 Downing Lu. I am a reader in modern Chinese culture and language at a source where I teach Chinese cinema and culture. I'm delighted to share today's webinar delivered by Professor Minghui Song. Minghui and I have known each other for a long time since we both studied at the Fudan University in Shanghai. Therefore it's a great pleasure for me to welcome an old friend and an internationally renowned scholar to give a talk today. Minghui Song is a professor of Chinese literary studies and the chair of the department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Wesley University in the United States. In 2020, Professor Song was elected to the Delegate Assembly of Modern Language Association MLA. Since 2022, he has served as the president of the Association of Chinese Comparative Literature. In Professor Song's research interests include modern Chinese literature, the Biodrome's Roman, science fiction, post-human theories, and the neo Baroque aesthetics. He is the author of Young China, National Rejuvenation, and the Biodrome's Roman 1900 to 1959, which was published by Harvard University Press in 2015. His forthcoming monograph is entitled Fear of Seeing, the Poetics and the Politics of Chinese Science Fiction. It will be published by Columbia University Press this year. He also co-edited a master read anthology entitled The Reincarnated Giant, an anthology of 21st century Chinese science fiction. This collection showcases the best of contemporary Chinese science fiction from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China. In addition, Professor Song has authored nine books in Chinese, including not only several academic books, but also poetry and fiction. Most recently, he co-authored a collection poetry, which was published by Taipei's Ryefield Press last December. His poems and short stories have been translated into English and Italian. In today's webinar, Professor Song will speak for about an hour followed by Q&A. If you'd like to raise questions or make comments, please use the Q&A box. If you'd like to stay anonymous, you are welcome to do so, but you are also welcome to give up the information as to who you are. This will help us to understand where the questions are coming from. Without further ado, let me hand over to Professor Song. Thank you so much, Xiao Ning. Indeed, you mentioned that we were indeed classmates back at Fudan such a long time ago, but you haven't changed at all. I think this moment is really sensational. It makes me feel like time traveling back to the future, back to the past. Okay, now I'm all alone, I know. All right, I really appreciate everyone coming to this webinar. This talk is based on some of my recent research on the CSFO, the women's science fiction writers emerging in China in the recent years, but still I want to give you the framework why I think about this topic and why it matters. So I'm going to share my PowerPoint and let me share my PowerPoint. Yes, okay. All right, I'm going to can you see the PowerPoint? Is this shared now? Yes, I can see it. Okay, great, thank you. If you go to view. Yes, I want to go to, yeah, go to a slideshow maybe, right? Yeah, slideshow. Yes, okay. I really like the design you did on your website, the rise of CSF Chinese science fiction's next wave with those very subtle kind of strings, almost like a cosmic dance of elements and waves and particles. All right, but there's another way, there's another title for this talk, which is, which is, yeah, new wonders of a non-binary universe. It's basically the same thing, but on the one hand, CSF is what has been used in the mainland China called Ta Ke Huai, Nu Ta, yeah, CSF. At the same time, actually, it's an effort to break down the binary structure of genre and gender. So if we can go one step further, we should call it non-binary universe. But in the context of mainland China, it's still very much limited to the CSF. Even that has been, it has received quite a lot of attention, but still very much marginalized. I want to start by mentioning an article that I recently written in Chinese, it's about Liu Yukun, Ken Liu. When I was trying to write about his science fiction, this was written in Chinese, I realized that at the heart of Ken Liu's science fiction, there was always this really the poetic heart. I think I captured that moment. For example, in many of his poems, we can see the images and even the personification of certain images coming from this point, Edna, Sylvain, and Mire, she was active in the early, she was active before the rise of modernism. So today, she was mostly forgotten, but she's kind of between Emily Dickinson, and then between Dickinson and Maria Moore. But I read her poems, I found she's very audacious and very imaginary. And that connects Ken Liu's fiction to the way how Ken Liu could appropriate a lot of the poetic elements from Maynard's poems in his fiction, gave me the key to understanding Ken Liu. Then I wrote this and then sent it to Ken Liu. Ken said, nobody, basically, he said, nobody found it, you found it, that's indeed the key. I felt very happy about that, but I won't really, you know, be kind of like, I think it's just because I also write poems. So I found that in it. But at the same time, there are other poems that often appear in Ken Liu's writing, such as W. H. Alden, One of the Land Altogether Airships, Vasta Herzgrinder, was even used as a title for one of Ken Liu's stories. Okay. So seeing this, I want to create a non-binary, not me. Indeed, this came from Suyang Chu. Sorry, this is in Chinese because the whole point is all mixed, but I will give you the English. I want to, simply I want to create this affinity between genres that can break the yearly non-binary, the yearly the binary structure that that categorize each in its own fixed place. So Suyang Chu wrote a wonderful book, The Mindful Dream of Literacy, in which she first argued that science fiction and realism are actually the same, which is very audacious, very productive. She basically, she, she argued that science fiction is a high-intensity mymesis, while realism is only a low-intensity mymesis. So in that capacity, science fiction can be, can beat realism, conventional realism to unpack the world from within, to get into the world's all different dimensions. So this is similar to what we use the Newtonian physics to understand the appearance of the world and to use quantum physics to go into the, you know, high intensity, not share the universe, you know, not share. But that's only