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

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.

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