The Next Wave of Chinese Science Fiction: Toward a Neo-Baroque Literary Universe
Thursday, November 6, 2025 | 2:00PM-3:30PM | NEW LOCATION: DML 240 | RSVP

EASC Guest Speaker Series: Talk by Prof. Mingwei Song (Wellesley College) moderated by Prof. Brian Bernards (EALC 150: Global Chinese Cinema and Cultural Studies) and PhD candidate Seoyeon Lee 

In recent years, the Chinese SF world has seen the emergence of a new generation of writers, mostly women, who have developed their distinct literary voices amid the collapse of the new liberal world order, the backlash against a free-market-oriented “universal” version of globalization, and the rises of a series of worldwide social and cultural movements, such as the #Me Too Movement, and the Gen Z environmentalist activism. Also important for them is a new rally call for establishing a planetary consciousness, which implies a new vision of multiplicity and diversity, in which we cohabit with other species. All these themes, together with less darker visions of technology and a new hope for creating a technologized future of the coexistence between the human and the posthuman, have characterized the politics of “She-SF.” Correspondingly, a more daring experiment with literary texts—including making the text itself a Möbius continuum or a chimera hybridity—has also begun to change the aesthetics of Chinese SF. Readers have long been anticipating what would be the next “miracle” after the success of The Three-Body Problem, and now we have found a clear answer: following the first wave created by Liu Cixin, Han Song, and Wang Jinkang among others, whose accomplishments can be characterized as illuminating the invisible, darker terra incognita of Sinotopia, the second wave of Chinese new SF has pushed the genre toward creating a Neo-Baroque literary universe.

Speaker bio: Mingwei Song is the Mayling Soong Professor of Chinese Studies and the Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Wellesley College, Massachusetts. His research interests include modern Chinese literature, the Bildungsroman, science fiction, posthuman theories, and the Neo-Baroque aesthetics. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He was a former Dilworth Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and a former An Wang Fellow at Harvard University. He served as the President of the Association of Chinese and Comparative Literature in 2022-24. He is the author of Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900-1959 (Harvard, 2015) and Fear of Seeing: The Poetics and Politics of Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia, 2023). He is the co-editor of The Reincarnated Giant: An Anthology of Twenty-First Century Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia, 2018). He is also the author of twelve books in Chinese, including several academic books as well as poetry and fiction. 
 

Please note that this event has been moved to DML 240 to accommodate a larger audience. 

This event is co-sponsored by the USC Korean Studies Institute, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and East Asian Library.