Chinese SF’s Next Wave: Toward a Neo-Baroque Literary Universe

Different from the earlier Chinese SF authors, the young women writers who emerged recently (all born after 1984—if this significant year in dystopian fiction can serve as a landmark in a real history of Chinese SF) have mostly enjoyed the privilege of being a global citizen growing up in a new digital age, with less burden of the so-called obsession with China. They have developed their distinct literary voices over the past several years when the entire world witnessed the collapse of the new liberal world order, the backfire of a free-market-oriented “universal” version of globalization, and the rises of a series of worldwide social and cultural movements, such as the #Me Too Movement, the Gen Z environmentalist activism, and a new rally call for establishing a planetary consciousness, which implies a new vision of multiplicity and diversity, cohabiting with other species on our already ruined planet. All these themes, together with less darker visions of technology, a new hope for creating a technologized future while humans and the posthuman can coexist instead of struggling in a “dark forest” scenario ending up in assured mutual destruction, have characterized the politics of She-SF. Correspondingly, a more daring experiment with literary texts—including making the text itself a Möbius continuum or a chimera hybridity, has also begun to change the aesthetics of Chinese SF. Chinese SF readers have long been anxious about what would be the next “miracle” after the success of The Three-Body Problem, and now we have found a clear answer: following the first wave created by Liu Cixin, Han Song, and Wang Jinkang among others, which achieved in illuminating the invisible, darker terra incognita of Sinotopia, the second wave of Chinese new SF has pushed the genre toward creating a Neo-Baroque literary universe.

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About the speaker:

Mingwei Song is a Professor of Chinese Literary Studies and the Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Wellesley College, Massachusetts. His research interests include modern Chinese literature, the Bildungsroman, science fiction, posthuman theories, and the Neo-Baroque aesthetics. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He was a former Dilworth Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and a former An Wang Fellow at Harvard University. He served as the President of the Association of Chinese and Comparative Literature in 2022-24. He is the author of Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900-1959 (Harvard, 2015) and Fear of Seeing: The Poetics and Politics of Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia, 2023). He is the co-editor of The Reincarnated Giant: An Anthology of Twenty-First Century Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia, 2018). He is also the author of twelve books in Chinese, including several academic books but also poetry and fiction.