Fear of Seeing - Global Chinese Culture by Mingwei Song Paperback

About the Book

Fear of Seeing traces the new wave of Chinese science fiction's origin and development over the past three decades, exploring the core concerns and literary strategies that make it so distinctive and vital.

Book Synopsis

Winner, 2023 SFRA Book Award, Science Fiction Research Association

A 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 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: 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 important book for all readers interested in the genre's significance for twenty-first-century literature.

Review Quotes

A timely and important contribution to the burgeoning new field of Chinese SF studies.-- "Utopian Studies"

Apart from his rigorous research, this strong sense of the present and dedicated participation--even his unconventional chapter arrangement recalls the irregularity of the NeoBaroque--make this book all the more appealing to scholars and students of SF and contemporary Chinese literature.-- "Journal of Asian Studies"

An eloquently written, robustly researched, and theoretically sophisticated book that is a welcome addition to the bourgeoning scholarship on Chinese SF.-- "Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews"

A must-read for anyone interested in science fiction and wishing to understand the historical and contemporary dynamics of this genre in the Chinese-speaking world. The breadth of its corpus and the richness of the themes addressed also pave the way for many studies that will follow in its wake, even outside the Sinophone world.-- "China Perspectives"

A must-read for every researcher interested in Chinese sf and sf aesthetics.-- "Science Fiction Studies"

Song's dazzling capacity to connect disparate literary and temporal regimes makes Fear of Seeing an engrossing read, with the book's true strength lying in the kaleidoscopic breadth of its references.-- "Los Angeles Review of Books"

Fear of Seeing not only enriches our comprehension of Chinese science fiction but also invites readers to reflect on the genre's capacity to illuminate the unseen and challenge established literary paradigms. With its compelling insights and expansive scope, Fear of Seeing leads the way for those
eager to delve into the rich tapestry of speculative literature from China and beyond.

--Hsin-Hui Lin "Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities"

A commendable overview of contemporary Chinese New Wave SF.--Wenxi Hu "Chinese Literature and Thought Today"

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.--Melissa A. Hosek "H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews"

Highly recommended.-- "Choice Reviews"

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

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

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

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

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

About the Author

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).