Fear of Seeing : A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction

Winner, 2023 SFRA Book Award, Science Fiction Research AssociationA 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