From Jack London’s 1906 story “The Unparalleled Invasion,” which painted China as a civilizational terror, to the postmodern Orientalist chaos of William S. Burroughs’s
Naked Lunch, Western cyberpunk is best understood as a symptom of historic attitudes toward a sinister East. In James Joyce’s
Ulysses, protagonist Leopold Bloom frets about the modern city as a shadowy, Oriental space while recognizing his own paranoia.
Dr. Betsy Huang notes that in 1881, California Senator John Miller “described Chinese as ‘inhabitants of another planet… automatic engines of flesh and blood; they are patient, stolid, unemotional, [and] herd together like beasts.’”