Chinese Journal of Literary Criticism

No.4, 2019

Reexaming Enlightenment from the Perspective of Technological Civilization: On Han Song’s Science Fictions

(Abstract)

Zhan Ling

From imagining the future in the mirror of Western existentialism to combing through the history of national civilization and predicting the future, and then to mirroring the present in the way that the future intrudes into reality, Han Song’s science fiction writing always centers on the survival of human beings under the technological civilization.“2066：Red Star over America” and “Red Ocean” unbound technological progress from human liberation and rediscover the value of enlightenment; subsequently, the “subway” and “hospital” series once again make an early warning of the issues of national character by describing the crisis of self-identity of people in the “inter-ordinal state” society and the symptoms of the “feudal modernization” era. However, due to the lack of the support of the thought which possess the power of integration, Han Song’s works, like many other mainstream literary works, are plagued by the value nihilism and fail to find a new path for enlightenment from a broader perspective.