The woes of talking animals and some New Weird solutions

I have a hard-and-fast rule: no talking animals allowed in adult literature, unless it’s Orwell’s Animal Farm or Pierre Boule’s Planet of the Apes. Okay, add to that some of Kafka’s short stories, but that’s it. Seriously, if an anthropomorphic animal crops up in any other book, I’m liable to start groaning loudly before jettisoning it altogether. You could build a house from the number of novels I’ve purchased, started reading and then swiftly abandoned. Half of them have chatty animals in them.

This bête noire first reared its ugly head while reading Michel Houellebecq some years ago. The bad boy of modern French literature, his first novel Whatever (pithily translated from the French Extension du domaine de la lutte) had me hooked until … the anti-hero’s animal fables started popping up. I don’t know what Houellebecq was thinking, but these Aesopian interludes practically ruined the whole story for me of a depressed computer engineer unable to get sex.

Four legs good, two legs bad 

Reading Animal Farm for the first time at school and learning all about allegory and how to pick out the veiled references to Stalinist Russia – now that was a real trip. It got me reading Aesop’s fables and Golding’s Lord of the Flies and re-evaluating those old Loony Tunes cartoons. But as a literary device, the fable swiftly loses its lustre, and so by the time I got to Houellebecq’s animal allegories, all I could do was mutter under my breath, “merde” (admittedly, he did redeem himself with his nihilistic sci-fi tale of cloning in The Possibility of an Island).

It’s for similar reasons that I developed such schizophrenic feelings towards Adrian Tchaikovsky’s award-winning sci-fi novel Children of Time. On the one hand, the descriptive imagination behind the Gilgamesh spaceship had me in awe: its technological deterioration, the intergenerational evolution/ revolution of its human cargo, the endless odyssey in search of a habitable planet … all crisply written and well thought out. In a secondary plot, however, Tchaikovsky decides to construct a whole freaking world out of the Aesopian fable. Every time the story shifted to Kern’s World, where a failed terraforming experiment has given an evolutionary leg up to a population of spiders, I started sighing and losing interest. For all its imaginative power, the spidery storyline just got sillier and sillier; and by the time I
arrived at the climactic chapters, where little spider-astronauts are launching themselves into space and attacking the human-manned spaceship, I could read no more. 

Eight legs good, two legs bad  (Photo: David Mark) 

Personally, I prefer David Wong’s This Book is Full of Spiders any day of the week. But I’m sure fans of the children’s classic Charlotte’s Web absolutely adored Tchaikovsky’s planet of intelligent, emotional spiders. That sounds a bit snarky, but it’s an observation rooted in culture and history. Talking animals have always been the mainstay of mythology, folk tales, fairy tales and children’s literature. Three Little Pigs and The Golden Compass and all that. With this sort of baggage, it takes a talented writer like Tchaikovsky to even convince an old cynic like myself to at least try reading an animal parable set in outer space. Perhaps I’ve simply lost touch with my ‘inner child’ – the Id, the source of creative energy – and am thus not as predisposed to hi-tech fairy tales as some. Heck, maybe I’m more in touch with my ‘inner adult’, the conservative, responsible, anal part of your Psyche; the surly professor in your first creative writing class threatening to throttle the first student who writes anything remotely related to talking animals.

The glowing reviews for Children of Time do seem to put me in the minority, as do the praises for Tchaikovsky’s sequel Children of Ruin, with its uplifted octopuses and utopia of humans and spiders living in peaceful harmony. Or maybe, just maybe, I’m more of a hard sci-fi reader rather than an all-embracing devotee of the fantasy genre. Indeed, Tchaikovsky did cut his teeth in fantasy writing; and personally speaking, I can’t abide any dragons that speak in fantasy films while sword fights bore me to tears, unless of course it’s John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981).

Whatever my psychological issues, I had even graver misgivings about The Child Garden by Geoff Ryman. Supposedly it’s a dystopic sci-fi novel aimed at adults; only it’s muddied by too many childish notions that steer it towards the section for young adult fantasy (maybe there’s a lesson to be learned here: never trust a sci-fi book with any form of child or children in its title – except for P.D. James’ 1992 novel Children of Men and the movie of the same name). Similar to Children of Time and its Kern’s World seeded with a gene-editing virus that inadvertently uplifts a superior race of spiders, The Child Garden gives us a semi-tropical London of the future where young humans are raised and educated by a vaguely described virus technology (another pet hate of mine: sci-fi authors who squeeze in miraculous ‘virus technologies’ without any real clue about glycoproteins or RNA and DNA).