the beginning of her book. Her book actually is not about realism. Her book is actually about poetry. She said this science fiction and lyric poetry are jointly, sorry, sorry, I here, I hereby submit a theory that might initially sound impossible, but will I hope have become more convincing by the end of this book. Science fiction and lyric poetry are joined inseparately by rich affinities. And she used a quite range, a wide range of the affinities, including verbal intensity, including the musicality and the time, things like that. Okay. So I always feel I owed a lot of a debt to this remarkable scholar, Suyang Chu, my peer, and I learned from her. And I think without her theories, I couldn't have come to my understanding of the Chinese science fiction here. Okay. So inspired by Suyang Chu, I began to use science fiction as a method. I have a list of quite a few different ways to use a method. But here what matters is I use science fiction as a method to rearrange gender and the genre and gender, you know, non-binary structures that brought us to the CSF. About the genre, I actually, a few years ago, I used, I know, I know I always have a new audience, but I have an old audience, some old audience already familiar with this, but new audience do not know this. So I will say this very briefly. I did a thought experiment in 2018, the 100th anniversary of Lu Xun's Mademons Diary, which was considered the most important piece for modern Chinese literature. But after this naughty question, can we read the Mademons Diary as science fiction? Interestingly, this question caused a lot of controversy, but eventually it even made its way into Chinese Gaokao Jikoo. It became, I think, it's institutionalized eventually by the system to make it a question that is legitimate. As a question, can we read the Mademons Diary as science fiction? But that's not my intention. I do not want to make it legitimate. I want to keep it illegitimate because I want to make it always provocative. So this question does not bear a certain answer. It is meant to destabilize the literary structure, the literary history to bring out all the, to unleash the demons of uncertainty. That's also where the title of my book that Xiao Ning introduced just now came from. So in that book, I talked about this. I basically, I believe Lu Xun's Mademons Diary is much more profoundly related to the structure of feeling and also the scientific knowledge about the world than we thought. So we can agree that Lu Xun, did Lu Xun know about the quantum revolution? I found some clues, but here I don't have time to give you all the clues. I found some clues to, to, to demonstrate that Lu Xun was indeed aware of the, what was happening in Germany at that time about physics. Okay. So, but here's not the place to talk about this. What I want to say is that basically I used this first question, this first prerogative question to unpack science fiction or to, to really, to rearrange science fiction's position in Chinese literary history, not, not just to put science fiction back to Chinese literature, but also to, to actually, to re-defend the origin of Chinese literary modernity as we can see as a singularity, which is not real, which is not about realism, but actually is very much about a new way of seeing. And this new way of seeing is what's inspired by the new scientific knowledge and the new epistemology, which prevailed, which began to emerge and prevailed, and that got into the entire school of quantum physics, and that got into Stravinsky, the music, and Picasso that got into philosophy, that got into many, many things, and that changed the fabric of reality. As one scholar, David Sturridge called, David Sturridge believed the Darwin, Darwin's theory and Freud's theory, and the quantum physics changed the fabric of reality. And that's exactly what Lucien did, and that's exactly what science fiction did. Science fiction also, yeah, basically re, science fiction, by nature, is a thought experiment that tried to ask, what if, or to give us a totally different image of the world as a cognit, cognitively, in stringing to use Dr. Kossou's definition, or simply Wanderers, like the Baroque. Okay, this talk is not about Lucien, this talk is about the second thing. Later, I began to develop my second productive question. Okay, another very naughty question, that is, can we read Lucien as a non-binary writer, or can we read Lucien's text as a non-binary text? This question made Lucien happy, I believe, because Lucien is called a big lew, and he's all the science of the masculine, masculinity, and after the success of the three-bodied problems, three-bodied novels, Lucien was considered the pride of China, and people celebrated him, because he elevated the China's position in the world, even though this is just the science fiction, and even though Lucien's success actually has nothing to do with the Chinese propaganda machine, it's actually a success was really made possible by science fiction fans, but on the receiving, and the Chinese readers, Chinese fans, all celebrated Lucien as the most kind of magnificent achievement in Chinese literature, as if China indeed invaded the United States by science fiction, and this show of the very strong masculinity and what came together with it, in the beginning it was called the San Ti Dang, the party of the three-bodied that evolved into industrial party, and evolved into several different schools of thought that were very popular among the young people, the millennia, those who were in their 30s, they all believed in the dark forest scenario as a real politic scenario, so they all called the Lucien like the godfather of science fiction, yeah, Wang Laoshu sometimes jokes that I'm the godfather, I'm not, I'm totally not a godfather, Lucien was considered really like the father, not the godfather, really the father of the fatherland, the father image that could match the fatherland, so there's even some shimmering of fascism in this new, in those new scholars interpretation of the three-bodied problems, the sublimes, aesthetics corresponding to moist revolution to China's current campaign to become the number one, so my question is really truly untamely and unpopular, how can I read Lucien as a non-binary writer, of course, Lucien is not a non-binary writer, but how can I read his text as a non-binary, okay, I have my reasons, and I indeed, even recently when I was watching the three-bodied film, when I was watching the Wandering Earth 2 and when I was