The Future Affairs Administration Wants to Build a "Three-Body Universe." Can It Make Science Fiction a Different Kind of Business? | 100 Entrepreneurs

Besides enthusiasm, what assets does this company have?

In February 2014, the organizing committee of the World Science Fiction Convention received a bid from Beijing to host the 2016 convention.

At the bid presentation in London, the bidder — an outfit calling itself the Future Affairs Administration — explained that they were "aliens from the future. On the future timeline, they had already won the bid and hosted this convention. So, to protect the correct timeline, this bid had to succeed."

The room laughed. It was a joke made for science fiction fans.

Ji Shaoting, director of the Future Affairs Administration, had no way of knowing then what 2016, the year she was bidding for, would bring. By the time the convention actually took place, she had resigned from Xinhua News Agency to run the Future Affairs Administration full time. The organization had gone from a club of science fiction fans to a company that actually does business in science fiction — still small, only about 30 people. In 2017 it closed a Series A round at a valuation of more than 100 million yuan.

On June 8, 2017, Liu Cixin and the Future Affairs Administration jointly announced a development plan called the "Three-Body Universe." The Three-Body Problem, the novel that won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, is already one of the hottest — and most troubled — pieces of intellectual property in China. At the launch, Liu Cixin pressed a giant red button while a galaxy flickered behind him, marking the official birth of a vast universe with his blessing.

This may also be the starting point of the Future Affairs Administration as a business.

1

In the summer of 2007, Ji Shaoting went to Chengdu wearing two hats, journalist and science fiction fan, for the International Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention, hosted by Science Fiction World magazine.

The magazine had brought in dozens of well-known science fiction and fantasy writers, scientists, and astronauts from China and abroad: leading domestic authors such as Liu Cixin, Wang Jinkang, and Han Song, along with popular foreign writers such as Robert Sawyer and James Gunn.

Fans seized the rare opportunity and turned the five-day event into a carnival. In an essay called "Science Fiction World and Me," the science fiction writer Han Song recalled: "Huge numbers of fans came from all over the country. When they saw Liu Cixin, their eyes filled with tears. They performed the human-formation computer from The Three-Body Problem in the public square — their enthusiasm astonished the foreign guests."

For Ji Shaoting, the convention mattered most because she met the people who would eventually change her life: science fiction writers such as Liu Cixin and He Xi, a few science writers including Xiao Zhuang, and Ji Shisan, who would later become known for founding Songshuhui, the Science Squirrels Club, and Guokr.

In 2008, Ji Shisan came to Beijing and, with a group of science writers, started a group blog meant to popularize science. Once they added offline events, it turned into a nonprofit — today's Songshuhui, the Science Squirrels Club.

Ji Shaoting joined too, and began planning and hosting offline forums and lectures. The best known was Little Ji's Screening Nights. They would pick a film with a science angle, post its theme and synopsis on the blog to draw people in, and later added guest conversations and talks alongside the screening.

"We started cross-disciplinary conversations very early. That line internet companies keep quoting — 'the future has already arrived, it just hasn't caught on yet' — we were the first in China to bring it up. That was back in 2003," Ji Shaoting said, with a touch of pride.

In 2010, Songshuhui set up Guokr as its commercial arm, and Ji Shaoting began turning up at Guokr's events. The love of science fiction carried over. In 2011, after publishing several series of popular science books, Guokr's publishing imprint, Guokr Reading, signed the science fiction writer Han Song and put out his novella collection Subway (《地铁》).

Founding the Future Affairs Administration was Guokr's formal move into science fiction. In 2014, several science fiction fans inside Guokr heard that the Chinese Nebula Award, run by the World Chinese Science Fiction Association, was taking applications to host the ceremony.

This domestic award was created in 2010. Compared with the Galaxy Award, run by Science Fiction World, the Chinese Nebula Award casts a wider net: it doesn't only honor novels and short fiction published that year but also hands out prizes for best science fiction writer, best editor, best translator, and more.

