A Topology of Hope: Utopia, Dystopia, and Heterotopia in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction

Mingwei Song

doi:10.14712/24646830.2022.6

Abstract

This essay investigates how utopian thinking met with dystopian variations in contemporary Chinese science fiction. The dystopian gaze into the utopian dreams, the alternative histories contending with the utopian narratives, and the heterotopian experiments challenging ideological orthodoxy are the focus of my analysis. Reading the dystopian fiction by Chan Koonchung and science fiction stories and novels by Han Song, Bao Shu and Hao Jingfang etc., I do not intend to illustrate the utopian/ dystopian interventions in the political sense, but rather to explore the vigorous, multifaceted variations of utopia, dystopia, and heterotopia that these authors have created as discursive constructs to suggest alternatives to the utopia/dystopian dualism. Contemporary science fiction authors write back to the usual literary practice taking words as reflections of the world. To these writers, words are worlds.

Highlights

The original “Utopia” in Thomas More’s book is “a non-place, simultaneously constituted by a movement of affirmation and denial.” (Fatima Vieira, 2010) Utopia is intended as a critique of certain social situations but leaves room for an imagined positive image that serves as a correction of the criticized society
Darko Suvin considers science fiction to be “at least collaterally descended from utopia,” a sort of niece of utopia, (Darko Suvin 1979, 61) and Frederic Jameson finds the utopian impulse in most of the genre. (Frederic Jameson 2005, 1–9) Utopia lends to science fiction an intellectual tendency to envision better alternatives to reality
Dystopian science fiction that contributed to the rise of anti-utopianism in the West after the World Wars and Stalinism is perhaps the rebellious “niece” that Suvin has in mind, who is ashamed of its utopian heritage (Darko Suvin 1979, 61) – but it cannot escape its genetic destiny, because even the darkest dystopian vision comes from the same utopian impulse, which inspires a subversion of society as much as it inspired utopianism in the first place

Summary

Introduction

The original “Utopia” in Thomas More’s book is “a non-place, simultaneously constituted by a movement of affirmation and denial.” (Fatima Vieira, 2010) Utopia is intended as a critique of certain social situations but leaves room for an imagined positive image that serves as a correction of the criticized society.

Results

Conclusion