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
Mingwei Song is a professor of Chinese literature at Wellesley College. He is the author of Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900–1959 (2015) and a coeditor of The Reincarnated Giant: An Anthology of Twenty-First-Century Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia, 2018).
With 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 Exorcism*
Song 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 Her*
Fear 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 Fiction*
This 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 Thaw*
Drawing 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 China*
Mingwei 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 China*
Fear of Seeing is the most definitive and comprehensive work on
contemporary Chinese science fiction to date. Its powerful
theoretical intervention opens new pathways for analyzing
narratives that challenge previous notions of science fiction from
China . . . This is a must-have book for anyone studying or
teaching Chinese science fiction.
*H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews*
Highly recommended.
*Choice Reviews*
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