Conflicting Times : Multiple Temporalities in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction

Abstract: This dissertation explores the intersection of temporality and politics in contemporary Chinese science fiction. Building on previous research on Chinese science fiction, science fiction studies, as well as narrative theory and historical theory, the investigation focuses on eight key texts written by the writers Han Song, Liu Cixin, and Baoshu. Mainly approaching the texts through the conceptual and analytical tools of multiple temporalities and temporal orders, the investigation discusses how these texts reconfigure time and narrate conflicts between different temporalities, as well as how these temporal antagonisms take on a political significance in the context of post-89 China. Whereas discussions on temporality since 1989 has often been framed in terms of a crisis of historical consciousness and a diminishing future-horizon, which François Hartog has defined as an age of “presentism,” Chinese official discourse has continued to be dominated by a teleological and highly future-oriented conception of time. Approaching science fiction as a temporal genre this study explores how Chinese science fiction has reconfigured temporality in the post-89 period, and challenged the hegemonic teleological temporal order associated with the politics of nation-building. The analysis begins by analyzing how the texts narrate variations of non-progressive temporalities, including a cyclical temporal order of recurrence and a presentist temporal order, that conflict with the teleological temporal order. In the following chapter, the study focuses on how the most successful Chinese science fiction novel, The Three Body Problem Trilogy, narrates a conflict between an apocalyptic temporal order and the teleological temporal order represented by the discourse of “The End of History.” The next two chapters focuses on how alternate histories introduce a contingent temporal order that disrupt teleological time, and how the existential time of the protagonists relate to various temporalities in the texts. More broadly, the investigation suggests that contemporary Chinese science fiction can be read as an expression of multiple temporalities in the post-89 context, which challenges and disrupts hegemonic discourses, and reveal these texts as ideological battlegrounds for multiple conceptions of time and timeframes.