Fantasy writing loves a good polar bear  (Photo: Stefan Keller)  

The main protagonist is a musical teenage prodigy who’s resistant to these unexplained pedagogical viruses. But if I was frustrated by the author’s lack of microbiological research, I was completely bamboozled by his protagonist’s lesbian relationship with – wait for it – a genetically engineered opera-singing polar bear. I tried my darndest to plough ahead, suspending my belief beyond all reason. Only I kept being reminded of Kungfu Panda at an LGBT rally. Needless to say, I couldn’t take this novel too seriously and soon abandoned ship. I should mention, though, that it has a heap of adult fans out there and actually won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1990.

The polar bear itself is a popular motif in animal-talking fantasy worlds. Goodreads lists 37 such novels featuring this carnivorous white bear, the vast majority being children’s literature, such as the armoured polar bears of The Golden Compass. But there’s also the adult-oriented Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada, about three generations of polar bears who “tell the stories of their lives in this strange and enchanting novel”. I had enough trouble copying out that cloying blurb let alone even thinking about reading such a book. Again, just me. Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, on the other hand, has become something of a cult classic – a political satire of modern Soviet life that features an enormous demonic black cat that talks and walks on two legs, thus following in the footsteps of the anti-Stalinist Animal Farm.

For my money though, the true heir to Orwellian postmodernism is Art Spiegelman’s Maus, the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize. Not only does his literary device of anthropomorphising the mice (Jews), cats (Germans) and pigs (Poles) afford a strangely different perspective of a horrifying piece of history, but the comic strip form transmutes the silliness of these walking-talking animals while attracting a newer readership to this most essential history lesson. Moreover, just like the frame narrative – which switches between the horrors of Auschwitz and the banal American existence of the protagonist’s father following the war – the graphic form in itself provides a bridge between the unthinkable (the Holocaust) and the ordinary (reading a comic book).

Whatever its true secret, Maus briefly rekindled that long-forgotten wonder I felt upon reading Animal Farm for the first time. But Maus is a special exception to the golden rule of no talking animals in creative writing class. And despite everything, I was still emotionally scarred by that opera-singing lesbian polar bear. Hence, it was with great trepidation that I approached Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Borne, which features nothing less than a gigantic mutant flying bear.

The idea sounds preposterous, but the novel is anything but. Believe me, I started and restarted it on my mini-iPad without being able to commit for a long time, so put out was I by the idea of this colossal bear occupying centre stage. What got me to finally click on ‘continue reading’ were promises of another VanderMeer-esque postapocalyptic province, this time laid waste by biotechnical experiments gone awry. A scenario that goes even further than his superlative sci-fi novel Annihilation. But whereas the sequels within the so-called Southern Reach Trilogy were rather disappointing, Borne is the true successor, taking up from where Annihilation left off. Only this time VanderMeer voyages from an alien environmental disaster zone to the land of the New Weird where the tropes of science fiction and fantasy are turned on their heads.

'Borne' features a gigantic flying bear - oh yeah

The giant flying bear known as Mord rules over a town devastated by the “Company”. The few human survivors must eke out an existence amongst ruins inhabited by mutants and hybrid creatures; the aborted biotech experiments of the Company, including Mord himself and his proxies: regular-sized transgenic bears who lust for blood and who view Mord as their god (stay with me here). Key to the narrative is the novel’s namesake, Borne, which is supposed to be neither human, nor animal, nor plant, but which inadvertently evokes memories of that giant talking carnivorous plant in Little Shop of Horrors. In any event, Borne starts out as this small hybrid squid-cum-sea-anemone before growing into an enormous protean creature that can turn itself into just about anything. Naturally, there’s a final showdown between the two titans of Mord and Borne, and a perilous journey to the wreckage of the Company where our human protagonists learn the secrets behind the biotech horrors unleashed upon their town; all of it described in lush, postapocalyptic detail.

