China stakes a claim on the future with the soft power of sci-fi and speculative fiction
Liu Cixin’s Three-Body trilogy and other Chinese works may challenge the West’s projection of capitalist society in fiction, experts say
“Speculative fiction, as a genre that imagines the future while critiquing the present, has long been dominated by Euro-American discourses, and traditional science fiction studies have likewise focused primarily on the texts of Western economic powers,” said Du Lanlan, tenured professor of English literature at Nanjing University in eastern China.
She made the remarks in a presentation last month at a two-day conference on speculative fiction hosted by Nanjing University’s school of frontier sciences and its Institute of Global Humanities in Suzhou, Jiangsu province.
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Speculative fiction explores “what if” possibilities beyond the everyday world and encompasses fantasy, science and dystopian fiction.
Du said Western writers often worked within a neoliberal ideological framework, projecting capitalist society into future scenarios, and their imagined worlds tended to be “dystopian, bleak and pessimistic”.