I started my research on science fiction in the early 20th century in China, Japan and the Soviet Union because I was interested in why their stories were so different. How do we explain this difference of attitude towards the future?

About Aaron William Moore
“I am the Handa Chair of Japanese-Chinese Relations at the University of Edinburgh and a modern historian of China and Japan. I also work in modern literature. I am a 2014 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner.
I am a comparative and transnational historian working with documents in Japanese, Chinese and Russian. I predominantly teach modern history of East Asia. My work includes studies of war diaries, the history of childhood and youth and speculative science writing and science fiction.”

Key Points
• North Asian writers of the early 20th century often saw disruptive technology as a potential path to utopia rather than doom, contrasting with the predominantly dystopian Western outlook.
• Their visions of future warfare centered on single, decisive technologies, like death rays, engineered plagues or mechanized armies, that would render conventional military strength irrelevant and directly threaten civilian populations.
• Hirabayashi Katsunosuke argued that modern culture is shaped by engineers and technology, anticipating Walter Benjamin’s ideas and insisting that new media would expand rather than exhaust human imagination.
• The pragmatic, largely non-theological response to radical technologies in the Soviet Union, China and Japan helps explain their quick adoption of innovations and willingness to reshape society around them.