Borne is considered emblematic of the New Weird, a literary genre that’s a bit tricky to pin down. In the introduction to Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s anthology The New Weird, it’s described as “a type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts … traditional fantasy, largely by choosing realistic, complex real-world models as the jumping off point for creation of settings that may combine elements of both science fiction and fantasy.”

With his wife, Ann, Jeff VanderMeer also edited The Big Book of Classic Fantasy (he’s a busy man) and it’s probably from this big book chock full of talking animals whence sprung inspiration for Borne and Mord. But where Ryman’s opera-singing polar bear fails, VanderMeer succeeds with his giant transgenic bear and its fanged proxies. Most likely because 1) Mord never actually speaks despite his über-intelligence and aerial abilities 2) the apocalyptic setting of bioengineered mutation and failed experimentation lends the story scientific credence in the vein of The Island of Doctor Moreau and 3) like Spiegelman’s Maus, the complexity and baroque violence of the New Weird transcends anthropomorphic animals and fairy tales to depict a hideous new reality. It doesn’t hurt either that VanderMeer’s writing knocks it out of the park on just about every page.

Another exponent of the New Weird is China Miéville. Like VanderMeer’s Borne, Miéville’s novels cannot be neatly slotted into one specific sci-fi or fantasy subgenre. For writers like Miéville, every story is an exercise in destroying a genre’s traditional conventions, breaking down boundaries and messing with stereotypes. This is why a giant spider with the hands of a human baby and which likes to spout poetry while travelling between dimensions works quite well within Miéville’s convoluted Bas-Lag series, whereas the spidery planet in Children of Time trips over itself in its emotional earnestness. David Wong’s sci-fi/ horror-comedies probably fall somewhere between the New Weird and bizarro fiction, although Wong is usually less interested in fantasy and more into sci-fi and cosmic fart jokes.

But if I can chuckle over a David Wong novel and accept the fantastical contortions of VanderMeer or Miéville, then perhaps I haven’t completely lost touch with my inner child. I’m not sure I could read something like Lord of the Rings again, but I did enjoy watching Game of Thrones as much as the next person. The dragons didn’t bother me either and I even developed a soft spot for that undead ice dragon in Season 7. But I swear, if those dragons ever started speaking I would have groaned so loudly before turning off that show for good.

© Tony McGowan

Separating the science fiction from Chinese censorship and Mad Sheila

China banned the popular video game ‘Plague Inc.’ in February 2020 because of uncomfortable parallels with the growing pandemic. Considering China’s ongoing paranoia over the origins of covid-19, it’ll be interesting to see how its burgeoning crop of sci-fi writers come to grips with this topic in coming years. Or how Hollywood, so eager for access to China’s lucrative movie market, will tap dance around the pandemic in its own sci-fi blockbusters. 

Chinese dystopian novels such as Chan Koonchung’s ‘Fat Years’ – which makes veiled references to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 – and Yan Lianke’s political satires are already banned. Likewise verboten is Max Brooks’ apocalyptic zombie novel ‘World War Z’, where a mysterious new disease shows up in China; and the government responds by suppressing news of the infection, threatening several doctors who try to sound the alarm, all of which allows the virus to spread beyond its borders. Sound familiar?

Surprisingly though, you can buy a copy of Orwell’s ‘1984’ or ‘Animal Farm’ in Shanghai, or even Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ in spite of those obvious parallels, at least to Western observers, between modern-day China and the totalitarian surveillance state. There’s even a Chinese edition of Michael Crichton’s pandemic novel ‘The Andromeda Strain’ and Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’. 

Chinese edition of Brave New World

Such foreign intellectual books are only read by a small elite in China and so they tend to fly under the radar. Yet the censors will surgically excise any references to Mao’s China … or Winnie the Pooh. At the moment, in fact, China is busy rewriting school history books in Hong Kong. Then you have the famous ‘Three Ts’: Tiananmen, Tibet, and Taiwan, all of which will end up in an Orwellian memory hole faster than you can say Richard Gere. Chinese writers themselves have to navigate a highly sensitive political and social landscape fraught with censorship, not unlike the novelists of the former Soviet Union. But if any genre has the versatility and innuendo of not being tied to any side of China’s political spectrum, it’s science fiction. Like Communist Russia, Chinese writers have found that the genre lends itself to futuristic imaginings and alternative universes that can circumnavigate or disguise prickly topics. Especially if those sci-fi writers or filmmakers include some nationalistic nuance while chasing their own creative dreams.