watching the three-bodied TV drama, I don't know if you're watching it, I thought while the Wandering Earth 2 is just, you know, technologically speaking, it's wonderful, but it's, it does not have the poetic heart, I think without, I earlier, a long time ago when I corresponded with Lucien often, I thought fundamentally he is a poet like Ken Liu, maybe that's why when Lucien's three-bodied novels were first published, it's mostly some Chinese poets who wrote reviews about him, like Liao Weitang, and it's the poet Ken Liu who found it's so powerful, so beautiful, of course, this argument is rather arrogant, I won't go that far, I refuse any certainty, so this is not a statement showing any certainty, but what I want to say is that I think Liu Lucien, based on my understanding of him as a person and his writing, I think he had a soft spot that is poetry, the poetic heart, so when I was revising my book, my favorite scene, I eventually renamed, I gave the title for Lucien, the title for the chapter of Lucien, a new title, yeah, before it was called Between the Sublime Cosmos and the Macro Era, now I changed it to a poetic heart in the dark forest, I just want to highlight this, this part of Lucien that has been overlooked for such a long time, or eventually almost being pushed up by Lucien, even being pushed up by Lucien himself when we began to accept all these new interpretations of him, his writings as a testimonial to China's national strengths, okay, but I have a reason, I, let me skip this, sorry, surely, yeah, of course, yeah, that's another thing I want to remind the people, but a mainland, a very important mainland scholar, Wu Yan, whom I respect tremendously, he, he wrote a book and in that book he grouped the science fiction writers by gender, he gave women science fiction writers a good place, he first talked about women's science fiction writers, he particularly reminded people that science fiction was created by a woman, indeed, yes, that's Mary Shelley, but then he grouped all the other science fiction writers as the big boys, like Lucien as a big boy, okay, I have a, I respect Wu Yan's respect for women's science fiction writers, but I have a problem with these categories, all these categories, I think science fiction is a queer, okay, this is of course another joke, but as a way to, just to provoke, to simply to, to put things in question, science fiction may have a, if we really talk about the bloodline, science fiction has one grandmother, Mary Shelley, but the two fathers, Julien Verne and H. G. Reyes, this is not my, what I said is, this was first said by a British author, Adam Roberts, but I often, I often quoted it, and then I loved Virginia Wurf's idea for writing Orlando, a biography beginning in the year 1500 and continuing to the present day called Orlando, later only with one, with a change about from one sector to the other, later Virginia Wurf indeed wrote this novel, her most fantastic novel, her only novel of a fantasy, Orlando, and the year 1500 was very important to the history of science fiction, because that's roughly the time period when science fiction as a genre began to come into being with the age of the great, at the age of the great geographic discovery, but also in the epoch of Baroque. What I found in Liu Zhixin, let's say, I think in Liu Zhixin's writings, women are never marginalized. First of all, Ye Wenjie is the, is the person who made the first contact with the aliens, even though we can say she's like a nemesis, the goddess with revenge or whatever, but when I saw in the TV show, the three-body, I felt before Ye Wenjie, before the young Ye Wenjie appears, the show was a little bit, it was entertaining, but it was just entertaining, but when Ye Wenjie appeared in the, in the show, you know, because of the censorship, the TV drama had to be delayed, the release was delayed for a year, they had to cut out all the mentioning of the cultural revolution, everything, but Ye Wenjie's eyes, you can see everything, you can see the sadness of the time, the madness of the time, you can see her desire and her fear and her, simply her loss of trust in people, you see everything in it, and that, from that moment, the TV show became really interesting in the sense that it gained the meaning larger than the show itself. So Ye Wenjie was not just a character in the story, she actually has the lasting power, like an agency of pushing, no, she does not just push the button, she push the story to go deeper and deeper, and the dark forest came from her, not from, the dark forest theory came from Ye Wenjie too, not from Luo Ji, okay. Then the second important female protagonist, Zhuang Yan, was considered like Ye in the Garden of Eden, very adult, kind of like a very flat, people thought that character was very flat, but if you read carefully, this character has a very subtle resistance, she is a woman and she is herself, she does not fit completely the fantasy, the male fantasy of Luo Ji, the playboy, she appears to be that, she even pretends to be that, but eventually she left Luo Ji and it's only her departure that pushed Luo Ji to become the real wall-facer, to become the real wall-facer, the real sword-holder. So Zhuang Yan played a much larger role than we usually credit it. Now let's talk about, I think particularly important is that Cheng Xin received quite a lot of criticism from the, okay, as for Cheng Xin, her tenderness forms the poetic heart of the entire trilogy, she's the only character who transcends the dark forest scenario, breathing a warm human kidneys to the cold dark immoral universe. When we finally, yeah, so when we finally understand that the entire narrative is Cheng Xin's message in the bottle, the narratorial voice becomes blurry, is it Cheng Xin's voice or all the Liu Xin's voice? However, in that atmosphere when I talk about when the industrial party was on the rise when readers militarized the dark forest scenario, received a three-body problem as purely like showing the muscles and the masculinity. The moral judgment targeting Cheng Xin in the science fiction circle goes far beyond the texture level. Cheng Xin, due to her kind heart and the empathy, fails to accomplish her mission as a sword-holder to exterminate the enemy and all lives on earth. The web is filled with netizens calling her Sheng Mu Biao. I found how to translate it and eventually I found the help from a student man. She translated it as a soft-hearted beach, a little similar, yeah, or Virgin Mary, Holly