Walter Tevis’ 1983 science-fiction novel The Steps of the Sun is mostly not a very good book; unlike some of his other books (the excellent chess novel The Queen’s Gambit, or The Color of Money) it has not aged well. The one thing about the book that does seem ahead of its time is the worldbuilding: it is set in a future world in which China has unquestionably risen. Here is one background passage:

Half the people on the street were Chinese. By midsummer New York always seems to be a Chinese city, a kind of cultural suburb of Peking. The Russians are ahead of everybody else at heavy industry; the art comes from Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro; the political life in Aberdeen and Hangchow is far more lively than New York’s; and if you want to make a really big business arrangement you go to Peking, the world’s richest city.

But New York is still New York, even with its elevators not working and a total of one hundred fifty taxis permitted to operate (Peking has thousands, they are electric powered and have leather upholstery). But Peking is still a stodgy businessman’s city, with all the old China erased from its neoclassical architecture. The Chinese come to New York for the civilized life.

New York is the major city of a second-rank power, of a country whose time is slipping away; but it still has a bounce you don’t find anywhere else. There are restaurants with white tablecloths, with waiters in tuxedos that look like they came from the last century, and, however they beer-feed and hand-rub their fat old steers in Japan, the Kansas City steak served in a New York restaurant, with the dim lights and the polished wooden bar and the tuxedoed waiters, is still one of the delights of the world. And New York theater is the only theater to hold anybody’s interest for long; American music is the most sophisticated in the world.

The Chinese are still, behind those stuffy facades, the greatest gamblers on earth and the trickiest businessmen; they’ve accommodated their ideology and their asceticism of the last century to their present wealth with the ease of the Renaissance Popes; they are Communists the way Cesare Borgia was a Christian. And they love New York.

Some of these details are remarkably prescient: the Chinese tourists crowding the streets of New York, and the way the city serves as a kind of living museum of a certain type and period of culture. The bit about China being ahead of the US in electric vehicles also has a ripped-from-the-headlines feel. In another passage, a billionaire shows off his ability to speak Chinese (remind you of anyone?).

This is pretty unusual stuff for 1983, when Americans were obsessed with the rise of Japan and had barely begun to notice China. William Gibson’s much more famous Neuromancer, from 1984, chose Japan as the natural setting for its hyper-technological fantasies. So I am curious what might have inspired this aspect of the book; there is little in Tevis’ biography to suggest a particular interest in or knowledge of Asia.