The Chinese had already pretty much mined out every genre when our ancestors were still drawing Family Circus cartoons. I know one Chinese scholar who found a room (one of many in a new excavated site) full of Hard Boiled Detective tales from about 700 years ago.
Unless that’s meant to be a pun, I believe ‘tychonaut’ is more usually spelt ‘taikonaut’.
Thank you! Fixing now.
You totally should have pretended it was a deliberate pun. 
along with the first recipe to sliced bread and the patent to the wheel no doubt.
Because of the Clarke’s World and Escape Pod podcasts I’ve already been exposed to a lot of asian and SE asian sci fi short stories. It’s pretty neat to see both the similarities and differences in how we do sci fi. For Boing Boing commenters who can read Chinese (because there’s always something lost in translation) - I’m curious - given the social structures in mainland China (both those shared with Chinese regardless of what country they live in and those specific to the mainland) - do you notice anything glaringly different about how they view the future? Eg: More or less likely to have a communist government in the year 22xx? More likely to have Chinese be the universal language in the future? (Chinese cursing while a fun workaround with the FCC was a pretty neat touch for Firefly since there are a LOT more Chinese people than non-Chinese people on Earth)
Some more information on Chinese sci-fi and parallels and contrasts with other varieties can be found in this interview that Alec Ash did with one of China’s SF writers for the Los Angeles Review of Books: http://tumblr.lareviewofbooks.org/post/49379142505/science-fiction-in-china-a-conversation-with-fei
On the theme of early Chinese inventions of all sorts of things, see the tongue in cheek listing that comes in at # 6 in the New Yorker’s Evan Osnos’ China predictions for 2014: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/12/next-year-in-china-the-top-ten-stories-of-2014.html
Not sure about that, but the Judge Dee novels are certainly fun: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_Dee_stories
It’s a shame that the article doesn’t mention anything about the supposed recent ban on time-travel themes in China. I’d like to know how true these stories are.
Yes, those are good Police Procedurals: known as gong’an in Chinese. These started out as puppet shows about 900 years ago and moved into printed media about 400 years ago. Judge Bao is the most famous of the sleuths portrayed. The Judge Dee we are familiar with in the West is the result of a Dutch author finding a collection of gong’an in a used bookstore in Tokyo.
Perhaps the ban will be ret-conned away!
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