mother, but soft-hearted beach, Sheng Mu Biao. These derogatory words have flown after the discussion about the novel to become a gender crusade, a mytho-gynastic fanaticism. Okay, what I try to do, very much inspired by some of my woman fellow scholars, in particular, I want to mention the name Yingying Huang, Huang Yingying, because I read one of her papers, realized that she gave me this very important epiphany, that is the three-body problem has a deeper time. Huang Yingying analyzed this poem written by Singer, so-called cleaner, but who's also a poet, a singer and it is a lover. We don't know it's sex, we don't know whether it has sex or not, but Yingying Huang, Huang Yingying analyzed this poem and Yingying Huang teaching at Lafayette College. I really want to, yeah, call up to praise her for finding this and I was inspired by her thought. And I think in this we see the, a deeper structure in Leucine's trilogy, which may not be in the consciousness of the author when he wrote about those scientific speculations, but this is a deeper level of textuality, which I, if I could, let me say I, I think it really responses to Zhu Tianwen's Fender's CXS Blender in a certain way, even though Leucine may have never read Zhu Tianwen's Fender's CXS Blender. It's about the end of the world and it's also adding Zhang, adding Zhang question about human, you know, man die or man is buried, but there's a woman, the the goddess will comfort the dead after you are asleep, I will talk you in. Or in Horowitz's words, our mother planet Gaia has been ruined, humans, men, or mostly men, must relearn how to stay with the trouble, developing a tentacular thinking, relying on the direct experience of a bodily senses. Humans must merge into the one with the devastated nature in all its monstrosity, non-binary, between man and woman, between human and non-human. And this is the deeper time that I, I think that's very important to consider in in Leucine's three-body trilogy. So I know Leucine won't agree with me, Leucine does not agree with a lot of my argument about him, but I don't think the author can dictate his own writing. And my argument do not aim to create any statement of certainty, but rather to unpack, to kind of, it's like to break down some fixed structure to see Leucine is a male writer and his text is the manifestation of the strengths of the nation in the image of all those male, generous strategies like Luo Ji, like Zhang Beihai, while the readers all kind of tried to push the women characters to the margin as insignificant or even counterproductive. But I think in Leucine's three-body trilogy, it's always women's characters who played a much larger role in executing the power like a human agency in the unfolding of the plot. We don't have time to talk more about this, and I think I have already used a lot of my time. Now let's talk about the CSF. Okay, this is a question. After the success of Leucine, I think Chinese science fiction entire Chinese literary field was very much unprepared. And then nobody could could simply speculate what would come after. So people always waited for Leucine to write another masterpiece, like another three-body trilogy. Leucine was working under tremendous pressure. I knew over the years, he wrote a lot, but none of those manuscripts he felt was even equal to the three-body trilogy. Maybe one day he will give us another miracle. But that's not that's not the way to think. If we think what will come next is like another, it's like to use the Chinese from Shengli or Wenwen from Trump to Trump. That's a very Hegelian teleological thinking. I was rather pessimistic in the beginning. I thought after the success of the three-body trilogy, Chinese science fiction had its supernova moment, and then it would die out. That's really my thought. And I think I even influenced my teacher, Professor Wang. He even talked about this to the press. Like Kehuai in the past, science fiction somehow, this moment was gone. Even though we really cherish some other writers like Han Song, who was writing was not like Leucine. Leucine is all sublime. Actually Leucine is sublime in the dark. And Han Song is catholic in the dark. Han Song is irrational in the dark. Leucine is very scientific in the dark. Even though we have the diversity, we have different writers. We have Chen Qiufan, who is closer to reality to the near reality, who has more eagerness for the social engagement. But it's during the pandemic, when I somehow received some gifts from a few very young writers, then in about 2020, I realized this is the next wave. This is the CSN. This is the Chinese women writers, or women and non-binary writers. Some writers are perhaps non-binary, but I want to give you a larger context. We include this new next wave in the larger Sinophone literary context. We can certainly call it non-binary. So it is the CSF and non-binary writers who quietly made a new wave, a next new wave. Okay, maybe I should say a few words about new wave. I use new wave as a phrase to describe the momentum of Chinese satisfaction, contemporary Chinese satisfaction when it truly presented almost like a paradigm shift in the literary imagination to the 21st century Chinese literature, where just yesterday I read a long article published in the very important Chinese journal, that article began with a sentence that is, realism, no doubt, how we even, realism, reality is still our most important or most significant standard, how we even, reality is still our standard, how we even, reality is still our standard. That's the standard narrative in Chinese literature about Chinese literature. I use new wave. Basically, I render science fiction as a new wave, almost like avant-garde literary movement to challenge this realism. Of course, there are many different other ways to challenge realism, like real avant-garde fiction in the 1980s, and also like a myth or realism created by Yan Lian Ke, and even Mo Yan's hallucinatory magic realism, all these different variations of realism already challenged this golden rules of challenge realism, but science fiction did something totally different. Science fiction decoupled representation and reality. It changed the relationship for all the other realism, all the other even avant-garde fiction. It always, there's the object first, but in science fiction is the representation conceives, often is the representation conceives the world. So, world building is a inbuilt mechanism in the genre. So, science fiction has to be, you