Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction

In 2013 Mingwei Song first used “Chinese New Wave Science Fiction” as a moniker to refer to Chinese science fiction (hereafter SF) written since the late 1990s. On many occasions, Song has quoted Chinese writer Fei Dao’s metaphorical comment about the status quo of Chinese SF in 2010: Chinese SF had been a “lonely hidden army,” having hardly been noticed by general readers and the literary scene except for diehard SF fans. Thirteen years after Fei Dao’s metaphor for Chinese SF as a lonely hidden army, Chinese SF is not “[lying] low in the wilderness” anymore, “its opportunity is ripe,” and “some valiant generals and warriors [have] rush[ed] out and change[d] heaven and earth” (7). Song is one of these warriors who have valiantly worked in the field of Chinese SF studies to make this subfield of Chinese literature more visible. With the publication of his seminal monograph Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction, Song brings Chinese New Wave SF into the spotlight and reveals its rich complexity through his panoramic yet in-depth analyses of various SF works, its writers, and its sociopolitical milieu.Song’s discussion centers around the New Wave SF’s unique poetics—“the representation of the invisible that changes how we view literature, China, and humanity” (13). The book is an original, visionary, and insightful work that is broad in scope and replete with in-depth analyses of various New Wave SF narratives and diverse theoretical explorations of the genre. Song makes an acute observation that the first New Wave, led by Liu Cixin, Wang Jinkang, and Han Song, has been followed by a second New Wave, brought about by a group of women writers, such as Shuang Chi Mu, Mu Ming, Tang Fei, Chi Hui, and Wang Kanyu. He accurately captures the distinct characteristics of these two waves.Song’s panoramic coverage of various Chinese SF narratives written over the past three decades is exceptionally informative. The book will help both general readers and SF researchers get up to speed with the most recent Chinese SF publications. In addition, Song’s analyses go beyond the New Wave period, and trace back to Lu Xun’s and other writers’ works in the early twentieth century. Song argues that most Chinese New Wave SF shares “Neo-Baroque” features such as a nonbinary orientation, a sense of unlimited possibilities, and a bent for boundary breaking. In Song’s interpretation, the general strategy of Chinese SF’s world building is to unfold the invisible hidden in the infinite folds embodied in Neo-Baroque narratives. It is also worth pointing out that Song’s style of writing is lyrical and passionate, an uncommon quality in academic writing. This prose style must have something to do with the fact that Song is not only a professional researcher, but also an imaginative writer and a painter in his spare time.The book is author-based and topically structured. It contains a prologue, nine chapters, two excursuses, and an epilogue. The prologue is a personal account of how the author was drawn to the field of Chinese SF studies and his observations about the development of the field over the past few decades.In chapter 1, Song focuses mostly on two key concepts: Chinese New Wave SF and “a poetics of the invisible.” Drawing upon the comparisons with Western New Wave SF and the French cinematic “nouvelle vague,” Song reveals that “the entire new trend of [Chinese] SF [written since the late 1990s has been] as an emerging new wave in relation to the entire Chinese literary field” by blurring the boundary between popular and serious literature, engaging in thematic and stylistic experiments, and “altering our perceptions of what is literature” (15). Inspired by Han Song’s short story “Fearing of Seeing,” Song identifies “the invisible” as the unique strength of Chinese New Wave SF. The invisible refers to the “realms beyond what we can ordinarily perceive,” providing a canvas for the depiction of “fears and dreams, and challenges to moral conventions and political doctrines” (15). Song acknowledges his theoretical debts to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “Chisam” and Michel Foucault’s notion of “invisible visibility.” He also traces “the invisible” feature of Chinese SF to Lu Xun’s and Kang Youwei’s writings in the early twentieth century, and reveals how the contemporary writers Liu Cixin and Han Song have inherited some literary motifs from the above-mentioned early writers and transformed them in their SF narratives.Song proposes using SF as a method of writing or reading literature in general in chapter 2. He engages in theoretical discussions of some key issues, such as how to define SF; the relation between SF and realism; the Neo-Baroque features that have surfaced in contemporary Chinese SF; and the nonbinary nature of some female Chinese writers’ SF works during the 2020s. In chapter 3, Song engages in a