The 2015 and 2016 Hugo awards for Liu Cixin and Hao Jingfang, respectively, placed Chinese SF, once a marginal niche in the universe of SF, firmly on the world map of global SF. The critical and popular success of writers such as Liu Cixin, Han Song, and Hao Jingfang has triggered an outpouring of new research—such as Fear of Seeing by Mingwei Song (2023)—as well as extensive translations that have made available an ever growing range of SF from mainland China available to global readers, in English and over a dozen other languages. China’s economic and political rise on the world stage has, arguably, gone hand in hand with a surge of interest in Chinese visions of the future. Within China, SF has emerged as one of the most critically acclaimed segments of literary production. However, Sinophone SF from outside mainland remains marginalized. SF writers from Hong Kong and Taiwan have to date attracted little attention beyond their home markets. SF from Sinophone Southeast Asian writers is barely known. The voices of these writers, however, and the story worlds they create, are crucially important. Not only do they throw critical light on China’s rise by presenting alternative perspectives. More importantly, they reimagine the past, present, of future of our world on their own terms, from the viewpoint of the margins, from the interstices between the major powers, offering new and often unsettling experiences. The papers in this session explore the approaches, methodologies, and imaginaries of these works.
Hsin-Hui Lin’s paper, “Toward Speculative Aesthetics: Island Narratives in Taiwanese Science Fiction and Visual Art, introduces “speculative aesthetics” as an analytic to explore how Taiwanese visual art engages with narrative dimensions beyond textual fiction, focusing on Wu Chi-Yu’s (1986-) video installation Atlas of the Closed Worlds (2021). Drawing on Taiwan’s “island turn” since the 1970s, Wu Chi-Yu’s builds a speculative framework that offers a meta-reflection on the concept of SF itself. Through an extraterrestrial perspective on Earth, Wu’s work juxtaposes Taiwan and global histories of colonialism, resource extraction, cartography, and governance, thus extending the island narrative beyond Taiwan to envision Earth as an island or a closed world.
Next, Michael O’Krent zooms in on the Promethean theme of creating life from inert matter. In “Chinese Prometheus: The Theme of Artificial Life in Sinophone Science Fiction” he focuses on Hong Kong author Dung Kai-cheung’s novella Androgyny (1994) and Taiwan author Chi Ta-wei’s short story “A Mermaid’s Tale” (1992), exploring how Sinophone SF reanimates Lu Xun’s Promethean symbolism in order to make artificial life, queer sexuality, and Sinophone positionality synonymous. This particular usage of artificial life symbolism is a unique and distinguishing feature of Sinophone SF from outside mainland China; all the while, it gestures backward to an earlier tradition of revolutionary writing that originated in mainland China during the late Qing.
Finally, in “Neglected Structures in Singapore’s Circle Line (2023),” Adam Knee examines a “creature feature,” a liminal category the constituents of which variously overlap with horror and SF. With its strictly Mandarin language use that clashes with the multilingual environment, Circle Line presents a forced Sinophone framework that resonates significantly with the imposition of new, uniform frameworks and narratives in the service of progress and modernity, while neglecting earlier but still-existing realities, which, in Circle Line, make their monstrous return.
Nathaniel Isaacson, one of the pioneering scholars of Chinese SF, will comments on the three papers and discuss their construction of alternative discourses in Sinophone SF.