know, create a world. So, that's what I call the new wave. That's how I value and treasure this particular momentum of science fiction in the context of Chinese literature. Then, I realized when everyone only wanted to repeat what Liu Xin did, I think there's no way for it to continue. The momentum is going to die out. But then, I found that Xi SF. Xi SF is not a powerful movement. It's a very quiet movement. So, I ask, does science fiction has gender? A genre fiction, it is in the Chinese context, often marked with a series of binary categories, such as hard SF versus soft SF, golden age versus new wave, for them new wave is too literary, and technological SF versus social SF. SF surnamed sense versus SF surnamed literature, and so on and so forth. These banners, Chinese die hard SF fans who took these banners for granted, you really prefer the former and view them as manifestations of true SF spirit. Science fiction is hard street, technological and sublime. If science fiction has a gender, it's often associated with geeky guy, street guy, and nerdy guy. Okay. So, actually, if we look at the writings by women writers in between 1997 and 2012, we actually see a lot of women writers who wrote like men. It's like this is a game, this is a rules of game, you have to play that rule. So, a lot of women writers use the unnarrative perspective, but the unnarrative is a man. And they try to imitate the male perspective, the male. So, indeed, for some time, even Hao Jingfang, I want to just call up to another name, Kara Healy. Kara Healy is a young scholar based in, based at Wabash College. She wrote about Hao Jingfang's gender stereotype. She found Hao Jingfang as a woman writer actually repeated the Taishi's家人, the beauty and scholar stereotype, and sort of kind of strengthened the gender stereotypes in her fiction. Indeed, that's true. That's exactly what I think quite a lot of earlier women writers were doing, but things changed with these books, The Waste Spring Arrives, some other books, and particularly when I really don't have time, but I want to show you, sorry, we have to skip all of this. I don't know why we have all this. Yeah, all these male writers, they are very handsome, but sorry to skip them. Baroque, skip all the baroque. Let's skip all of them. Too many, sorry. In Zhu Tianwen's Finder-Sax Blender, of course, Finder-Sax Blender is not a science fiction, but we can read it as a science fiction if we use science fiction as a method, because it was written in 1990, but it's about what will have happened between 1990 and the 2000, and it ends with this very famous quote, the abuse mode, blue of the lake, tells her that the world of men have built with theories and systems will collapse, the shame with her memory of smells, the colors will survive and rebuild the world from here. That is a different way of thinking. So even in Han Song, a writer who is very different from Liu Shixin, in many ways, in writing, in thinking, in ideology, in ideological tendencies, and in terms of liberalism versus the fascism. I think Han Song has a much, much larger tolerance for different things, but Han Song's perspective is still very much built in that what I call here, the world of men have built with theories and systems. And then this new word, Zhu Tianwen, predicts this mouse is resisting. Then a few years after Zhu Tianwen, actually I'm writing a paper about this thread in Taiwan. I realized it's very interesting just a few years after Zhu Tianwen's writing. I see in Ji Dawei's short story, Beneath His Eyes in Your Palm, a red rose is about to bloom. A very similar tendency of showing us a word that was built by some corporations replacing the nation to manipulate the human world. Actually, it's only an illusion where the truth of the world was actually the unlimited repetition of the experiments of making lives by a gay couple. By the way, one of the gay couples, one of the gay's name is Dakar, the protagonist of the duo enjoys dreaming of an electric ship. And then all the people are the same person, but they are all different. They are the same genes, but they variance. So Beneath His Eyes in Your Palm is actually the same. Okay, the story is too complicated to introduce here, but I want to mention it. I want to mention it is that please remember in 1994, in Taiwan, the non-binary universe of science fiction was already born with all the new baroque splendor. I will skip all this. Sorry, let's skip all this. So finally, in the story, like the solar studio single Taiyang Xi Pian Cha, I found a perfect text. I got to read this text in 2020. Then I later realized this story was never published or was astonished. How could such a wonderful text never published? But the author told me that they all consider it too difficult to understand. Indeed, it is a very difficult. It's a very difficult text. The author's name is Deep Terror or Shuang Chi Mu, like a fly. Sorry, I was distracted by the chat. Okay, sorry, sorry. We don't know its gender, and I cannot find her picture. I know she's a woman, but I can't find her picture. I don't want to ask her for a picture, so I don't have a picture to show you. But this story is really marvelous in the sense that it is a text that weaves into itself the staging of Chekhov's Seiko, that very famous light comedy. Of course, Chekhov's comedy is always very tragic, but it's still laughable, very laughable, humorous in a good way. That's the play when there's a gun, how Chekhov's gun can help you with description. Yes, when you have a gun, the gun has to be shot. Okay. But this play in this story is not staged in a studio, it's staged in the universe. The entire universe is playing this Chekhov's play. And the who play in it is a wave and a particle that became personalized. It's just a very beautiful balance here to create this indeterminate non-binary state. Let me tell you this. I don't know if you are familiar with Chekhov's Seiko. In Seiko, there is a play in play. The play is about this young romantic playwright. He's fiercely in love with a country girl, and he wrote a play. This play is about, this play is a science fiction. This play is about 20 million years into the future when all lives die out. Mind you, this play was written in 1896, one year after the success, the phenomenal success of HG Wehr's novel, The Time Machine. So this moment of 20 million years into the future is very similar to the scene described by HG Wehr's. But Chekhov considered HG Wehr's was bad taste. So he made a lot