This nationalist strain first came to my attention while reading Liu Cixin’s otherwise incredible 2006 novel ‘The Three Body Problem’. It’s a sprawling, dazzling space opera that can be boiled down to a China-led planetary resistance against a pending alien takeover from afar, along the way discussing "dark forest theory" and dimension-destroying warfare. As I ploughed through all three tomes of this series, I was at once wowed by its sci-fi inventiveness and increasingly perturbed by its China-centric visions of the future. At first, I thought it was because I had spent a lifetime reading and watching American and British sci-fi. And indeed, there are enough American-led and American-filled spaceships in the genre to fill up the entire Andromeda Galaxy. Another example of American cultural imperialism, some might argue; while others might contend that American writers are perhaps entitled to populate their fictitious spacecrafts with their ilk, having landed the first man on the moon and now a crop of rovers on Mars. 

Ken Liu, translator of ‘The Three Body Problem’, was quoted in 2016 as saying that, “When you go into space, you become part of this overall collective called ‘humanity’. You’re no longer Chinese, American, Russian or whatever. Your culture is left behind.” For a preeminent translator of science fiction, it’s ironic just how wrong Ken Liu was about the near-future of his genre, not to mention the evolving space race between the U.S and China. For it appears the Chinese are taking a leaf out of the American playbook by rushing to assert their own brand of sci-fi nationalism alongside real-world advances, such as their landing a rover on Mars and another on the dark side of the moon. Those lingering suspicions about Liu Cixin, meanwhile, were finally borne out by the transformation of his novella ‘The Wandering Earth’ into China’s highest-grossing science-fiction film of the same name in 2019. Once again we have the scenario of a China-led planetary resistance, this time against a future global catastrophe rather than aliens, which brings nations together in a herculean effort to save mankind by rocket-boosting Earth all the way to Alpha Centauri. 

Wandering Earth's brotherly love vs. communist propaganda poster

Whatever the naivety of Cixin’s cultural viewpoints within this far-fetched story, the Chinese scriptwriters made sure to excavate and amplify the story’s nationalistic undercurrents, so much so that China basically becomes the saviour of the universe (cue Flash theme song). For all its spectacular effects, the movie’s Sino-jingoistic perspectives are worrisome at times, above all that climactic scene where diverse nationalities, including Russia and even Japan, all come together to selflessly work as one – under Chinese hegemony, naturally – to get some thruster or other restarted. All that brotherly pushing and grunting for one common goal is like something out of a propaganda poster for the Cultural Revolution.  

Still, it’s a far cry from China’s recent past when you couldn’t direct or show any films about ghosts, zombies or ‘un-scientific’ subjects. The Chinese government’s aversion to zombie films, in fact, was supposedly the main reason why Paramount cancelled a planned sequel to ‘World War Z’. Beijing has apparently taken a more lenient attitude in recent times, yet the sex and violence of ‘Game of Thrones’ remains heavily censored while seven minutes of blood and guts was cut from the cinematic release of ‘Resident Evil: The Final Chapter’ (2016). It’s a small wonder that the latter made it into any Chinese cinemas at all, since the South Korean zombie sensation ‘Train to Busan’ (2016) had to be illegally downloaded by China’s millennials.

Censorship rules are as murky and arbitrary as ever in China; and of all the sci-fi tropes, it’s not zombies but time travel that has been the stickiest of all. The censors claim that the subgenre disrespects history, when in reality they fear its potential to comment upon past and present. Despite the franchise of ‘Back to the Future’ being banned for years in China, the makers of ‘Looper’ (2012) overcame such antipathy with a neat trick: showcasing a flatteringly futuristic China within the time-travel plot. The producers of this Bruce Willis sci-fi adventure even went so far as to add a scene in which a character says, “I’m from the future. You should go to China.” But after years of suspicion and vilification, sci-fi is starting to establish itself as a rare exception to creative expression in China, as Jing Tsu recounts in the Financial Times. China, in fact, is already cementing its position as a sci-fi powerhouse, with its growing army of sci-fi nerds now seeking to host the World Science Fiction Convention in 2023. From the perspective of earth’s Star-Wars-quoting geeks, this is like bidding for the Olympic Games. As such, Chinese science fiction is emerging as “an unexpected element in a broader initiative of cultural diplomacy aimed at projecting a positive and engaging impression of the country abroad,” Jing Tsu informs us, somewhat in the tone of Stan Marsh in his South Park bedroom trying to write his death-metal biography while a Chinese censor stands over his shoulder (in response to the scathing ridicule of this episode, South Park has been entirely ‘band’ in China).    