But the domestic science fiction scene was thin at the time, so the award's influence stayed limited. Ji Shaoting recalled: "We heard all these domestic science fiction awards were pretty broke back then, and no company was willing to sponsor a science fiction event. So that year we — Guokr — planned to put up some money and host it."

In January 2014, Guokr.com published the charter for the fifth Global Chinese Science Fiction Nebula Award and announced it would host that year's ceremony. In May, the Future Affairs Administration held, with mock solemnity, its "First Congress": a few science fiction writers and researchers sat down in a Sculpting in Time café near Workers' Stadium and discussed scientific futurism.

After that, the Future Affairs Administration kept running as Guokr's science fiction sub-brand.

2

In 2016, the Future Affairs Administration split off from Guokr and became a brand under Shanghai Guoyue Culture and Creativity Co., Ltd. The name brings Guokr Reading to mind easily enough, and you can see Guokr's shadow in the business as well.

The Future Affairs Administration runs two platforms, one online and one offline. Online there is The Nonexistent Daily, which describes itself as a publication about the future and technology, covering broadly science-fiction-adjacent subjects: artificial intelligence, aliens, superheroes.

Offline there is Times, a conversation series that invites people from the tech industry, science fiction writers, and the most interesting people in whatever field the topic touches, and lets them think wild thoughts together — an upgraded Little Ji's Screening Nights.

The Future Affairs Administration also inherited Guokr Reading's publishing work. It now holds the Chinese rights to the latest Marvel comics. "It isn't cheap," Ji Shaoting said, "but people still buy this kind of book even at a slightly higher price. The target market is very good."

By running an online publication and offline events, the Future Affairs Administration has gathered a crowd of science fiction fans, which makes it something like a science fiction Guokr. Publishing science fiction books, meanwhile, is the path Science Fiction World has followed for years — and the head of the Future Affairs Administration's publishing business is a former Science Fiction World editor. These are its main lines of work right now, and its main source of cash.

But the Future Affairs Administration is clearly not content with that. What it wants is to "build a golden age for Chinese science fiction."

In world science fiction, the "golden age" usually means the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. After the Second World War, young Americans in the habit of buying pulp science fiction magazines added up to a sizable readership, and the genre became widely known. In 1937, John W. Campbell renamed the magazine he edited, Astounding Stories, as Astounding Science Fiction, and gathered a large group of writers around it, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein among them. They wrote about computers, rockets, and nuclear weapons, and time after time their inventions matched what technology actually went on to do.

As Ji Shaoting sees it, a golden age of science fiction means a large number of good writers and good books appearing all at once. And the Future Affairs Administration believes that if another golden age is coming, it will happen in China.

But compared with America in 1940, what China lacks most today is science fiction writers.

Chinese science fiction is generally thought to have gone through three big cycles of rise and fall. The late 1950s and the late 1970s both produced plenty of fine work and fine writers. Ye Yonglie's best-known series, Little Smart Roams the Future (《小灵通漫游未来》), still makes for entertaining reading.

But in China, writing has never been only about literature. In 1979 an argument broke out over whether science fiction was pure literary creation or had a duty to popularize science. In 1980, Qian Xuesen led the criticism: "Some popular science fiction novels, in my view, have problems both in their thinking and in their science."

In 1983, Hu Qiaomu advanced the line that "spiritual pollution" existed in theoretical and literary circles, arguing that certain people were spreading the decadent ideas of the bourgeoisie and other exploiting classes, which was an anti-socialist act. People's Daily wrote: "A very small number of science fiction novels have gone beyond discussing 'science' and show bad political tendencies."

Chinese science fiction lost a generation as a result, and only showed signs of recovery in the early 1990s, thanks to a magazine called Science Fiction World. In 1991, Science Literature and Art formally renamed itself Science Fiction World, aimed itself at middle and high school students, and began digging up new writers. It went on to become the most influential science fiction platform in China; a single issue once sold more than 400,000 copies.

That laid the ground for what the Future Affairs Administration is trying to do now. In fact, everything it does can be read as Science Fiction World for the digital age.