of that. So he made this scene very, very laughable. But the play itself eventually shows the unpredictability and the absurdity of the universe. So eventually when all the human affairs, the story of human affairs unfold in Seiko, actually you will remember what eventually happened. It's very similar to this HG Wehr's moment, the dying out, everything. So the gun is fired, the protagonist killed himself. And then also the tagline of the play is that there's a beautiful Seiko, but a man comes seeing the Seiko, kills that Seiko for no reason. It's cute. Then the play is about something quite mysterious. Do I have the time just to read? I really want to read this to you so you can see what I mean. Okay, here I give you three paragraphs that are translated. Maybe not very good. But this translation can give you a sense of the text, how, why they are difficult to read because they often put the Chekhov quotations into the text. But the quotations sometimes are modified. Okay, here I begin. So this country girl, which the playwright is fiercely in love with, is called Nina. So first is here the Nina is talking, Nina says, man lands, eagles and the partridges haunt their teeth, spiders, salamanders, fish that were in the water, starfishes that creatures which cannot be seen by eyes, all living things, all living things, all living things, having completed their circle of sorrow are extinct. These are from Chekhov's play in play. For thousands of years, the earth has born no living creature on its surface. And this pool move lights its lamp in vain. It is cold, empty, dreadful. The bodies of living creatures have vanished into dust. An eternal matter has transformed into rocks, into water, into cloths. While the souls of all have melted into wine, that world so I am is me. I in me, the consciousness of a man is blended with the instincts of the animals. And I remember all, all, and I live through every life once again, all over again, in myself. And this, of course, because the playwright is fiercely in love with this girl. So she made it female. It's in this, but this female, in description, she has both Napoleon and an insect. A Napoleon lived in her. An insect also lived in her. So she's the one, she's like the Gaia, she's like what Haruby calls this, eventually this, this manifestation of the monstrosity in one single life. But here, Dipterid, which is an insect, is going to give us a new perspective. She breaks this one single life into two. They are two. Okay. Of course, they're Russian. So, they're these descriptions. They were born in the North. The long summer days are warming up, like, big are fully equipped. They dive into explore the bottom of the lake. And the water forest only has scarce vegetation. They believe they have reached the end of the universe in winter. They run in the cold of a 40 Fahrenheit degree below zero. And I can see the mucous way in the sky on a sunny day. By the end of the spring, trees are still sprouting and they are watching the opening to the ancient tunnel built in the 20th century with their four legs wrinkling in rhythmic and cheerful ways. One is watching the zigzag tracks far away, supporting the train that enters the tunnel. The other is listening to the sound of the train closer and closer. They seize the opportunity, jump into the ancient train. Following the tracks, they come from the far eastern backwater all the way to the source. So in this paragraph, this soul becomes a couple of girls, two girls. But furthermore, the earth has never abandoned its past, even after humans began their evolution. Thousands of years, millions of years later, human expedition feedback on the earth, making it a living fossil that keeps growing, keeps growing, giving birth to layers of layers, tree rings that record its own growth, that planets is indeed an ecological museum of human civilization, populated by both the pre-modern tribes, the non-human beings of the 29th century. Now we're in the 29th century. They hide themselves in the third class trains. Now the girls, the two girls appear again. They hide themselves in the third class trains, third class carriages, mingling with people and things that they have never seen. They manage to survive, completing a macro history of evolution equivalent to an entire millennium for human beings. When the trains reached the edges of the Indian Ocean, she has learned how to process all the quantum of images, and she has learned how to record all the quantum sounds. They have become the senior engineers who adventure into the new frontiers of the universe. Everyone wants to have them, recruiting them to join their crew. They choose a monster named Leviathan, which takes them to reach the limits of the human world with the maximum speed. The entire route is more challenging than you imagined. They have turned from homoflex hidden in the trains into the predators in space. They have learned to live in narrow space and die in the cosmos of enormous magnitude. They have overcome all kinds of uncertainties in life and reached the end of the universe. Again, there seems to be a cliff in the void standing on the edge of the cliff. They simultaneously catch the set of the burst and dance the stars. Further away, they see the unknown desolate. Humans have not found a way to make a first step into the void. The narrative will eventually reveal these two girls are very particular. They are interchangeable. They are also gender-changeable. They play the two women characters in the play, so they are part of the representation, but they are also conceiving a new reality, a new universe. So Chekhov's light comedy eventually becomes the divine comedy, the cosmic comedy that ends with a totally new non-binary universe. This text I praised very much, and I just want to mention this name. Lin Chen. For a long time, she was overlooked, but lately I read so many interesting stories written by her, including one story called the 404 dragon invisible. It's perfect for me. It's about a dragon. It's about a dragon that appears in Beijing City, but you have to 404 the dragon. So in Beijing, everyone knows this dragon, rooming everywhere, but all the news reports have to hide the dragon. So it's very funny, but she has other things. But she's one of the authors who tries to write like a man. Her narrative is very similar to Liu Zixin. It doesn't have too much female, but in a certain way, I hate to see the female trace, but I just want to see she avoids the gender question in her stories. Zhao