Science fiction is the business of imagining the future, but reading Han Song, one of China’s leading writers of the genre, can sometimes feel like reading recent history.
In 2000, he wrote a novel depicting the collapse of the World Trade Center. In 2016, another book imagined the world transformed into a giant hospital, with doctors taking people from their homes — as would happen at times during China’s coronavirus years.
For Mr. Han, 59, this means only that he had not gone far enough in imagining how dark or strange modern life could become.
“I thought I was just writing, but that it was impossible for it to happen,” he said of his novel “Hospital,” in which everyone is reduced to being a patient. “It actually happened just a few years later,” he said, referring to the pandemic. “This is an example of reality being more science fiction than science fiction.”
How the unthinkable can become reality has been Mr. Han’s subject for the past four decades. By day, he is a journalist at China’s state news agency, recording the country’s astonishing modernization. At night, he writes fiction to grapple with how disorienting that change can be.
His stories are bleak, grotesque and graphic. Some scrutinize the gap between China and the West, as in “The Passengers and the Creator,” a short story in which Chinese people worship a mysterious god called Boeing. Others imagine that China has displaced the United States as the world’s leading superpower. Many take ordinary settings, like subway trains, as backdrops for wild scenes of cannibalism or orgies.
Supposed progress is always viewed warily. After China surpasses the United States in his novel “2066: Red Star over America” — the one with the collapse of the World Trade Center — it is not long before China, too, begins unraveling.
Classic sci-fi elements such as space travel or artificial intelligence appear, but the science is not Mr. Han’s focus. He is more interested in how people respond to new technologies and the power and disruption they represent.
He has said that Chinese science fiction, more than other contemporary genres, is preoccupied with exploring pain.
That interest is also personal. Sickly from a young age, Mr. Han has in recent years seen a sharp deterioration in his health. This, he said, has made him more skeptical about the ability of medicine, and science generally, to improve humanity.
That is a potentially risky position, Mr. Han acknowledged in an interview in Beijing, where he lives with his wife. He is thin and soft-spoken, with a serious demeanor that belies the dark humor in his work.
“According to our standards, there is only one possible future. It’s all planned: what 2035 will be like, what will 2050 be like, all the way until we reach peak socialism,” he said, referring to the Chinese government’s five-year plans for development. “But in science fiction, there are too many possibilities.”
The Chinese government has promoted science fiction as a reflection of the country’s technological advancement and its global influence. Xi Jinping, China’s leader, is a fan of Jules Verne, the French author of classics like “Journey to the Center of the Earth.”
The state film administration has pledged to support sci-fi films as a source of soft power; arguably China’s most successful cultural export in recent years is Liu Cixin’s novel “The Three-Body Problem,” which was adapted into a Netflix series.
Mr. Han’s writing aligns more with an earlier vision of science fiction’s role in China. In the early 20th century, when Chinese intellectuals began translating Verne, they wanted the stories to reveal the country’s weaknesses, to inspire reform.
Mr. Han is no dissident. He has won China’s top science fiction awards and led its national science fiction association. And he is a high-ranking journalist at Xinhua, the state news agency, which never portrays China’s accomplishments as anything but thrilling and inevitable.
The contradiction may be explained by the more open era in which Mr. Han began writing.
He was born in the southwestern city of Chongqing during the Cultural Revolution, the 10 years of populist bloodshed unleashed by Mao Zedong. Scientific expertise was demonized as bourgeois, and universities shuttered. But after Mao died, China’s new leaders pledged to embrace modernization. Mr. Han’s father, a journalist, brought home science magazines and books such as “One Hundred Thousand Whys,” a popular science series for children. The young Mr. Han was fascinated.
At university, he studied English and journalism, reading Western novels like “Slaughterhouse Five” and “Gravity’s Rainbow,” while taking science electives. He published his first novel in 1991, the same year that he started at Xinhua. Mr. Han said his bosses supported his personal writing, and some were sci-fi fans themselves.
Science fiction’s niche status at the time also allowed writers to push the censors’ boundaries. Many new works were laced with social commentary.
Mr. Han’s particular style may also be key. Rather than making clear political statements, many of his works evoke a deep ambivalence about China’s place in the world.
One story, “My Country Doesn’t Dream,” initially seems an indictment of China’s at-any-cost drive for development, which raised living standards but fueled corruption and other social problems. The protagonist, Xiao Ji, learns from an American spy that the Chinese government has devised a technology to make people work in their sleep.
But even as Xiao Ji reels, he is put off by the American’s sense of superiority: “He felt somewhat disgusted with this foreigner who was so set on revealing the truth to him. He suspected the man of harboring an ulterior motive.”
Michael Berry, who has translated several of Mr. Han’s books into English, said there were always multiple interpretations in the writing.
“He makes you realize the humanity in the other — and the inhumanity,” said Mr. Berry, a professor of contemporary Chinese cultural studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Maybe more the latter, because I think a lot of what he is doing is exploring this darker side of human nature.”
Mr. Han estimates that about half of his writing has not been published in China because of censorship. That includes “My Country Doesn’t Dream,” though it has circulated widely online.
Lately, Mr. Han has turned his writing focus inward: to his own body.
On Weibo, a social media platform where he has more than 1 million followers, Mr. Han has spent the last few years sharing, in unsparing detail, the onset of dementia and other ailments. Alongside photos of books he reads or meals he eats, he describes forgetting who he was riding on the subway to meet, or losing control of his bladder.
He treats his own decline with the same psychological interest he views his characters. After braving the cold to buy food, then feeling worn down, he mused: “People are always like this, selling out their bodies and souls just for a bite.”
Mr. Han said he saw Weibo as a way to keep writing when creating fiction had become too tiring. He has also been experimenting with DeepSeek, the Chinese A.I. chatbot, to help him polish drafts or even write stories. He was dispirited that it sometimes produced better stories than he did. But he now has embraced it as a tool — just as the human brain was merely a tool, he said, that itself could need sharpening.
If human frailty is a common theme of Mr. Han’s writing, so is something slightly more optimistic: the value of writing about it.
Starting in 2015, Mr. Han began posting on Weibo about a mysterious seven-year countdown. Fans guessed that at the end he might announce a new novel, or retire.
In 2022, Mr. Han finally explained that he had years earlier visited a fortuneteller, who predicted his fate only until that year.
Now that his health had deteriorated seemingly along with the countdown, he wrote, he was unsure if that proved the existence of fate, or of hidden scientific laws.
“Of course, there are no convincing answers, nor is there any way to verify them in a laboratory,” he wrote. “Since one day my memory really may disappear, I just want to write this all down. As a reminder for myself, and for anyone interested in studying it.”
Siyi Zhao contributed research.
Vivian Wang is a China correspondent based in Beijing, where she writes about how the country’s global rise and ambitions are shaping the daily lives of its people.
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