The Posthuman and the Neo-Baroque in Taiwan Science Fiction

Abstract

While the new wave Chinese science fiction has caught the worldwide attention, what has remained less visible to the world audience is the experimentalist variations of science fiction by authors in Taiwan. This chapter applies contemporary posthuman and Neo-Baroque theories to analysis of the works of several authors residing in Taiwan: Chang Ta-chun’s “Those Who Mourn” (1984), Chu T’ian-wen’s “Fin-de-siècle Splendor” (1990), Chi Ta-wei’s The Membranes (1996), Egoyan’s The Dream Devourers (2010) and Zero Degree of Separation (2021), and Lo Yi-chin’s Superman Kuang (2017) and Mingchao (2019). My discussion on these authors is contextualized in the history of science fiction in Taiwan as well as in Taiwan’s own history. I read these texts as more than a genre, but rather experimentalist fiction that gains a self-reflective quality through transforming its narrative from a human-centric mode to a posthuman experiment that decenters the modern motifs, such as nation and narration, and destabilizes conventional binary identities and categories such as gender and genre. These writers foreground the fluidity, multiplicity, and queerness in Taiwan science fiction’s metamorphosis in a cultural context full of tensions in terms of identity politics and cultural conflicts. In the larger context, these authors have opened a new literary space—a Neo-Baroque fold that recasts as Taiwan as a novum, pushing the island from the dangerous backwater of the current geopolitical map to the center of an imaginary topology of the posthuman future.