Sometimes critics try to distinguish SF from genres they say are related but distinct, such as satire, utopiae, fantasy etc. Darko Suvin makes this distinction in his essay "On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre", and then defines SF as "a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment". However, I now want to use his argument in reverse, because I want to examine Robert van Gulik's Judge Dee detective stories and show that many science fictional features can be found in them, even while the facts that they are set in seventh century China and are detective stories would seem to exclude them. ("Transient estrangement is specific to murder mysteries, not a mature SF", Suvin says).

By "cognition" Suvin means that stories make the readers think, and by "estrangement" Suvin means both creating worlds different from this one and making this one feel strange when we read about it.

The historical detective stories of Umberto Eco and Ellis Peters have sold well to SF readers, so this argument may be better accepted now than ten years ago. However, van Gulik is a better example to illustrate this argument, and reveals, I think, that what Suvin calls "estrangement and cognition" can be dealt with in different types of literature. In his history of the crime novel, Bloody Murder Julian Symons calls the Dee books "well informed pastiche", while other critics seem to omit van Gulik from their studies. However, Symons' rejection of the series concludes thus: "The best of them are clever, but they proceed from such fantastication of style and motive that they remain simply curiosities", and it is here that our examination can begin. The stories are not fantastic - the most common motive for the crimes investigated by Judge Dee is sexual jealousy (sometimes extending to a mania), while economic motives (e.g. theft and tax evasion) are quite common. However, a society in which failure to father sons causes mental derangement, or in which a salt smuggler is a master criminal, is one a long way from ours. We know about secret struggles over gold-bearing lodes or meteorites, but secret visits to groves of mandrake plants? That is a long way from our ken.

The stories can be examined in three lights: that of their estrangement (a different world to ours), their science/technology, and their methodology.

By setting them in a society which had been settled into feudalism for a thousand years, had an established infrastructure and high degree of civilisation, as well as a long established technology, van Gulik paradoxically was able to create a world very different to our own.

At the same time the level of technology affects the geography and social order in very clear ways. They are obviously part of their time, but we would look at them very oddly today. For instance, people accept that earthquakes occur. In The Emperor's Pearl an earthquake years before has left a murder scene a marsh. This is not a development we would expect at all in Britain, nor would we expect the modern Chinese not to drain and reclaim the land but seventh century society moves more slowly. Similarly, whole areas can be affected - in The Chinese Maze Murders - "Until a few years ago the main route to Khotan and the other tributary kingdoms of the west ran through Lan-fang and this town was quite an important emporium. Then three oases along the desert route dried up and it shifted a hundred miles to the north." The stories are set in a period before technology controls or replaces nature.

We are estranged in these stories because the characters in some ways either seem modern (Judge Dee as the rational detective) or because the stories can be read in modern ways (they could be read as a sort of Sword and Sorcery). Delany said "sword-and-sorcery tends to take place in a world that seems to be changing from a barter to a money economy". But Dee's world is a feudal world, in which antique dealers make a good living, poets publish, and specialist tea merchants sell to cognoscenti. Readers are puzzled, but how do the characters of this civilisation react?

Consider what further distinctions have to be made between a magistrate who has just solved three cases and announces his ratification in these words: "This is the official verdict on Yoo Kee's treason, the killing of General Ding, and Mrs Lee's murder. It will interest you that the conspiracy of the Uigur tribes has been settled on high government level, in negotiations between our Board for Barbarian Affairs and the khan of the Uigurs" (The Chinese Maze Murders) with the same man announcing "The criminal Yoo Kee is guilty of high treason. He should properly be submitted to the lingering death, being cut to pieces alive ... (but) this sentence is mitigated in so far as that the said criminal shall first be killed and thereafter dismembered" (one page later). Dee feels that there is no discontinuity between his first and second announcements, but we, his readers, do. The missing word's from his statement were "In view of the fact that the criminal's father, His Excellency Yoo Shou-chien, has merited greatly of the State and the people, and in view of the fact that he has entered a posthumous plea for mercy for his son", and they again suggest a world of other values - inherited leniency or virtue is something that disappeared long ago.

Other elements all go to present a world different to our own - we recognise the established Guilds that control the trades (Goldsmiths, Merchants, ironmongers) but did London, Paris or Florence know a Guild of Beggars? It is a strange society that not only has beggary but has so accepted it into its structure of urban organisation. Similarly, the brothels, the selling of daughters to meet the rent, and the hire of courtesans may be familiar as individual ideas but to see the role they play in an unchanging society is again to complete the picture of that society and to emphasise its alienness compared to the reader's world.

So this estranging or distancing is achieved by a number of things: the historical setting, the distant location, the foreign culture and the different social standards. The level of technology and what it can and cannot do also affect the reading of the story.

The science in the books is chiefly forensic: medicine, herbally based, is well advanced both in the knowledge of pharmacy and in pathology. Several of the books include detailed accounts of post-mortems carried out on suspected victims. Admittedly, one coroner misses the signs of imminent leprosy in a man with a severed jugular and another misses the modus operandi of an obscure domestic murder but overall the scientists are well equipped with devices and information. Van Gulik reinforces this knowledge by forensic detail of other types (identifying weapons which made blows, identifying the murder scene from the presence of disguised blood stains etc).

One effect of this, given other restrictions on technical advance (travel, for instance, is very slow) is to make the Judge something of a superhero. Equally, though, it can be seen as reinforcing the feudal structure since it is only because the Judge represents the central power (the Emperor) that he has access to the technical advisors, and so is perhaps only a superhero in locum.

