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In a short essay originally from 2014, Chinese science Action author Chen Qiufan reflects upon the inception and reception of his acclaimed debut novel, Waste Tide (2013). Chen acknowledges that the novel's bleak near-future setting draws inspiration from his 'experience^] in contrasts and social rips'. He also notes that he 'wrote about the suffering of a China in transformation because I yearn to see it change gradually for the better' (Chen 2016: 358). Chen's vantage point marks him out as a prominent figure amongst the new wave of Chinese sf coming to light on the anglophone stage, following the global success of Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem (2008). Mingwei Song argues that Chen's Action, compared to that of his peers, is remarkable for 'open[ing] up a journey to interiority' (Song 2016: 560). Accordingly, Chen describes himself as a pragmatic realist who employs the unique affordances and generic tendencies of sf to 'wedg[e] open small possibilities: to mend the torn generation' (Chen 2016: 361). Thus, Chen's particular mode and method of cognitive estrangement, defined by Darko Suvin as 'a representation [...] which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar' (Suvin 1979: 6), is anchored to both resolutely making 'social rips' visible and tentatively contemplating potentialities, however distant, of their repair.
Unfolding on Silicon Isle, an island whose name in Mandarin Chinese is homophonous with Guiyu, Shantou - otherwise known as the largest electronic waste processing site in the world - Waste Tide foregrounds critical concerns about globalization, the natural environment, social class, language and labour, all of which intersect to form a complex interrogation of what it means to be human in an age of 'rips and divisions [...] confusions and chaos' (Chen 2016: 360). Centred around a class war that erupts between the waste people - the migrant labour force on the lowest social stratum - and the wealthy natives of Silicon Isle, Chen's narrative focuses on Mimi, the character who, over the course of the novel, emerges as the leader of the resistance. Brutally raped and buried alive after being accidentally infected with a neurological virus, Mimi subsequently transforms into a cyborg-like amalgamation of body and machine. Transgressing previously impermeable physical and metaphysical boundaries, Mimi effectively...