The Parascientific Method: Thresholds of History in and Beyond Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction

Abstract

Whereas most existing scholarship on science fiction defines the genre almost exclusively based on a Euro-American sample of texts, this dissertation foregrounds Chinese-language texts written since 1989 to rethink the definition of science fiction. Just as science creates theories that make sensory and experimental data intelligible as expressions of rational principles, science fiction authors create principles that explain the working of all matter of things in their fictional worlds. I call these not-quite-scientific theories about alternative realities parasciences. Science fiction is thus not only a literary genre but also an intellectual method that breaks down the world into parts in order to imagine how each part could be different. Pseudoscience can be seen as a subset of parascience that does not recognize that it is speaking about an alternate world. All science fiction involves parascientific thinking, but Chinese authors tend to make their parascientific commitments more explicit because they are writing in the wake of a particular intellectual tradition calling for constant reforms and revolutions of the nation in order to bring about a more desirable future. Chinese authors use parascience to construct alternate worlds because scientific advancement has been the core emblem of futurity in China since the late 19th century. Since 1989, three major developments have created an apparent stasis in China and its environs in which the increasing prosperity and power of the People’s Republic seems to be a matter of necessity: the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre ended hopes for substantial political reform in mainland China; the single-party state in Taiwan has given way to a vibrant democracy (which held its first open presidential elections in 1996), more or less ending hopes of peaceful reunification with the mainland; and Hong Kong returned to Chinese control after 150 years of British possession in 1997. But these events and their consequences have also given rise to uncountable uncertainties about China’s future. Many literary critics hold that science fiction is commentary on the author’s present, and China studies scholarship often looks at contemporary art and literature as reactions to the past few decades’ rapid economic and technological growth. The Parascientific Method differs by arguing that the flourishing of science fiction in Sinophone contexts since 1989 points to genuine uncertainty about the future. The dissertation introduction argues that realist literature in twentieth-century China depended on a parascientific logic by which China would be remade into a society governed by the utopian dictates of scientific rationality through political revolution. The primary social function of literature was to transform apathetic readers into citizens duty-bound to advance China’s reformist project. Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, various avant-gardes have rejected this instrumentalization of literature, and contemporary science fiction inherits their experimentalist ethos. Contemporary science fiction embraces unbounded possibilities by creating systematically coherent alternative realities. Unlike Chinese realism, texts found in the Chinese New Wave of science fiction do not necessarily owe allegiance to any specific political view, but create imaginary worlds that are meaningful precisely because they are alternative. The first chapter argues that science fiction’s self-conscious construction of alternate worlds helps us see the parascientific thinking that drove not only Mao Zedong’s totalitarian rule but the broader history of Chinese reformist and revolutionary movements which he epitomizes. The next two chapters consider mainland Chinese authors who directly contest the legacy of China’s realist tradition. They use science fiction to demonstrate the pitfalls of attempting to control the direction of future development. Chapter 2, titled “Parahistory,” argues that Liu Cixin’s popular Three-Body Problem trilogy creates a world in which historical eras are named and separated in order to demonstrate that any social order’s continued stability is contingent on circumstance and thus temporary – a subversive position when viewed in light of the triumphalist rhetoric that characterizes China’s contemporary rise. Chapter 3, “Pareconomics,” examines economist Hao Jingfang, whose science fictional writing creates scenarios that test predictions made about China’s future by multiple economic and political models. Hao’s short story “Folding Beijing” questions whether continued economic growth constitutes the achievement of China’s modernization project, and her long novel Vagabonds simultaneously invites and rejects allegorical readings that would attempt to reduce the novel to a commentary on contemporary US-China relations. The latter two chapters look beyond mainland China to examine Sinophone authors whose works are usually read as literary fiction, rather than science fiction. The revolutionary tradition in Chinese literature is alive and well outside of the political repressive atmosphere of the mainland. These authors find that “revolution” takes place today in unexpected realms beyond the reach of state politics. Chapter 4, “Parabiology,” argues that Taiwanese author Chi Ta-wei and Hong Kong author Dung Kai-cheung use science fiction to compare the uncomfortable positionality of Sinophone authors outside the mainland to queer sexuality. All three are attempts to get at the fundamental form of difference captured by parascience. Chapter 5, “Parecology,” looks at the 2019 short story anthology The Land of Little Rain by Taiwanese author Wu Ming-yi. Wu borrows a symbolic vocabulary from early 20th-century essayist Zhou Zuoren to depict climate change as a type of revolution changing peoples’ lives today. The dissertation concludes by briefly examining parascience as a form of political rhetoric, indicating its significance for modern Chinese history beyond science fiction.