Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction

Recent Chinese science fiction has emerged as a cutting-edge, risk-taking genre that reflects the anticipation and anxieties of China's new era. It is deeply entangled with the politics and culture of a changing China and has attracted a growing global readership. Mingwei Song's book Fear of Seeing explores the core concerns and literary strategies that make this genre distinctive and vital, arguing that it has the capacity to illuminate what had been invisible and inspire new ways of telling stories about China and the world.

Format: Hardback
Length: 384 pages
Publication date: 03 October 2023
Publisher: Columbia University Press

A fresh surge of cutting-edge, daring science fiction has revitalized twenty-first-century Chinese literature, capturing the anticipation and anxieties of China's new era. These works speak to a future filled with uncertainties, deeply intertwined with the politics and culture of a changing China. Contemporary science fiction has also garnered a growing global readership.

Fear of Seeing delves into the origins and evolution of this new wave 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 its capacity to illuminate what had been unseen—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 such as 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 essential book for all readers interested in the genre's significance for twenty-first-century literature.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780231204422