Lyu, Guangzhao; (2022) The Boom and The Boom: Historical Rupture and Political Economy in Contemporary Chinese and British Science Fiction. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This is a comparative study of the most recent science fiction (sf) renaissance in China and Britain both beginning around the late 1980s or early 1990s.They are commonly referred to as the British SF Boom and the Chinese New Wave (which I will call the Chinese SF Boom hereafter). This thesis will contextualise these two sf booms in the transitional upheavals in the political and cultural history of China and the UK, marked by the politico-economic changes initiated by Deng Xiaoping and Margaret Thatcher. I will argue that the British SF Boom holds on to a political high ground for left-wing writers, radical or not, who stood against Thatcherite politics, striving to envision an alternative to the capitalist realism where people’s imagination of non-capitalist possibility seems exhausted. In comparison, however, the Chinese Boom’s response to the Dengist reforms appears more complicated. Nourished by the rising influence of a mass public since the 1990s in contrast to the decline of the ‘top-down’ elitism of the 1980s, the Chinese Boom is troubled with a sense of doubleness, with its futuristic visions of non- or post-capitalist alternatives often coupled with a collective trauma of the past. This thesis is then divided into two sections: Historical Rupture and Political Economy. I will first interpret the sense of historical change through my close reading of the critical utopianism in Han Song’s Red Star Over America and Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels, and the co-habituation of different utopias in Hao Jingfang’s Vagabonds and Ken MacLeod’s Fall Revolution quartet. This is followed by a politico-economic study of the economic and social marginality in Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide and China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, the politics of consumption and prosumption in James Lovegrove’s Days and Long Yi’s Earth Province, and the Self-Other epistemology in Liu Cixin’s Three Body trilogy and the Deleuzian deterritorialisation in M. John Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract trilogy. Based on these discussions, I aim to show that the two sf booms have responded in different ways to the socio-political condition formed upon privatisation, marketisation and individualisation in the two countries. And therefore, no matter how global or how planetary sf could have become, it is always anchored in the soil of a certain place, speaking to a certain historical moment. This is why sf is in essence a historical and political genre, and thus should be read in line with history and politics.

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