Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction by Mingwei Song

It’s a difficult task to take stock of a still-unfolding literary movement. Without the ability to see into the future, assessing, identifying, and classifying the ahistorical formal properties of a work or articulating its position within the broader literary (or narrower genre) system is almost as much a matter of luck as it is a matter of actually identifying developmental patterns.

Such a task becomes even more difficult when the objects of study are themselves characterized, in part, by their self-obscuring nature. Texts become cyphers that are inherently resistant to interpretation, concealing their “real” meaning behind more manifest content. The act of reading them thus becomes a double-pronged practice: on one hand, the manifest pleasure of experiencing a new literary form unfolds for the reader like the recounting of a mystery, but simultaneously, those same formal elements require that the reader adopt a suspicious attitude toward the “fabricated smooth surface of ‘reality’ represented in common knowledge, mass media, state propaganda, and ‘normative’ human consciousness” to be able to draw out their hidden meanings in the first place (p. 16).

This is exactly the daunting investigative task Mingwei Song has set for himself in Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction. The key argument of the text revolves around what Song identifies as a “new mode of literariness” that characterizes Chinese New Wave Science Fiction (SF) through a “poetics of the invisible,” which “in the context of contemporary China […] also includes all that is not available for conventional representations due to artistic constraints or political prohibitions” (p. 15). Through this approach, “China” itself becomes a carefully built fiction while fiction becomes a tool for uncovering the truth behind the state-level façade.

Song is already instrumental to the development of Chinese SF criticism, having introduced the “New Wave” terminology that characterizes so much subsequent scholarship about Chinese SF today. In his earlier articulations (“After 1989,” “Does Science Fiction Dream of a Chinese New Wave?” “Variations on Utopia,” etc.) of the term, the New Wave of Chinese SF was held to broadly represent literature in conflict with the mainstream. Here, however, just as Song identifies SF as being “distinguished by its own poetics,” Fear of Seeing goes beyond the attempts to define the genre that has characterized much Chinese SF scholarship up until this point. Instead, it adopts a profoundly suspicious view toward the specific chronospatial milieu in which these texts were written while examining the texts themselves as the keys to disambiguating reality.

The texts at the heart of this study, New Wave Chinese SF, are characterized by two things: their “genetic affinity” to those advanced modern sciences that have “long departed from the nineteenth-century epistemology corresponding to mimetic realism,” as well as a “generic affinity” to the heterotopic space of what passes for “utopianism” in contemporary times (p. 21). The result of this corpus of work departing from a normative epistemological realism is that it is able to represent the “visible invisibility” that represents the “truth” of contemporary China in which it is being produced (emphasis in-text, p. 21).

That is, Song establishes from the outset that the texts he’s examining correlate with underlying systems of oppression, inequality, and fascist political ideology that they are uniquely capable of illuminating. Such oppressive social forces are the “reality” capable of being uncovered by Chinese New Wave SF, with the correspondingly paranoid¹ understanding that all of reality is itself a textual fabrication promoted by the powers that be, and that it is in fiction alone that one may find truth. As a result, such a corpus of work assumes not only a political but a moral imperative for Song—by utilizing formal devices and rhetorical strategies aimed at provoking suspicion on the part of readers, New Wave SF may, in fact, be the only way to identify acts of subterfuge or symptomatic absences that might otherwise stand in for reality.

Such suspicious reading forms the very basis of this entire project, as it does not take official literary history at face value, instead resituating a great deal of earlier work as potentially within the canon of SF or as direct genealogical precursors. Chapter 2’s redefinition of SF as method establishes the contemporary genre as a descendent of the Baroque movement, and chapter 3 furthers this claim by investigating whether canonical texts like Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” can be read as SF given that “SF as a method opened a Neo-Baroque world” with a corresponding epistemological shift toward suspicion (p. 66). Chapters 4 and 5 focus on Liu Cixin and Han Song, respectively, while chapter 6 undercuts the “utopian mentality” defining the “foundation of ideological fictions [that] still prevails in state-controlled Chinese political thought,” showing it for yet another fictitious illusion (p. 206). Chapter 7 exposes the Sinotopic dream of a “Chinese future” for its ethical and ecological costs in which past, present, and future are subsumed into a “reality” manufactured by state apparatuses, even as it goes global in chapter 8. Chapters 9 and 10 look at how the landscape itself is changing as a result of new authors who have themselves historically been deliberately invisibilized and what their newly visible participation means for the changing field’s future.

This very possibility of a future, Song reminds us, is only possible if we’re careful to illuminate the past and the ways it has led here. The final paragraph of the epilogue reminds us that “choosing to remember is a personal ethical decision” and that SF is the very “chronicle of a history that will never end” (p. 312). In order to come to this conclusion, however, he must first demystify these very origins. Like much contemporary scholarship on Chinese SF, Song’s approach focuses on extending the origins of the genre and, in the absence of a central national literary narrative about the development of SF in China, mapping a new developmental path that incorporates and redefines literary history. This is perhaps most evident in his chapters on Lu Xun and his rereading of “Diary of a Madman” as SF, which, as mentioned previously, make up the bulk of chapter 3.

Rereadings and reinterpretations of Lu Xun are de rigueur for anyone in the field of Chinese literary studies generally, and SF studies is no exception. But notably, aside from “Diary of a Madman” and a handful of other historical texts, Song is not treating these works themselves as being in need of demystification. Nor does he imply the necessity of reading contemporary New Wave SF itself suspiciously. The fact that contemporary SF is self-evidently aware of the illusions of society that it seeks to unmask is taken at face value; the literature has itself, to some extent, been treated as if it’s already done the work of relinquishing utopian social narratives and deliberately exposing its attempts to read against the grain.

In identifying Chinese New Wave SF texts as morally and politically responsible for revealing the truth of society, Song invites us, his readers, into the pleasures of suspicion while simultaneously reassuring us that we are in on the very same process of assessment that such texts, per his approach, foreclose to “official” channels. That is, we are reassured that we see behind the curtain opened by the texts without considering the potential for these exact texts to conform to or represent the structures they supposedly illuminate. This is an appealing strategy for understanding Chinese SF in general, given its historically fraught relationship to the “world” literary canon and its own position within the Chinese publishing and censorial milieu. As scholars of suspicious reading such as Paul Ricouer and Rita Felksi remind us, those who have historically been at odds with the canon may find the most benefit (to say nothing of pleasure) in recuperatively finding themselves within textual criticism. This pleasurable assessment neither detracts from nor negates Fear of Seeing’s overall claim that such literature can, does, has, and will continue to reveal that which resists revelation, but the self-aware reader may come away from such an approach profoundly suspicious of the idea that the texts themselves are as transparent about what they make visible as is being claimed. After all, once you’ve seen behind the looking glass darkly, all promises to hold a mirror onto the truth of society imply another reflection.