Alternate history of science fiction as a Chinese phenomenon

"An Alternate History of Chinese Science Fiction: The Humble Scrawl of Kuo Pao Kun, Mandarin" is a truly remarkable fake alternate history of science fiction told as though the field had evolved in China. The author goes way, way over top, including photoshopped book covers, elaborate fan-disputes over authors' significance, and so on.

Liu Hui Wen's "The Call of Cthulhu" (4625). Look, you can poke fun at Liu's style all you want. Anyone can imitate him, in mediocre fashion, by tossing around words like "glabrous" and "foetor." You can point at the decades of bad Liu imitations as having had a deleterious effect on horror writing. But what you can't do is say that there wasn't anything to the stories, or that they weren't very good. As Professor Han Kuang Ning has repeatedly pointed out, there's a lot of good writing–not good prose, good writing, which is different–and solid idea-work in Liu's stories.

More to the point, the meme that started me on this calls for the "most representative and influential" of the decade, which Liu's work is, and the best known, most representative, and most influential of Liu's oeuvre is "Call of Cthulhu." Hell, its famous first line, "the most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to awaken from the sleep of ignorance," is quoted in the Tsinghua Book of Quotations, and being quoted there means that you've entered the canon. The bad writers who followed Liu were influenced only by the surface elements of his work, and imitated only his style. But the good writers who followed Liu were influenced by the concept of cosmic horror which he (essentially) created. Cosmic horror, the idea that there are beings like Cthulhu and the No-Buddha which so transcend human understanding that to draw too close to them is to be driven insane–the idea that the powers of the universe are uncaring and unaware of puny motes like humanity–is Liu's real legacy.

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(Thanks to everyone who suggested this!)