Fear of Seeing

Winner, 2023 SFRA Book Award, Science Fiction Research Association

A new wave of cutting-edge, risk-taking science fiction has energized twenty-first-century Chinese literature. These works capture the anticipation and anxieties of China’s new era, speaking to a future filled with uncertainties. Deeply entangled with the politics and culture of a changing China, contemporary science fiction has also attracted a growing global readership.

Fear of Seeing traces the new wave’s origin and development over the past three decades, exploring the core concerns and literary strategies that make it so distinctive and vital. Mingwei Song argues that recent Chinese science fiction is united by a capacity to illuminate what had been invisible—what society had chosen not to see; what conventional literature had failed to represent. Its poetics of the invisible opens up new literary possibilities and inspires new ways of telling stories about China and the world. Reading the works of major writers such as Liu Cixin and Han Song as well as lesser-known figures, Song explores how science fiction has spurred larger changes in contemporary literature and culture. He analyzes key topics: variations of utopia and dystopia, cyborgs and the posthuman, and nonbinary perspectives on gender and genre, among many more. A compelling and authoritative account of the politics and poetics of contemporary Chinese science fiction, Fear of Seeing is an important book for all readers interested in the genre’s significance for twenty-first-century literature.

Acknowledgments
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