If there is a distinction between technical and scientific developments, then no new scientific developments are being made. The canal system is being expanded which helps trade but on the edges of the Empire this is still subject to other forces (like oases drying). The only new technical development ever mentioned is the adoption by the army of iron tipped crossbow bolts to replace simple wood.

So what we have instead is a Detective Science (or method). If this existed in ancient China no record of it survives. As Dr van Gulik wrote in his postscript to The Chinese Nail Murders, while the forms of the crimes he describes come from ancient sources the method of their solution comes from modern, Western literature. Some of the ancient tales are available in a collection, The Strange Cases of Magistrate Pao, and while they are interesting, a comparison of the original tales with van Gulik's use of them shows the difference between the literature of the period and the literature of another, later civilisation - "The (ancient Chinese) author apparently did not care a fig about probability or credulity in the modern sense. The plots are supported by coincidence and the intervention of supernatural agencies".

Dee, on the other hand, is a post-Holmesian detective whose magisterial position allows him to explain his solutions thoroughly. Although supernatural elements sometimes appear (people think they see ghosts, or feel a sense of evil), these ultimately play no part in the solution. This rejection of the spirit world also reinforces the rejection of these books as Sword and Sorcery, for although they contain fighting, armies marching, hidden gold in temples, this is always explained by the exigencies of the situation.

The official religion of the Empire was Confucianism, but many of the people worshipped an animistic pantheon; Taoism was allowed but frowned upon as leading to sexual excess, while Buddhism was spreading. Buddhism is represented as a rapacious cult and not as the force for peace it is now held to be. Suppression of vice leaves Taoist temples empty to be misused by others, political struggles as the Buddhists try to influence the throne lead to corruption and injustice, while all kinds of reprehensible and dubious crooks hide behind the shield of the cloth.

This kind of struggle is clearer than other cultural problems, since schisms in Christianity have lead to the same developments in the west. However, religion has not had the same kind of affect on society in the west - Confucianism with its obligations to preserve the old order inherently stopped social change and improvement. This is so much at odds with western developments that again in presenting something like a modern man in Dee in this environment is to shock readers. Dee who is a reasoning man thinks it is reasonable to preserve society on its inequitable basis, though this attitude seems at odds with the progressiveness of the logic he uses in solving cases. Once more the reader is faced with the strange position that Dee finds society tenable when the reader cannot.

Dee's society is one in which women are oppressed - polygamous wives are kept in seclusion, brothels are normal, the selling of daughters to meet debts is common. On the other hand the Confucian emphasis on family order and continuation provides some re-assurance (a mistreated girl may be married posthumously to her fiancée, her soul tablet taking her place at the wedding service) while pressures on men to father sons is cited as the basis of several men's madness. All of this is comprehensible as the basis of society and helps to maintain it, but it gnaws at the reader's certainty that his or her own world is constant and fixed.

In many ways the world of Judge Dee was totalitarian because everything reinforced the social order. There was no escape from it. All who lived within it were free but there was no freedom without it, and again it makes this world strange by showing that it could continue even while forces which have undermined other cultures thrived within it.

This becomes very evident in Dee's attitude to aliens - both internal and external. Round about China Dee met Koreans (who had been invaded by the Chinese), Uigur tribesmen from the sub-Gobi whose grazing land was being swallowed by Chinese expansionism, and Arab and Persian traders, and his attitude to all was essentially one of nationalist contempt. The Han Chinese, though, had also colonised internally, driving the early aboriginal Tanka peoples into ghettoes of floating villages. Dee's response to Tanka resistance is not to accept that they have cause for complaint and put it right but to increase oppression and vigilance. The solution he offers to the "blackhaired people" (the Han Chinese) he does not make available to other sufferers. They are not of his people and so are outside the pale of society.

This sort of Chauvinism apparently still continues (and is still mentioned in the Japanese treatment of Korean guestworkers and the aboriginal Ainu) but its significance is its continuing so long - we recognize it in the Third Reich but reassure ourselves that the Reich showed it could not be maintained, Dee's society demonstrates that an unfairness can be maintained for a chiliad or longer. Certainty in progress, or the rate of progress at any rate, is called into question.

It is in these sort of areas that Suvin's cognition is called for: SF has examples of chauvinism being extended into the future (the further suppression of women, for instance; or the suppression of races), even without considering the suppression of species (aliens by humans, animals by humans etc), but generally the impression is of an optimism that implies We can write about this problem because passing time will see it corrected. Van Gulik challenges this gratuitous optimism - an Empire maintained itself with no internal challenge (Emperors changed and were overthrown but imperial rule continued), accepted by its people and by its administrators and literati.

Van Gulik's historical, detective stories show the same sort of challenge that Darko Suvin said were the qualities of generic sf but show them in ways other than those identified by Suvin. Thus they help to redefine what is sf and also to show the critical uses of the theory of estrangement and cognition - making what seems obvious, strange and thus challenging the reader to think about all the implications of that estrangement.

Appendix

Dee was a real person who lived in the seventh century. He served first as a magistrate and then transferred to a political role in the Imperial capital. Van Gulik's stories are not biographical, although many of the crimes he describes appeared in various Chinese texts.

Van Gulik was a Dutch diplomat who worked in the Far East. Apparently he wrote his first stories in English (rather than Dutch) only as working texts, intending to translate them into Chinese and Japanese because he did not like the westernised trash that was swamping the orient. However, he was encouraged to publish in English and the success of the five novels he published in the nineteen-fifties (one novel for each scene of Dee's magisterial career) encouraged him to write more in the sixties. The novels of the second decade are shorter than those of the earlier. A short-lived television series was made by ATV in seventies, receiving poor reviews, but a US television film of The Haunted Monastery worked well.

The following list gives, I hope, a list of all the Dee novels and two short stories, according to their location and internal chronology.