Even with Science Fiction World around, though, writing science fiction in China stayed a very small world right up to 2010, or even 2015.

In May 2005, Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem began its serialization in Science Fiction World. The editors wrote at the top of the first installment: "Many readers have written and called asking us to publish this new work as soon as possible. After careful and repeated consideration, we believe serializing it in Science Fiction World is the fastest way to bring it to readers." The implication was plain: bringing out a full-length science fiction novel outright was clearly not the better option.

The book was not formally published until 2008, a year after the serialization ended, and the first print run was small. As late as 2014, people were still posting on Baidu Tieba that they had gotten hold of a first-edition, first-printing copy of The Three-Body Problem.

If that was the situation for Liu Cixin, already hailed as one of the "Three Giants" of Chinese science fiction, you can imagine it for everyone else. Ji Shaoting said the number of full-time science fiction writers in China today "can be counted on two hands."

So the business at the Future Affairs Administration that sits closest to the word "future" is developing young writers — incubating the next Liu Cixin. They look for young writers with a distinctive voice, sign the authors or their books, and take part in publishing them and making money from them afterward. It is a little like the path Guo Jingming's Zuishi Culture has taken.

One method is to pay new authors their fee upfront when they publish through the Future Affairs Administration, counting it as a research and development cost. The Future Affairs Administration has also run several sessions of a "Science Fiction Masters Workshop," taking writers, and young people who want to become writers, out to see something of the world.

They once published a piece on 15Yan explaining in detail how the workshop runs. Over the weekend of May 14 and 15, every participating writer moved into a research observatory in the suburbs of Beijing and held closed-door sessions with top researchers to set off their imaginations.

The writers then went home to write, with a team of scientific advisors from the Future Affairs Administration supporting and coaching them. Forty days later, each one brought the finished work to a closed-door review by specialists from various commercial fields, who judged its potential and looked for its commercial value.

At the end of that piece, asked "Are you playing a really big game here?", their answer was: "Yes."

3

This big game, aimed at "incubating the next Liu Cixin," is a complicated one.

Limited means are part of it; more to the point, the science fiction world still has too few new writers who are good enough. Once, the Future Affairs Administration received a submission from an unknown writer, and after reading the whole manuscript Ji Shaoting was so excited — purely because he was a newcomer "nobody had ever heard of" — that she posted to her WeChat Moments that same night to celebrate.

But the phrase "closed-door review by specialists from various commercial fields," in the workshop's own description, already shows where the Future Affairs Administration's business points.

In the interview, Ji Shaoting stressed that a science fiction work doesn't have to end up as a printed book. It can be a film, a web series, a short film, even an art piece. "Science fiction is especially good at breaking down the walls between dimensions," she said.

What Ji Shaoting cares about most, though, is still film and television. For signed authors who already have some standing, the Future Affairs Administration's job is to connect them with projects. It also gets involved itself: "finding money, putting in people, writing outlines and scripts, controlling every step." Ji Shaoting said they are currently developing projects based on works by Han Song and Liu Cixin.

The scramble by film and television companies for science fiction novels, which started after 2015, is in fact the direct cause of the boom in this market.

In March 2015, before The Three-Body Problem had won the Hugo Award, a film of the same name had already started shooting. After that, other Liu Cixin works such as The Wandering Earth and The Village Teacher were put on the schedule one by one. At a recent project pitch event at the Beijing Film Festival, entries that billed themselves as science fiction made up a quarter of the finalists.

But to this day no film or television adaptation of a domestic science fiction work has succeeded. Even The Three-Body Problem film, launched two years ago with great fanfare and a claimed budget of 200 million yuan, has sat shelved at Yoozoo Pictures ever since.

Ji Shaoting thinks the biggest problem with work that flies the science fiction flag to raise money is that it doesn't feel like science fiction. "A lot of film and TV companies want to make science fiction, but they all lack a basic understanding of it. Resident Evil and Interstellar, for example, have completely different textures, and Han Song's work is not the same as Liu Cixin's."

