Description
Book SynopsisFear of Seeing traces the new wave of Chinese science fiction’s origin and development over the past three decades, exploring the core concerns and literary strategies that make it so distinctive and vital.
Trade ReviewWith
Fear of Seeing, Mingwei Song opens our eyes to a brave new world of Chinese science fiction. It is a book that simultaneously celebrates the genre’s literary audacity, explores its innovative vision of the future, and reveals the uncanny horror hidden beneath its surface. -- Michael Berry, translator of
ExorcismSong has written the most critically significant and astonishingly revelatory account of the rise of new wave Chinese SF. Brilliant scholarship like this appears once in a lifetime, if we’re lucky. -- Junot Díaz, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of
This Is How You Lose HerFear of Seeing demonstrates the paradoxical significance of the “new wave” of Chinese science fiction as a genre whose aesthetics and ethics offer their audience an alternative window on the cultural sphere: a window upon that which is unknown, uncertain, or otherwise hidden. -- Nathaniel Isaacson, author of
Celestial Empire: the Emergence of Chinese Science FictionThis is remarkably visionary and insightful scholarship on Chinese New Wave science fiction from the late 1990s to 2020s. Song’s panoramic yet in-depth analysis of various New Wave sf works is exceptionally informative. His theoretical exploration of the Neo-Baroque poetics in Chinese SF is thoroughgoing and inspiring. -- Hua Li, author of
Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cultural ThawDrawing on a near-encyclopedic knowledge of contemporary Chinese-language SF literature, combined with long-standing friendships with many of the corresponding authors, Song’s
Fear of Seeing offers a provocative new look at this dynamic emerging field, while also examining how a dialectics of sight and blindness runs through the genre itself. -- Carlos Rojas, author of
Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern ChinaMingwei Song has written the definitive book on contemporary Chinese science fiction. From space odyssey to dystopian adventure, galactic cataclysm to millennial apocalypse, Song probes why science fiction matters so much for how we engage with—and imagine—China’s future and past, and offers observations on speculative poetics at the planetary scale. A groundbreaking work! -- David Der-wei Wang, author of
Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary ChinaTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Prologue: A Lonely Hidden Army, 2010
1. Poetics of the Invisible: Introducing the New Wave
2. Science Fiction as Method: Worlding the Genre
3. Can We Read “A Madman’s Diary” as Science Fiction? Rewriting Literary History
Excursus I: Looking Backward: 2010–1900
4. A Poetic Heart in the Dark Forest: Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Universe
5. The Power of Darkness in Han Song: Mythology of the Chthonic
6. Variations on Utopia: Specters and Myths
7. A Topology of Hope: Sinotopia and Heterotopia
8. Chinese New Wave Goes Global: The Posthuman Turn
Excursus II: The Rise of She-SF: 2010–2022
9. New Wonders of a Nonbinary Universe: Opening of the Neo-Baroque
Epilogue: The Wandering Earth, 2019
Notes
Bibliography
Index
