Despite its long history (Huss 2000), Chinese SF only recently became a subject of academic research. Scholars of the early modern period contextualized its emergence against the background of late-imperial China’s condition of colonial subjugation (Zhang 2009; Isaacson 2017), foregrounding it as a tool for educating the masses in scientific thought (Chen 2006) and for shaping modern subjectivities (Ma 2013). Early Chinese “scientific fiction” posited science as a gateway to salvation against imperialist encroachment (Wu 2006; Lin 2006), and such a vision was often developed into utopian scenarios of national revanchism (G. Li 2013; Andolfatto 2019a). Scholars also highlighted the importance of translation for developing domestic writing during this period (Jiang 2013; Andolfatto 2019b), and retraced the development of SF language in other media upon the genre’s disappearance in the late 1910s (see, e.g., M. Ye 2019 on SF tropes in the film industry).

With the establishment of the PRC in 1949, SF was initially mobilized as propaganda in support of the party-state’s “march toward science and technology” (Wu 2013), only to disappear with the onset of the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1978. Wagner pioneered the study of this period in his work on “science phantasy” in post-Mao China (Wagner 1985), followed by a comprehensive study of SF from 1949 to 1966 by Zhang et al. (2006). Rui Kunze (2017) re-contextualized the genre in light of the reintroduction of a consumer-oriented market economy and the loosening of the state’s ideological grip during in the early reform era (c. 1978–83), while Zhan Ling (2014) continued exploring the links between science writing, popular fiction, and the popularization of scientific knowledge in the 1980s. Overall, the study of Chinese SF from the Maoist and post-Maoist period remains limited to survey-like efforts that address the genre as a whole, but seldom engage with individual writers or works. As Stember (2017) and H. Li (2018) show, this gap is worth exploring.

The boom of Chinese SF worldwide since the early 2010s was described as a “new wave” of writers who developed the genre as a critical tool to make sense of contemporary China (Song 2015). Between 2012 and 2018, five journals (Science Fiction Studies; China Perspective; Chinese Literature Today; The Journal of Translation Studies; and Le Monde Chinois) dedicated special issues to Chinese SF. Scholars foregrounded orientalist and self-orientalist dynamics in its circulation and reception (Gaffric 2019); questions of aesthetic ideology vis-à-vis China’s nation-state discourse (Solomon 2019); issues of generic hybridity and subversion of literary canons (Healey 2017); the genre’s mobilization as a soft-power tool (L. Ye 2019; Tsu 2020); and its linkages to China’s philosophical tradition (Raphals 2019). Considerable attention has been given to writers Liu Cixin and Han Song. Scholars have explored Liu’s work in terms of utopian speculation (Thieret 2015; H. Li 2015; G. Li and Isaacson 2019), technological sublime (Song 2018), and world literature and translation (Aloisio 2019; Dougherty 2019). Conversely, Han’s fiction has spiked scholarly interest because of its aversion to progressive and utopian visions (Jia 2013; Li and Isaacson 2018), its problematic development of SF tropes (Andolfatto forthcoming), and as a critique of scientific positivism (Rojas 2018; Y. Wang and Isaacson 2018). Nowadays, Chinese SF’s circulation goes hand in hand with its reception in academia, to the extent that even works by up-and-coming writers such as Chen Qiufan, Hao Jingfang, and Xia Jia often become part of the academic debate (see, e.g., Schneider-Vielsäcker 2017; Ren and Xu 2018; or Sun 2019).

The relationship between SF speculation and the geopolitical geographies of its circulation remains practically unaddressed, except for by Dyson (2019). So far, emphasis has been given to the worldwide success of Chinese SF, credited to its sophisticated visions of the future against the background of contemporary China’s authoritarianism: Chinese SF writers are worth studying because they dare to imagine the future where doing so is strictly policed. Still, almost no attention is directed toward the material and discursive ecology that imbues SF speculation with cultural capital—whether it be a fan community circulating a text, an academic establishment canonizing a writer, or a propaganda office appropriating a piece of fiction. This project will address this gap in research and focus on the geographies of Chinese SF.

SF works have distinct geographies. In their edited volume Lost in Space: The Geographies of Science Fiction, Kitchin and Kneale (2002) provided the first substantial analysis of geographical imaginations in SF literature and film. Kneale (2011), Rhodes II et al. (2017) and Dunnett (2019) showed the geopolitical dimension of William Gibson’s writings, the Star Trek television series and franchise, and the life and works of Arthur C. Clarke. Gold (2001) and Debois (2007) give insight into the relationship between real and fictional urban spaces and SF’s relevance for urban planning (a concern echoed in urban studies; see Hewitt and Graham 2014, Graham 2016). Dunnett (2020) demonstrated the close connection between SF and space exploration through an account of the space elevator as a recurring trope in SF and its origins in Russian spaceflight theory. Gunderman (2020) argued for the potential of critical world building through more compassionate spaces in SF works. Engaging with debates on ongoing environmental crises and climate change, scholars have probed SF for alternative futures and environments (Garforth 2018; 2019). Research in the related field of ecocriticism demonstrated the richness and complexity of planetary environments and ecologies in SF (Bernardo 2014; Canavan and Robinson 2014; Pak 2016).

Existing research has greatly advanced scholarship on the geographical imaginations in SF. Debates on the concept and the prospects of the Anthropocene repeatedly draw on SF literature (Wark 2015; Whyte 2018; Yusoff 2019). However, except for Milner (2014), scholars to date limit their analysis to SF texts and ignore the geographies their production practices engender— a bias also characteristic of literary geography (Brosseau 2017; Bradshaw and Brown 2018), spatial literary studies (Tally Jr. 2019), and literary anthropology (Wiles 2020). Thus, existing scholarship fails to address the discursive and material logistics of producing and promoting SF literature. The present project will address this gap in research by bringing literary geographies into conversation with the geographical analysis of logistics.

The study of logistics recently became a vibrant field in human geography and related social sciences (Cowen 2014; Chua et al. 2018; Benvegnù et al. 2019; Coe 2020). Logistical geographies are concerned with both the geographies of logistics systems, the places they interconnect, and the new geographical relations and imaginations they produce (Coe 2020:2). Ongoing analyses focus on urban and regional development, global supply chains and production networks, and the labor of logistics (see for example Gutelius 2016; Coe and Yeung 2019; Hesse 2020). Recent scholarship also observes that logistics encompasses much more than the organization of production and trade to achieve economic, communication, and transport efficiencies. Enabling and smoothening the circulation of people, material, or information is not only a technical, but also a political act. Moreover, logistics is a form of power that must be questioned for its impacts upon changing regimes of sovereignty, governance, knowledge, and biopolitics (Neilson 2012).

Logistics is inherently geopolitical: it both derives from and drives imperial projects, which either follow established or build new cartographies and trajectories (Cowen 2014). Logistics underpins the forms of political and economic orders that we currently experience: the “invisible workings” (Neilson 2012) or the “technological unconscious” (Thrift 2005) of capitalism. Existing scholarship has begun to explore logistics for questions of politics and power, but this research limits its analysis to the “management of the movement of stuff” (Cowen 2013:187, emphasis in original). Scholars focus almost exclusively on the processes and outcomes of the material circulation of people, material, and information, while the semiotic realm of such a circulation is largely ignored. Conceiving of logistics as power, as Neilson (2012:234) proposes, can only reveal its impacts on changing regimes of sovereignty, governance, knowledge, and biopolitics if it unpacks and goes beyond “stuff” as the key variable. To address this limitation and to expand the analysis of logistical geographies beyond materiality, this project adopts and develops the notion of “cultural logistics” (Barbour 2003).