Foreword

The purpose of organizing this cluster of articles, which all address questions of gender and genre in contemporary Chinese science fiction, is to create a critical space where stereotyped gender and genre conventions can be reconsidered, resisted, and even replaced by an emerging nonbinary vision of the undifferentiated difference. While science fiction has traditionally been seen as a male-dominated genre, particularly in a Chinese context, these four articles challenge this view. Years ago, I tried a thought experiment to ask if we can read Lu Xun's “A Madman's Diary” as science fiction, as a way of breaking down the dichotomy existing between the genre experiment and the mainstream literary paradigm of twentieth-century China. In my observation, there should not be such a solid line. In terms of genres, the binary view on the high and the low is a very outdated structure. Science fiction should be a method that stimulates challenges to dualist thinking and dichotomous worldviews.In the first article in this cluster, Huang Yingying asks an equally provocative question: can we read Liu Cixin's Three-Body Trilogy as a nonbinary text? Huang shows us that Liu's saga actually unsettles gender binary and lets in abundant ambiguity. In a similar line, Cara Healey, through analyzing a group of female science fiction writers’ work, presents a deeper understanding of the use of generic tropes in a rebellion against the popular vision of science fiction as a male-dominated genre. Mia Ma also reads female science fiction writers, focusing on the representations of body, empathy, and care, which crystallize in a posthuman becoming that transcends gender conventions. Finally, Astrid Møller-Olsen ushers us to the posthuman space-ocean where hydrocommons and multispecies coevolution replace the narrowly defined humancentric world view, and this new world is, after all, nonhierarchical, undifferentiated, and nonbinary, in all senses. Altogether, these four contributions point to the new wonders of a nonbinary universe that transcends the deep divide between “us” and “others,” or the Dark Forest scenario, which characterizes the three-body universe that Liu Cixin himself names as “the worst possible.” Moving toward a nonbinary view on Chinese science fiction, we follow these four young scholars to explore uncharted territory where multiplicity and abundance form a neo-Baroque fold to generate a new mode of science fictional imagination. What comes after Liu Cixin is not his own replica, but a revolt coming from the margin—a new generation of female and nonbinary writers.