The Glocal Cosmopolises of Chinese / American Speculative Fiction

This essay discusses selected texts by three Chinese/American speculative fiction authors, two writing their creative work in English—Ken Liu and R. F. Kuang—and one in Chinese—Hao Jingfang. I attempt to frame their work as part of an always-already transcultural space and continuum, nowadays revealed, reinforced, and to an extent created by two factors. First, a recent flourishing of and increased critical attention to speculative fiction on both sides of the Pacific and beyond. “Speculative fiction” is a broad concept, including both science and fantasy fiction, and a “genre” which experiments with different temporalities and contributes to a rethinking of the relation among past, present, and future. Second, ideas of “China” and “Chineseness” as fluid concepts, deployed according to various “scalar” strategies, all relevant to the present historical conjuncture—one in which the “whither China” question is inseparable from questions around world literature and the future of the planet.