You've Never Heard of China's Greatest Sci-Fi Novel

WIRED 

You've Never Heard of China's Greatest Sci-Fi Novel Thousands of authors. is barely known outside China--but it contains the secret to the country's modernization and malaise. Ma Qianzhu was unsatisfied with Chinese progress. An engineer at a large state-owned enterprise, he belonged to a generation that grew up believing engineering is destiny, that China's future would be built, bolt by bolt, by people like him. Then Ma discovered something extraordinary: a wormhole to the late Ming Dynasty. With more than 500 peers, he commandeered a ship and traveled back in time 400 years, to a preindustrial China wracked by foreign invasion and internal decay. Their mission: trigger an industrial revolution in the past that would, in the future, make modern China great (again).