Cover of Science Fiction World magazine
Mars over America: The New Wave of Chinese Science Fiction
A public lecture by Professor Mingwei Song, Wellesley College
Wednesday, January 11, 3 – 5:00pm
Fairmont Social Lounge, St. John’s College, UBC
2111 Lower Mall
The contemporary new wave of Chinese science fiction presents a subversive vision of China’s pursuit of power and wealth, a dystopian counterpart to the government-promoted “Chinese dream.” This lecture explores the cutting-edge literary experiments that characterize the new wave, which evoke sensations ranging from the uncanny to the sublime, from the corporeal to the virtual, and from the post-human to the transcendent. Professor Mingwei Song will discuss important Chinese science fiction novels such as Mars over America (Han Song, 2000), The Three-Body Problem (Liu Cixin, 2006) and The Waste Tide (Chen Qiufan, 2013).
Mingwei Song is an associate professor of Chinese literature at Wellesley College. In 2016, he was an Elizabeth and J. Richardson Dilworth Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. His research interests include modern Chinese literature, cinema studies, youth culture, and science fiction. He is the author of numerous books and research articles, including Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900-1959 (Harvard, 2015), and Criticism and Imagination: Collected Literary Critical Essays (Fudan, 2013). He has been researching Chinese science fiction since 2010. He has edited three special journal issues on Chinese science fiction: Renditions 77/78 (2012), which features English translations of thirteen Chinese science fiction stories and novel excerpts; China Perspectives 1 (2015); and Chinese Comparative Literature 100 (2015). He has also organized conferences on science fiction at Wellesley College (2013) and Fudan University (2016) and served as a juror for numerous Chinese science fiction awards. He is currently editing The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia, 2017) and writing a monograph Posthuman China: The Poetics of the Invisible and the Hidden Dimensions of Chinese Science Fiction.
Prof. Song will also be offering a graduate seminar on “Representations of the Invisible: Posthuman China” at UBC from 10am-12pm on January 13. Interested parties, please email: chris.rea@ubc.ca.
Hosted by the UBC Modern Chinese Culture Seminar, and sponsored by the CCK Foundation Inter-University Centre for Sinology, St. John’s College at UBC, the UBC Centre for Chinese Research, and UBC Asian Studies.