The argument over "soft" versus "hard" science fiction is a good example. Screenwriters and film developers treat the distinction as a yardstick, mainly for how much technology and spectacle a work contains. Ji Shaoting points out that inside the science fiction world this is a sloppy classification that nobody brings up anymore.

In her view, the Future Affairs Administration could also join film and television projects as a science fiction consultant, helping screenwriting teams fill out the underlying setting so the work truly feels like science fiction.

But how large the audience for science fiction in China really is may be the biggest constraint on this market.

Take Liu Cixin again. After The Three-Body Problem won its award, it spent a while on the annual bestseller lists and pulled in a large number of readers who were not science fiction fans. Sales of his other books, by comparison, did not rise much.

Over the Spring Festival of 2016, the Future Affairs Administration held the first Science Fiction Spring Festival Gala, inviting 12 established and up-and-coming Chinese writers to write a chain story. In 2017 it invited 23 writers and held a second gala, this time assigning them a theme. Afterward the results were collected and released on e-reading platforms.

The whole event drew 1.5 million reads across all platforms. It gave them their widest exposure, and it more or less established how many true science fiction fans there are in China.

Ji Shaoting doesn't think that's the ceiling of the market, though.

In an earlier QDaily interview with Guokr founder Ji Shisan, he used science fiction to explain Guokr's idea of "core users and peripheral users": "How many people actually read science fiction novels? And how many watch science fiction blockbusters? That's the periphery and the core. What you have to do is find a way to bring those blockbuster viewers in."

Ji Shaoting agrees. She said science fiction is a thing you can have or do without, and what the Future Affairs Administration hopes for, perhaps, is to make science fiction part of everyday culture.

Guokr "grew out of community and was made by community," and has had to keep hunting for ways to make money. The Future Affairs Administration faces something different: a new field that is more tempting, and where the competition is more complicated.

In publishing, Chongqing Press, which published The Three-Body Problem, is treating science fiction as an opportunity. Editor-in-chief Chen Xingwu said the press will work to find and promote more science fiction writers; its advantage is that it took over the job of publishing Science Fiction World's standalone editions. New Star Press has also launched a speculative fiction imprint that publishes science fiction — Hao Jingfang's novel Wandering Maers (《流浪玛厄斯》) came out of it.

In 2016, EntGroup and the Future Affairs Administration jointly released a White Paper on the Science Fiction Film and TV Industry. It noted that in Hollywood, science fiction and superhero films together accounted for nearly 25% of that year's box office — but even as investment in the genre kept accelerating, it also took up a large share of the list of money-losing films.

More important, most Chinese moviegoers who pay attention to such films do so for the special effects and the action; the "science fiction" part is not really in their calculations. This past January two science fiction films opened in China back to back, Passengers and Arrival, and both underperformed, taking in under 300 million yuan and under 100 million yuan respectively — even though Ted Chiang, who wrote "Story of Your Life," the novella Arrival is based on, has also won a Hugo Award.

For Chinese science fiction film and television, a genre the market hasn't accepted, a shortage of top-tier IP, and a narrow range of original material remain problems that can't be ignored.

At a Beijing International Film Festival forum called "On Genre Filmmaking in China," the screenwriter Song Fangjin said, discussing two kinds of Chinese film that won't succeed for now: "My prediction is that within the next twenty or thirty years — perhaps within the lifetime of everyone in this room — Chinese science fiction films will not succeed. Science fiction film rests on science, and in an age with so little scientific awareness, trying to make science fiction films is itself a very 'science fiction' thing to do."

Ji Shaoting doesn't agree. The Future Affairs Administration has already committed to working closely on an adaptation of a Han Song novel; in their view, the team behind it has enough respect for the film industry, and what remains is more learning and more adjusting to each other.

"It'll be a long time before we can make something like Nolan's Interstellar, but I still think that within three to five years, audiences here will be able to see science fiction that's at least passable."

"Let's take it slow," she added with a laugh. "The Future Affairs Administration advises everyone not to predict the future carelessly."

Cover image from: 15Yan, Mtime