groundbreaking reading of Lu Xun’s “A Madman’s Diary” through the lens of SF and establishes a connection between Lu Xun and New Wave Chinese SF writers. Song contends that “Lu Xun’s ‘A Madman’s Diary’ has served as a precedent for both twentieth-century literary realism and twenty-first-century New Wave SF” by “dismantling the genre conventions” (101). “Excursus I” is a brief review of the history of Chinese SF from the late Qing to 2010. Song’s review provides historical background for the various detailed discussions in the book’s next five chapters.Chapter 4 focuses on Liu Cixin’s the Three-Body Problem trilogy with references to Liu’s many other narratives, such as “Poetry Cloud,” “The Wandering Earth,” and Ball Lightning. Song substantiates his observations on the sublime aesthetics of Liu’s “hard” SF by presenting a comprehensive evaluation and interpretation of the themes, world building strategies, and narrative techniques of representative works by Liu. Han Song’s Subway, Red Ocean, and other key works of his fiction are the focus of chapter 5. Song characterizes the “anatomical aesthetics” of Han’s narratives as “confronting the hidden dimensions of Chinese reality and cutting into the core of the dominant power” (162). Song asserts that Han is an heir of Lu Xun due to Han’s incorporation of various motifs from Lu Xun’s works in his own narratives and his use of “his [Han’s] storytelling to simultaneously betray the illusion of hope and the futility of despair” (200). Chapter 6 focuses on utopian and dystopian motifs in Chinese New Wave SF. Song identifies three major motifs in these utopian/dystopian narratives: China’s rise as a one-nation utopia; negotiations with die-hard specters of old ideologies; and the myth of China’s high-speed development as an advanced society. Song elaborates on these three motifs by analyzing the works of Han Song’s Mars over America and “Track” trilogy, Liu Cixin’s China 2185, and Wang Jinkang’s “The Reincarnated Giant.”In chapter 7, Song delves into Sinotopian and heterotopian worlds in Chinese New Wave SF. Sinotopia is a term coined by Australian journalist Mark Harrison and popularized by Han Song. Sinotopia not only epitomizes the “glossy success story about [contemporary China’s] power and glory,” but also discloses the “hideous, inhuman side of China’s economic miracle, exposing the colossal ethical and ecological costs of breakneck development” (226). Song links Sinotopia to the Foucauldian term “heterotopia” and points out that “Sinotopia has to be a heterotopia” (227). Song substantiates his argument by engaging in close readings of a wide variety of SF narratives from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China, including works written by such writers as Chan Koonchung, Zhao Haihong, La La, Bao Shu, Hao Jingfang, Han Song, Fei Dao, Dung Kai-Cheung, and Lo Yi-chin. Chapter 8 examines the translations and disseminations of Chinese SF, its global influence in recent decade, and its negotiation with world literature. This chapter also touches upon the theme of posthumanism that has emerged in SF works from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China.“Excursus II” provides an introductory review of Chinese SF from 2010 to 2022. This section of the book also presents a backdrop for the topics discussed in the book’s final two chapters. In chapter 9, Song elaborates on his idea of Neo-Baroque and the nonbinary characteristics in Chinese SF by providing an extensive examination of the works written by renowned writers such as Liu Cixin and Chen Qiufan, along with a new generation of female Chinese SF writers. The tenth and last chapter of the book is an epilogue. Starting with a discussion of the film adaptation of Liu Cixin’s The Wandering Earth, Song discusses some concerns he has had, such as the government’s appropriation of SF as soft power for propaganda purposes, heavy-handed bowdlerization and censorship of various Chinese SF publications, the impact of COVID-19 on the Chinese SF community, and his personal thoughts and hopes for the future of Chinese SF. The book concludes with a well-organized scholarly apparatus consisting of endnotes, a bibliography, and an index.Though all of these chapters are drawn together by the central theme of the poetics of the invisible, each chapter is relatively discrete and can be read on its own as an individual essay. This is probably because some of the chapters were originally written and published as individual essays and afterwards gathered together in the book. Therefore, there are some overlapping discussions of a given writer or work of fiction throughout various chapters. However, I would not characterize these overlapping discussions as a shortcoming of the book; instead, a given writer or novel is examined through a variety of different lenses in various chapters. Overall, this book is a timely and important contribution to the burgeoning new field of Chinese SF studies.