A Narrow Corner of Freedom by Luo Xiaoming (review)

Reviewed by: A Narrow Corner of Freedomby Luo Xiaoming Angie Chau A Narrow Corner of Freedom. Luo Xiaoming. Unlocking the Future: The Urban Imagination in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction. Routledge, 2023. 189 pp. 160 hc, 47. 65 ebk. Luo Xiaoming's Unlocking the Future: The Urban Imagination in Contemporary Chinese Science Fictionsurveys a dazzling array of contemporary Chinese-language sf with a focus on how authors reimagine the future, particularly the future as related to literary depictions of the city. Adopting a conceptual framework that builds on Raymond Williams's structure of feeling, Luo claims an ambitious goal from the book's onset, to "assess the capacity of the Chinese society of the current era to conceive of the future" from contemporary sf's urban imagination (4). Luo's assumption that Chinese sf is uniquely shaped by the culturally specific conditions of China's rapid urbanization process, therefore, takes a markedly different stance to that of sf writer-translator Ken Liu, who questions the validity of the label "Chinese science fiction, " given the diversity of works and authors included in this broad category (Invisible PlanetsTor, 2016 14). Luo's assessment is organized into an introduction followed by six chapters and a conclusion, and it makes a compelling case that the label "Chinese science fiction" can illuminate the connections between sf and the individual's changing role in Chinese society from the era of Reform and Opening Up in the 1980s to the present. According to Luo, sf highlights the need for social revolution on a global scale, given the implications of the global supply chain on the majority of Chinese people: "I argue that the genre's narrow corner of freedom, from which both its successes and failures come, can best be viewed, reflected on, and grasped in such a 'revolutionary' context" (11). The book's introduction provides a brief overview of the historical context of four decades of China's urbanization to explain how the process transformed ordinary people's perceptions of time and space; these are the concepts underlying Luo's first two chapters. In Chapter 1, Luo analyzes how the city's fictional reconceptualization has been impacted by the redistribution of urban space. In the context of Chinese sf, Luo observes that the city "emerges at once as an all-enveloping symbol of oppression and a fundamentally unimaginable and indescribable alienating space" (22), an imaginary construction that explains the "pervasive feelings of insignificance and helplessness among individuals" (23). But city space can only be understood in relation to its counterpart, time, usually distorted or reversed in sf narratives within the framework of global capitalist production. For instance, on the issue of how human labor is redefined in the modern city, Luo provides a helpful comparison of Hao Jingfang's "Folding Beijing" (2016) to the lesser-known (at least to anglophone readers) Feng Yuan's "The Career Planning Bureau" (2013). Chapter 2 looks at how the trope of time travel is related to the popular notion of "China speed. " Despite Luo's reading of the ubiquitous time-travel narrative as being characterized by a "conceptual limitation" due to its ambivalent attitude toward the "unalterable reality" of the twenty-first-century present (37), Luo explores other literary strategies that experiment with the End Page 111manipulation of time, such as the "time cage" in stories that imagine the flow of time in a sealed space, featured in Liu Wenyang's Prisoner for a Day (2001), Tang Fei's "Three Seasons of Life" (2015), and Gu Shi's "The Final File" (2020). The second half of the chapter is devoted to a discussion of Chen Geng, the protagonist in Shuang Chimu's story "Spiritual Sampling" (2018). Luo claims that the character of Cheng Geng is representative of Chinese youth today and their sense of obsolescence in the face of consumerism and authoritarianism (53). In Chapter 3, the author turns to the theme of urban infrastructure and more specifically, sf depictions of housing, transportation, and language systems. Luo's insightful analysis of housing in Liu Cixin's T hree-B odytrilogy (English trans. 2014-2016) and of garbage collectors in Chen Qiufan's The Waste Tide (2013. . .