Science Fictions: Early Modern Technological Change and Literary Response

Inspired by the imaginative experiments in fiction undertaken in response to scientific developments and technological change in the seventeenth century, this essay seeks to use science fiction's investment in speculative departures and hypothetical worlds to develop a new method for comparative analysis of the early modern world. This essay takes a new approach to the question of a global history of science fiction as a genre, proposing a triangulation among early Qing China, seventeenth- century England, and the present, rather than a teleological account of generic development from early modernity to the present. This model is elaborated through a comparative study of literary responses to new telescopic lens technologies in Li Yu's Shi'er lou (1658) 十二樓 (Twelve Towers), Margaret Cavendish's A Blazing World (1666), and global science fiction today. The aim of this essay is largely methodological, seeking to demonstrate what is to be gained through comparative studies of the early modern world and how we might go about writing them.