers on subjects as diverse as black holes, exoskeletons and liquid metal, she says. The Wandering Earth has a message: collective action tops individual freedom Other writers look to their own experiences to craft stories. Han Song, whose Hongse haiyang (Océans Rouges) was adapted into an animation last year, and whose short story Cold War and Couriers is in the process of being turned into a movie screenplay, says much of his inspiration comes from the everyday yet otherworldly experiences of life in modern China. “Taking the subway in Beijing is itself a surreal experience, because people don’t queue, and people of all ages are squeezed cheek by jowl on the train,” Han says. This inspired his novel Subway (2011), which portrays an apocalyptic world in which people engage in cannibalism and orgies. FAA author Stanley Chen Qiufan is already achieving international recognition for his work. Sponsored by the British Film Institute, the 37-year-old’s novel Waste Tide is being adapted into a feature film. Meanwhile, his Eros and The Animal Observers are being adapted into a television series in China. He wrote his first sci-fi work, The Bait , in 1997 at the age of 16, inspired by his mother. “The original idea came from my mum’s warning not to take or eat anything offered by strangers. This grew into a story about how human beings are being softened up to be slaves for an advanced alien civilisation,” Chen says. From the age of six Chen began visiting his local library, devouring all the sci-fi he could find by the likes of H.G. Wells and Arthur C. Clarke. He had a particular affinity for American-Canadian speculative fiction writer William Gibson. “Gibson gives the reader a sense of what the future is,” Chen says. “For good science fiction, the reader must be shocked by the text and the narrative. They can perceive a whole new world.” Chen, a Chinese language and arts graduate from Peking University, who has worked for search engine giant Google and its Chinese equivalent Baidu, set up the production house Thema Mundi in 2017 to develop science fiction franchises. “It’s too difficult to make a living from writing alone,” he says. “Only a few writers can live off the sale of adaptation rights. There is a huge science fiction fan base in China, but it will take time.” Li tends to agree. He says it could take a while for a work of Chinese sci-fi to go head-to-head with Western hits such as Interstellar and Avatar . “Nobody expected China could produce a movie like The Wandering Earth , because our movie industry in general still lags behind Hollywood,” Li says. “In spite of this success, we have to be objective. The movie doesn’t represent the standard of the industry as a whole .” Li says the success of Liu’s novel The Three-Body Problem can be attributed to the writer and its able English translator, Ken Liu. Credit for the success of Liu’s The Wandering Earth , however, should go to the film’s director, Frant Gwo, and superstar actor Wu Jing – who worked free of charge and helped with funding after the production ran out of money. Sci-fi talents like Gwo and Liu are rare in China, Li says. As if to underscore the generally dismal state of the industry, the premiere of a Chinese film adaptation of The Three-Body Problem has been pushed back several times, according to Chinese news portal Sixth Tone, due in part to "sky-high expectations for visual effects”. Despite these setbacks the FAA is developing several spin-offs from Liu’s novel. "We are incubating publishing and other media projects like movies and TV programmes," Li says. Contemporary writers are not waiting for that day. Inspired by China’s recent mission to the far side of the moon, Chen is in the throes of writing a short story about a rural Chinese girl who graduates as an agricultural biologist and joins a team of astronauts to grow food in space. “In a hundred years, China has experienced progress that the West took many centuries to achieve,” Chen says. “There is something very science-fictional and fantastical about this dramatic social transformation. Our space exploration will inspire people to read, write and think about technology, the universe and the future.”