On Chinese Science Fiction

537 ON CHINESE SF: SELECTED ESSAYS, 2015-2020 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY On Chinese Science Fiction: Selected Essays and Critical Pieces in English, 2015-2020 Compiled by Liu Jian (China Science Fiction Research Center and Tianjin Art Vocational College) and Hua Li (Montana State University). ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to Cara Healey, Veronica Hollinger, Nathaniel Isaacson, Frederike Schneider-Vielsäcker, and Mingwei Song for their help. Some of the abstracts have been edited for length. 2020 Luo, Xiaoming. “Unlocking the Future: Characterizing ‘Hope’ in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction.” Cultural Studies 34.2 (Mar. 2020): 235–56. “The future” is the primary driver for the development of Chinese science fiction. This article examines how “hope” is characterized in Chinese sf from two different perspectives. First, are there any reiterations of the future more free or unique than that which already exists with high-tech life? Second, is there a more active approach to conceptualizing the individual’s relationship with the future? The Town Beneath the Tower by Liu Weijia is this article’s entry point to examining depictions of the future in Chinese sf of the past twenty years. I analyze contemporary Chinese sf’s imagined aspects of a barbarous world vehemently opposed to progress, low-tech society, and the relationship between the individual and the future. What are the advantages and disadvantages that stem from society’s search for hope and projections of its future in contemporary Chinese science fiction? Li, Hua. “Don’t Allow Troubled Vision in Science Fiction to Become Reality.” “Thinking Through the Pandemic: A Symposium.” SFS 47.3 (2020): 359-61. China’s science fiction community was the earliest group on the Chinese literary scene to respond to the COVID-19 crisis when it officially began in January 2020. On the one hand, this community foregrounded discussions of both local and international sf stories and films about virus pandemics. On the other, it thought beyond the current COVID-19 moment, actively pondering future scenarios that we might create through our choices going forward about how to implement new advances in science and technology. Moran, Thomas. “The Perverse Utopianism of Willed Human Extinction: Writing Extinction in Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem.” Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction. Ed. Zachary Kendal et al. Springer, 2020. 119–40. 538 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 48 (2021) This essay examines the perverse utopianism in Chinese author Liu Cixin’s novel, The Three-Body Problem. It argues that the text’s exploration of the desire for human extinction functions as a critique of the utopian belief in scientific progress, evident in earlier Chinese sf and in the aesthetics of socialist realism. Extinction becomes a way of mapping the decline of the idea of utopia. The threat of extinction allegorizes a number of threats to the human species, particularly climate catastrophe and the future solar death of the Earth. In ThreeBody , extinction pushes allegorical writing to its limit. In reaching the limits of allegory, the text reaches a utopia that is radically inconceivable and refuses inscription. Special Issue: Alternative Sinofuturisms. SFRA Review 50.2-3 (2020) Aloisio, Loïc, and Gwennaël Gaffric. “A Discussion between Two French Translators of Chinese Science.” SFRA Review 50.2-3 (2020): 71-78. Conn, Virginia L. “Photographesomenonic Sinofuturism(s).” SFRA Review 50.2-3 (2020): 79-85. ))))). “Sinofuturism and Chinese Science Fiction: An Introduction to the Alternative Sinofuturisms Special Issue.” SFRA Review 50.2-3 (2020): 66-70. De Seta, Gabriele. “Sinofuturism as Inverse Orientalism: China’s Future and the Denial of Coevalness.” SFRA Review 50.2-3 (2020): 86-94. Fisher, Margaret A. “The Science-Fictional in China’s Online Learning Initiatives.” SFRA Review 50.2-3 (2020): 95-103. Herold, Carmen. “China’s Sonic Fictions: Music, Technology, and the Phantasma of a Sinicized Future.” SFRA Review 50.2-3 (2020): 104-14. Ireland, Amy. “Empathy, War, and Women.” SFRA Review 50.2-3 (2020): 115-23. Lyu, Guangzhao. “Capitalist Monster and Bottled Passengers: Political Stakes of Embodiment in The Reincarnated Giant and The Last Subway.” SFRA Review 50.2-3 (2020): 124-32. Møller-Olsen, Astrid. “Data Narrator: Digital Chronotopes in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction.” SFRA Review 50.2-3 (2020): 133-40. Ooi, Yen

Art history · China · Chinese society · Sociology · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance · History · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

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  Regina Kanyu Wang•Science Fiction Studies•2025

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