Guangzhao, Lyu; (2022) Demise of the False Utopia: China's Post-socialist Transition in Han Song's Red Star Over America. Science Fiction Studies , 49 (1) pp. 100-119. 10.1353/sfs.2022.0007.

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Abstract

The eeriness in Han Song's stories has made him a unique writer in the New Wave of Chinese science fiction. His "eerie" writings blend the imageries of utopia and dystopia, blurring the boundaries between "good" and "bad" places and creating a new form of utopianism that can account for the rapid social transition in China since the 1990s. This essay focuses on one of Han Song's earlier novels, Red Star over America (2000), and interrogates the seemingly utopian China, governed by the omnipotent artificial intelligence Amanduo, through the lens of Moylan's "critical utopia" and Bakhtin's "adventure chronotope." The collapse of Amanduo reflects the decline of "top-down" elitist discourse in China, developed during the New Enlightenment of the 1980s. Han's protagonist's hesitant journey in the post-Amanduo world in search of a new order represents China's ideological transition during the post-socialist era.

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