How do we imagine digital realities? How do we measure time and distance in the aspatial everpresent of cyberspace and can we even begin to fathom the vast amounts of information being translated into binary data to circumnavigate the planet on a daily basis?
On december 3rd, at the 12th Annual Nordic NIAS Council Conference held at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University and entitled “Digital Asia,” I presented three examples of how contemporary Chinese science fiction writers deal with such complex questions in highly original and creative ways.
Inspired by Elana Gomel’s concept of “impossible topologies,” I analysed how contemporary writers engage with digital realities in spatial terms: From Liu Cixin’s (刘慈欣) use of virtual reality as world simulation in The Three Body Problem (《三体》 2008), over Tang Fei’s (糖匪) portrayal of an “ocean of data” as the source of all stories in “Call Girl” (黄色故事 2013) to Ma Boyong’s (马伯庸) Orwellian narrative “The City of Silence” (寂静之城 2005), where all interpersonal communication is carried out soundlessly via strictly censored online forums.
In Liu’s text, the virtual reality of a computer game serves as an exercise ground for dealing with real material problems as well as a means to probe and mould the minds and ideological convictions of the players. In “The City of Silence,” the role of the internet as an alternative reality unbound by physical limitations is turned on its head as the censorship applied to online forums begins to haunt the material spaces of the city through portable “listening devises” and electronic spies. Finally, in “Call Girl,” imagination itself is imagined as a vast sea of data, out of which stories emerge and take form and which in itself offers an escape from the constraints of reality.
In these stories, digital realities are presented as alternative, parallel spacetimes that afford imaginary arenas for experimentation, escape and control. Whether in the form of lightscapes, cityscapes or seascapes, the digital chronotopes evoked by these authors represent new and interesting ways of understanding the elusive and digital aspects of reality that have come to form such a large part of our everyday experiences.
Ling Hon Lam encourages us to think of emotions in terms of space; when we sympathize with a character in a play or feel something for another person, that emotion takes place, for it moves us outside ourselves. In Chinese this relation between space and emotion is described by the term qingjing; a scenery of feeling or in Ling’s translation an “emotion-realm”.
小说 XIAOSHUO 小說 