NOT SCI-FI Author Mingyuan Dong Interview — Embracing Ambiguity

Read the related story -- NOT SCI-FI Review — Eco-Futurist Fantasy

(PTP) Could you please share with Picture This Post readers why you chose this title– Not Sci-Fi ?

(MD) I asked friends who read my draft about what genre they thought it was, and they told me —

“With the machines and the chemical reactions, it’s like science fiction, but it’s not.”

“It’s like fantasy with the mystical elements, but it feels real.”

“Historical fiction? But it’s not that real either.”

“Thriller? But missing the conventional tropes.”

They are right – in terms of genre, this book is everything and nothing because it is a piece of art.

Before I was a writer, I was an artist. Since I started this book, I have identified my conviction of writing as a modern art practice, using every artistic technique: tearing things apart, reconstructing images, associating unrelated ideas, overlapping paradoxes, breaking the boundary between the real and the imagined… 

I picked what the story sounded the closest to, science fiction, and negated it in my title. Negation, saying what is not instead of what it is, removes the stable frame of expectation. It not only provides a rough hint, but also challenges and frees up the space of genre. Negation reflects my style of playing with words, syntax, and ironies.

The title enlarges imagination — what are the limits to science fiction? And what are the limits to fiction, as both tangible events and inner thoughts determine our experience?

Do we all live in some kind of “fiction,” in between the real and the unreal?

How do real-world events parallel the arguments of Conservists vs. Distributists in your novel?  

In the context of climate change, Conservists are those against over-consumption. They eat less, use less, and travel less, but sometimes at the cost of their satisfaction. The other extreme, Distributists, believe in keeping up the consumption. An example, according to sociologist Michaël Dandrieux, is the belief of Cornucopians, a.k.a. Environmental Optimists, that technology will solve all environmental problems.

Most environmentalists always believe in tradeoffs between environmental protection and commercial activities. However, my position aligns with economist Michael E. Porter’s hypothesis that a win-win is possible: pollution indicates low productivity, and the way to exit this dead-end is to innovate. He suggests flexible environmental regulations that trigger innovation, improving productivity so that the current generation can keep enjoying consumption at no cost to future generations.

This novel gives no perfect answer to climate change, but it encourages reflections on our current environmental actions. While the reader is thinking, they are in fact, acting. 

When did you first become interested in the issues surrounding the Not Sci-Fi protagonist and science in general?   

As a kid, I had regular conversations about science with my Dad. When I was eleven, he brought up the idea that competition for resources caused most wars in history. I asked him how we could stop all the struggles, so he introduced me to the Laws of Thermodynamics — we compete for energy because it is finite. However, what if we can make energy infinite? Then, he told me about the perpetual motion machine, a machine that runs non-stop, as well as all the scientists who failed to create it.

I hated wars, so I became addicted to the idea of perpetual motion, spending my free time doing machine designs. After seven years of designing, I never made one. Then, I convinced myself of the impossibility when I took advanced physics in high school – a true disappointment. Seeking comfort, I shifted my focus from logical science to contemporary art. I began creating artworks centered around the perpetual motion machine to critique people’s desire for eternity and the finite nature of society.

Now, as an adult artist, I sprinkle the idea of perpetual motion here and there. I always write short things for fun, but I knew the first long piece had to be about the perpetual motion machine.

That was how I started. The writing accompanied me from high school graduation to college graduation. As my protagonist grew, my thinking also transformed.

Have you played around with metals or magnets in your artwork, as the central character of your novel does at one point?  

No, but magnets took part in many of my early designs of the perpetual motion machine, roughly between the ages of twelve and sixteen.

I find magnets interesting in terms of force because they can exert movement without touching another object, attracting or repelling them like magic. These lifeless objects that possess power, the power to move others without self-action, speak surrealism to me.

In creating NOT SCI-FI - which came first- the pictures or the story or??

I started the research and machine drawings at eleven. At eighteen, I made a series of artworks about perpetual motion before starting this novel, which are in the appendix of the book. Prior to writing the novel, pieces of the story had certainly come first in my subconscious -- during the years that transformed me from a child to an adult.

I made the pictures in the novel after I finished writing because I wanted the illustrations to be perfect matches as part of the written artwork. The protagonist hired me. Since he was supposed to be the artist of all the drawings, I had to consider his personality, mentality, and growth while making his work. The extra visual spice adds extra dimensions to the character.

Please share with Picture This Post how your multi-faceted creative process works– both in Not Sci-Fi and beyond.

At nine, I wrote my first short detective novella of three chapters with illustrations. When I was about twelve – having attempted poems, prose, and short stories – I started to embrace surrealism. For my literature-class assignment to keep a daily journal, I would combine things in reality and my imagination. My teacher implicitly accepted my weird style. Since then, in the surrealist writing and art that I practice, I explore dreams, synesthesia, automatic writing, and stream of consciousness.

While writing, I always refer to my long-learned creation process when I meet a dead end. When I do not know what to write, I literally just write with subconsciousness. Then, I play with associations like a puzzle to link fragments together. I connect touch to smell, taste to hearing, etc. They always make more sense at the end because I convey meaning not with logic but feeling. 

I want the readers to experience the feeling of unreal but more real than the real.

Not Sci-Fi is both a continuation and an innovation of my habitual art practice. It continued my artistic exploration of the laws of thermodynamics, environmental economics, psychology, and sociology. However, instead of manipulating visual elements, I broke words and played with sentences. I love words as a medium of art, and I am ready to paint more with them.

Do you want the reader to dwell on the fine line distinctions between passion, madness, and genius? 

Genius has a concrete connotation of “possessing high knowledge or ability without being taught,” a state of rationality. However, madness can have multiple definitions, or associations: the pathological definition of insanity caused by a chemical imbalance, the emotional definition of reacting with irrationality, unpredictability, and even violence, and often, an association with the mystical, the unexplained, detached from logic. 

In real life, when someone is smart or crazy, genius and the mentally ill become their sole identity in the eyes of the world. However, one identity cannot define a human being as a whole.