Mad Sheila riffs off Mad Max

The world’s nerds are only now waking up to just how much influence China is exerting over the future of science fiction. For fear of offending the Chinese, a Tibetan character in the Marvel comics ‘Doctor Strange’ was turned into an innocuous Celt for the 2016 film adaptation; whereas that outspoken Tibetan activist Richard Gere never got another decent gig after ‘The Mothman Prophecies’ in 2002. Michael Bay sucks up to the Communist Party big time in ‘Transformers: Age of Extinction’ (2014) while Paramount removed from the movie ‘World War Z’ (2013) any mention of the zombie plague originating in China, as is the storyline in the banned novel. ‘V for Vendetta’ (2006) was removed from iQiyi and other Chinese streaming platforms in August 2020 because of that damned Guy Fawkes mask being used as a symbol of resistance in the Hong Kong protests. George Miller’s Oscar-winning ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ (2015) failed to secure a theatrical release in China, largely to make way for an unashamed local rip-off, which is just another form of overt nationalism-slash-censorship. The cheap Chinese version translates as ‘Mad Sheila’, never mind that the Mad Max franchise stems from Australia where the term ‘mad sheila’ is likely to conjure up images of a drunken foul-mouthed female going berserk in a pub. From the poster to the trailer, to even the on-screen credits, the Chinese ‘Mad Shelia’ incompetently rips off Miller’s postapocalyptic universe, which is actually nothing new. ‘Mad Max 2’ (1981) spawned a whole subgenre of dystopian homoerotic road warriors, mostly Italian for some reason.

Since China’s box office is just too important, it is now commonly accepted that there will be no Chinese villains in any Hollywood film in the years to come. Quite the opposite in fact. Humanity is saved by the Chinese in the disaster movie ‘2012’ because the Chinese government had the foresight to build life-saving arcs. In ‘Gravity’ (2013), Sandra Bullock survives by getting herself to a Chinese space station. In the 2015 Ridley Scott film ‘The Martian’, China’s space program saves the day for Matt Damon marooned on Mars. ‘Arrival’, the unusual 2016 alien invasion film, also predicates its happy ending on Chinese forces coming to the rescue. In extolling the saving qualities of China in all of these sci-fi films, the writers probably didn’t imagine they’d also be extolling concentration camps for religious minorities (or ‘joycamps’ as they’re known in 1984 newspeak). Other minorities, such as gays and lesbians, are also singled out by the Chinese. As recounted in the PEN report, Beijing’s censors commonly demand that kisses between same-sex characters be removed, in movies like ‘Star Trek Beyond’ (2016) and ‘Alien: Covenant’ (2017). No place for gays in China’s utopic futures. Or as that mad sheila at the Aussie pub might say, no poofs allowed.

Hollywood studios have been accused of sending their scripts in advance to the Chinese censors so as to pave their way for cinematic release in the land of 1.4 billion potential viewers. U.S. producers are even now supposedly pre-empting the censorship boards by getting their scriptwriters to come up with films that they know will pass the Chinese litmus test, such as Godzilla vs. Kong (2021), where you’ll certainly see no same-sex tongue kissing between Tibetan monks. In addition to the ‘Three T’s’ of Chinese censorship, might we now already be dealing with the Three Ps: Pandemic, Poofs and Winnie the Pooh?