Haihong's stories are much more diverse, and she can write very cold kind of mechanical stories, very much like the hard science fiction. But she also writes stories like Baobai, Baobai or Annie, like baby, baby, I love you. Stories like that. I remember she wrote one story, almost like a joke. In that story, in that story, she depicts that she talks with Liu Zixin at a place and after they depart, she somehow, she keeps transforming from one person to another person. And this transformation happened six times until she calls Liu Zixin up to ask what happens. Then Liu Zixin has no idea. Liu Zixin does not even remember saying her. It's quite a mystery. In this process, she transforms from man to woman, from woman to man, back and forth, back and forth. This is a very interesting story. And Xia Jia, I literally really, I particularly read her in English, made me say her in Neolithic, but she's very famous, so I will not say too much about her. Hao Jingfang, she's super famous, so I will not say about her. And Chi Hui, I really think Chi Hui deserves more attention. I rediscovered her stories about the horror element. Like Rune Forest is always, you know, whenever I teach science fiction, my students always choose Rune Forest as their favorite story, not Liu Zixin's story. Rune Forest is about a woman warrior who eventually merged into the forest, become the one with the trees, non-binary and trans species. And Chi Hui also wrote quite a few stories about fake people. Fake people, I literally just discovered how interesting that was, but for a long time it was overlooked, and she never won a major award from Chinese science fiction circle. I thought she was underestimated. Cheng Jingbo's writings are, some stories are quite sweet, like firetails, but she wrote one story, which is really, really about this. I don't have time to talk about it, sorry. You can read it before the collapse of the city, yes. That Tang Fei is the central figure of this Shui SM, because she has the consciousness, she has a self-conscious of the Shui SM. There's a non-binary, a self-conscious of the non-binary thinking. I highly recommend Tang Fei and the Gu Shi camera, and we are all camera in the Mobius time space. These are just so marvelous examples for me to use to illustrate this Shui SF. But again, I won't give you the spoilers here. You need to read the stories yourselves. And Mo Ming, her first collection of stories is finally forthcoming. I particularly like Gu Shi and Mo Ming using very, they both have a very nice balance between reason and imagination. They both use very strict scientific calculation to set up the plot and then create the marvelous uncertainty about it. And also Wang Hai Yu, she's also super famous. And Wang Luoluo just began to know her stories, not yet too much. Duan Ziqi also just began to, you can see the age, they're younger and younger. And George Elliot, why George Elliot? Okay, why George Elliot? Because George Elliot translated Spinoza, introduced Spinoza to the Victorian British people. Well, Spinoza was long forgotten in the history of philosophy for hundreds of years. But I think for all these non-binary philosophy, we own something to Spinoza. The Spinoza legacy is the most powerful heritage we have to help us get into a quite important dialogue with humanism. Okay, I think the second wave is can be characterized as a process from can to kin in which we can find new wonders of the non-binary universe. Thank you very much. I used too much time. Sorry, I should stop. Thank you. Thank you so much, Ming Wei, for this thought-provoking presentation. We had a glimpse of your loan presentation, PPT. It would be great if we have opportunities to have a science fiction research seminar series so you can cover all the grounds. Yeah, we have received a number of questions. I think some of them you have already answered in your presentation. We've got a question from Mia Ma. She graduated from my department recently. She also shared with Shuang Chi Mu. You mentioned in your talk, she is a female writer. She actually teaches at the philosophy department in Nanjing University, Shuang Chi Mu. So Mia's question is, I'm particularly interested in the idea of binary text. You brought up earlier. If we can read Liu Zhixing's three-body trilogy as non-binary text, what constitutes the core of such binary text? Would the pursuing of science fictional poetics possibly play a role in defining or redefining non-binary text? Yes, thank you, Mia. Of course, Mia is a great scholar herself, very promising young scholar herself, and you know so much about this generation of women writers. These terms are used for convenience, but if you ask me to define it, we need to go to really the philosophical definition that will take us a little more than just a textual definition. But here, I just want to say this is part of my larger thinking about what happens after modernity. I think modernity is very much based upon a lot of binary categories. I think what's happening now is opening up a new time. What I define as a contemporary, actually this book, Fear of a Sin, is only volume one of what I'm writing as a trilogy of what is contemporary. I think this contemporary is the new baroque, but new baroque is only a sign. It does not hide everything. It cannot cover everything, but I think what is happening is certainly something better than post-modern. I think post-modern is a very bad word, like post-socialist or very lame words, not very creative. I think the non-binary, the new baroque is what's happening now. But it does not mean that it's totally new. As I finally mentioned, if we go back to Spinoza, we will find abundant resources. Going back to the baroque age, we will find a lot of inspirations. So a poeticness, yes, poeticness, if we use Sui An Chu's definition, metaphor itself can be non-binary. I don't think I answered the question, but I hope I open up the question a little bit. Since you just mentioned the new baroque, we have a follow-up question. It seems you used the new baroque to refer to post-socialist state, but this audience, Lorenzo and Dufato asked, could you elaborate on the category of the new baroque? Does it relate to the space or rough feeling of works by Liu Zixin or Baoshu? Thank you, Lorenzo. Lorenzo is another wonderful, great young scholar. I had a fortunate meeting person. The new baroque, I use it to refer to science fiction. So the new baroque is already part of my definition of what science fiction is. It centers