Who Co-Authors the Future? Globalisation, Translation Politics, and Narrative Power in Waste Tide and AI 2041

This paper examines the collaborative structures – encompassing translation, co-authorship, and their institutional contexts – through which Chinese science fiction enters global circulation, taking two works by the same author as comparative cases: Waste Tide (Citation2019a), translated by Ken Liu, and AI 2041 (2021), co-authored with AI scientist Kai-Fu Lee. Drawing on Jin’s global dialogism, Bakhtin’s heteroglossia, and Casanova’s sociology of literary translation, Section 1 analyzes how terminological and editorial choices in Waste Tide’s translation constitute a paradigmatic site of negotiation between domestication and foreignization. Section 2 engages with Walton’s critique of AI 2041 as uncritical design fiction, reframing the book’s bifurcated structure through Scott’s hidden transcripts to show how fiction generates meaning in excess of its analytical containment, and foregrounding the complementarity of literary and scientific epistemologies. Section 3 synthesises both cases through Haraway’s sympoiesis and the concept of adversarial generation, proposing situated futurity as a theoretical contribution: the production of counter-futures from specific positions within unequal collaborative structures, where friction between co-authorial voices functions as signal rather than noise.