Chinese meddling in Hollywood, so astutely lampooned by South Park, is affecting all sorts of film genres and forms of pop culture. John Cena, star of the latest ‘Fast and Furious’ movie was forced to publicly apologize for casually referring to Taiwan as "a country”, lest he place in jeopardy the release of F9 in the biggest movie market of the world. As if a Chinese-made AK-47 were pointed at his head, musclebound John Cena issued this grovelling apology in Mandarin. Cena’s not the only Hollywood star to be co-opted into Chinese ideology. One has to look no further than Matt Damon in the big-budget, propaganda-riddled historical fantasy, ‘The Great Wall’ (2016). The James Bond film, ‘Skyfall’ (2012) was only allowed to open in China after a scene in which Bond kills a security guard in Shanghai was cut, as too references to prostitution in Macau. Subtitles were even changed to hide references to torture by Chinese security forces (remember, no more Chinese villains, aside from the loveable Mr. Chow in ‘The Hangover’ perhaps).

No Taiwanese or Japanese flags allowed

Because being excluded from China can be so costly, studios will alter their movies to avoid a temper tantrum from the censors. The Taiwanese and Japanese flags, for instance, were removed from Tom Cruise’s iconic bomber jacket in ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ (2021) while Lady Gaga and Just Bieber were cut from the Chinese airing of ‘Friends: The Reunion’ (2021) because this duo had offended Chinese sensibilities in the past (Lady Gaga met with the Dalai Lama, Bieber was photographed at a shrine for Japanese war dead). Chinese director Chloé Zhao incurred the wrath of the censors because of an old interview in which she was critical of China. In retaliation, Beijing blacked out news of her Oscar win for ‘Nomadland’ (2020) and then threatened to halt the release of ‘Eternals’ (2021), which she also directs. In this $200 million Marvel movie, an immortal alien race emerges from hiding after thousands of years to protect Earth from their evil counterparts, the Deviants. If only these villains were instead sexual deviants working for the Chinese board of censorship…  

Perhaps the worst consequence of current Sino-Hollywood relations is not what gets made but what doesn’t. In today’s climate it would be all but impossible to make something like ‘Seven Years in Tibet’ (1997) about China’s invasion of Tibet; or a remake of Terry Gilliam’s dystopian satire ‘Brazil’ (1985) set within Xinjiang, China. As the Washington Post and The New Yorker remind us, Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 saw Hollywood studios studiously avoiding films that would make the Nazis look like, well, like Nazis. American producers simply didn’t want to risk losing access to the German market, never mind Hitler and all that. Now history seems to be repeating itself, with Hollywood studios not only kowtowing to Communist China, but also indulging in self-censoring.

Look, nobody likes being compared to the Nazis, but it’s hard to overlook China being accused of genocide against the Muslim Uyghurs at its ‘joycamps’. Not that this stopped Disney from shooting the live-action version of ‘Mulan’ (2020) in Xinjiang, a region in northwest China where China has been accused of carrying out these human rights abuses, including execution, torture and sterilisation of Uyghurs. If that’s not enough, Disney thanks no less than four different propaganda departments in the end credits to Mulan. And just to show that I wasn’t completely off the mark about my suspicions of Liu Cixin and his ‘Three Body Problem’, when asked during an interview with The New Yorker in 2019 about the Chinese government’s inhumane treatment of Xinjiang’s Uyghur community, Liu Cixin replied: “Would you rather that they be hacking away at bodies at train stations and schools in terrorist attacks? … If anything, the government is helping their economy and trying to lift them out of poverty.”

Yeah, put that in your pipe and smoke it, South Park.

China disliked Tarantino's depiction of Bruce Lee  

Occasionally there are happy endings. ‘The Three Body Problem’ is being adapted for the screen by Netflix; and since Netflix isn’t allowed in China anyway, their writers are free to throw in a Tibetan or Uyghur character just for the hell of it. And Quentin Tarantino, bless his soul, refused to modify ‘Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood’ (2019) for release in China. Shannon Lee, Bruce Lee’s daughter, complained to Chinese officials about the film’s representation of her father as a boastful fool being fought to a standstill by a mere stuntman. It’s one of the funniest scenes in the movie, but an overly sensitive Beijing demanded it be cut. Tarantino said no thanks. In the main though, Hollywood producers are still desperately eager to please Beijing, as there are still trillions of Yen to be made at the box office. This dynamic doesn’t just keep new science fiction ideas away from Chinese consumers, but is allowing an authoritarian nation-state to insert elements of its own propaganda into American and international pop culture. So again I ask, how will big-budget science fiction in China and abroad treat the covid-19 pandemic in years to come?

©Tony McGowan