China’s golden-age of science fiction pushes new boundaries at Hong Kong conference

Last November, Amy Leung Yuk-yiu began writing a science-fiction novel. She divided it into 80 episodes, each about 1,000 words long, and wrote one or two a day until January. Although it’s set in Hong Kong, it’s written in simplified Chinese because, as she explains, “Hong Kong is under Chinese control and I’m trying to target my audience”.

Leung, a tutor in an international school, was inspired by Ni Kuang, Hong Kong’s most famous science-fiction writer. Ni, who fled China in 1957, is probably best known as the creator of Wisely, his mystery-solving and alien-battling adventurer, whom he introduced to Hong Kong readers in a March 1963 column in newspaper Ming Pao. A constant theme in those stories is life as we know it being in danger of a hideous transformation by hostile invasionary forces. Some Hong Kong readers consider him highly prescient.

“I got inspired by him a lot,” Leung says. It is the unearthly hour of 8am on a recent Saturday morning in the JW Marriott hotel and the scanning of QR codes for Melon: Sci-Fi and Beyond, an all-day science-fiction conference, is taking place. Every­one’s hands glow with the various 21st-century communi­cation tablets they are clasping.

While we wait to go in, Leung summarises her novel, which is already posted online. (“I need to put it online because a lot of people steal my stuff.”) A Harvard graduate lives in Bel-Air – the one in Cyberport, not California – with his wife, who’s a former Miss Hong Kong and a graduate of the London School of Economics, plus a Mercedes convert­ible. A young woman becomes jealous. (“She thinks there is no conflict in the upper-class circle. Why is the world so unfair?”). After some computer hacking, attempted poisoning and adultery, the young woman is infected with a virus by the Harvard alumnus (“He has 1,000 sexual partners by his 30s”) and the Mercedes explodes in a fireball. Spoiler alert: it was all plotted by the wife.

As a study of the widening social chasm in post-Sars Hong Kong, this has definite merit but I am uncertain what defines it as science-fiction. “It talks about viruses, bacteria, sponta­ne­ous combustion, a combination of Aids and Ebola,” says Leung, a Columbia University graduate who lives in South Horizons. She looks a little alarmed. “Do you think it’s not science fiction? I like to investigate world issues. Why do some people hate others for no reason? What is social justice?”