on a wonder, a wonder that goes beyond the regulations and the regularities. So certainly Baoshu is new baroque, but Liu Zixin, if we look at the moment, it's two-dimensional. I would say for the three-body trilogy, maybe 80% of the texts do not read like baroque. They are very straightforward, very logic. But if we read those crazy moments like the two-dimensionalization of the universe when one molecule can be as large as an ocean, those moments, I think it has this new baroque sublime. I think the word choice may not be very good. Maybe we should say new baroque sublime. It certainly has the new baroque field, which goes even beyond the conscious sublime. Because conscious sublime is to see, to come from the ininformable magnitude magnificent, then we're odd. But Liu Zixin is not just odd. It still goes to give us all the details. So that is like baroque. That is very much like baroque. The baroque gives us a new map, a star map or an atlas of the world, but it's filled with all the imaginary wonders. So yes, that fits. And to me, I think if we consider the quantum physics as a sign of the epistemology shift in the new baroque age, that began 120 years ago. So it's not just like a very new thing. We may have been living in the middle of the new baroque age, just not knowing it yet. But after all, it's only a name. What matters is how we deal with, you know, sincerely deal with this field. Maybe a new baroque world can be changed. But we are facing this tremendous unknown becoming. Of course, delus is another source for us to use, you know, quite a lot of useful words. We have another question from Jingfei Zhang, a former MA student from Chinese Studies at SOAS. Thank you, Professor Song, for this very inspiring lecture. You mentioned the poetic characteristics of science fiction. I'm wondering if these lyric copoetry features are unique to science fiction. How to understand this connection between lyric poetry and science fiction. Is it possible that other genres of fictions also have this feature, for example, fantasy fictions? Yes, of course. I think, of course, of course, all fictions can be poetic, of course, even realism can be poetic. The reason why I borrowed the idea from Xuanzhu to emphasize the affinity between poetic tradition and science fiction is that we rarely think that way. We usually think they are too far remote ends. But Ken Liu truly inspired me to think that his science fiction is poetry. And I believe fantasy, of course, has that, even horror has that, even, let's say, even realism has that. So it's not exclusively science fiction. It's not unique. It's a reverse. I try to unpack science fiction to let us see its poetic dimension. It's not a definition. All I have said should not be taken as a statement of certainty, but rather brainstorming. Okay, so we only have time for one more question. Maybe Yan, she's a science fiction writer, also an editor, based in London, I think. Okay, so Yan's question, can you share the definition of indeterminate non-binary states? Okay, thank you. What I mean by this is that, just like I talked about the wave particle in the text of Shang Chi Mu, the Sala Studio Seiko, it's there forever changing. You cannot decide whether it's a wave or a particle. Just like the protagonist, the crew member on the stage, he's like the narrative. He can never tell the difference between the two girls. You can never tell the difference between the wave and the particle. You can never tell the difference between whether it is a chick-off or it's a fake chick-off, whether it's a real chick-off quotation or it's a fake chick-off quotation. Whether it is a text that is meant to be literal or it's meant to be speculative. So indeterminate non-binary is more like a metaphysical or quantum physics, a certain feature of that, which is brought into the text of science fiction. I think that's the reason why Shang Chi Mu's text is very difficult to read. I had to read it a few times to totally understand it and also corresponded with the author a lot to test whether what I meant is truly what she meant. Sometimes I find what I mean is not what she meant, but again, I like that. It's also indeterminate. Even the author, the author reader relationship can also be non-binary in a certain sense. We both create a field in which we understand it. Professor Song, since the title of your talk refers to Xi Sifai, I really want to read out this final question from Michael O'Crent, a PhD candidate at Harvard University. Based on your talk, it seems like there are many ways to capture the type of differences you see science fiction as pointing to non-binary, baroque, and so on. What do we gain by approaching this discussion from the perspective of gender as opposed to putting the baroque at the center? Why situate this discussion in light of the rising generation of women sci-fi writers in China? Thank you. Thank you, Michael. This is a fantastic question. Why gender? Because gender is still the ceiling, what you call the Tianhua Bay. I think we need to make a break in gender in order to change a lot of things. It is my strategy indeed. If I just disrupt baroque, disrupt non-binary, things like that, it will not make me a big enemy to the system. I don't want to be a big enemy to the system, but I do want to be as proactive as possible. Last year, about this time, last year I wrote that article, New Wonders of a Non-binary Universe published it in April in Shanghai, after that article was published, all of us, suddenly people began to target me as a spokesman, a spokesperson for women writers in a very bad way. They thought that I tried to subword something. I think it's exactly because in China, the gender issue is still the high ceiling we need to break. So that is why I say to this discussion in light of the rising generation of women sci-fi writers. But of course, if you read my, you know, for the English audience in this book, I talk about the baroque, talk about the binary. But they are all connected. It's just very important to resist the ossification of any categories in this. Thank you, Mako. This is a very good question. The time is up, unfortunately. So I'm afraid that we have to wrap up today's webinar. Thank you again, Professor Minghui Song, for giving us this wide-ranging and sort-provoking talk. I'm sure we are all looking forward to reading your forthcoming book. I'd also like to thank our audience members for your participation, and I wish to see you soon at our seminar events. Thank you. Bye.