We are in a world of drastic climate change, energy scarcities, and rampant pollution, rendering a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene (an epoch of the Anthropos). The fictional responses, however, vary enormously. As a leading voice in Chinese science fiction, Liu Cixin is well known for his techno-fix, in which advances in science and technology ideally generate all desired solutions to ecological and environmental threats. However, his optimism about techno-fix should be reevaluated as it attains an allegorical significance by sanctioning humanism and its affiliated values. I borrow Donna Haraway’s term, “techno-humanism,” and find that ecological and environmental crises in Liu Cixin’s speculative storytelling are often reframed as human existential threats, and technology and technological innovation are for the benefit of human survival and the continuing prosperity of human civilization, which justify human domination of nature and outward expansion as well as the following industrialization and exploitation. For Liu Cixin, humanism entails strong sparks of human-centrism or anthropocentrism. From Haraway’s post-humanist perspective, human-centrism colludes with techno-centrism, creating an unprecedentedly disastrous world for more-than-human beings. I argue that Liu Cixin’s techno-humanist choices are intertwined with the contingencies of socioeconomic, geopolitical, and cultural realities, such as the play of national interests favoring technical choice over another, and discuss how the over-coding of “the Unity of Heaven and Man” and Mao’s war against nature is translated into today’s China’s infrastructure construction by the powerful state to negotiate its way in this world of antagonism and represented in Liu Cixin’s ecological science fiction.

Authors:
Yue Zhou, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China

About the Presenter(s)
Ms. Yue Zhou is currently registered full-time PhD student at the University of Liverpool but undertaking the degree offsite at doctoral researcher at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China.

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https://researchmap.jp/jamespong0080?lang=en

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