ABSTRACT
Critics are hailing The Waste Tide (2013) by Chen Qiufan as an outstanding work of science fiction. The Three-Body Problem (2008), by the immensely successful and popular, mainstream writer Liu Cixin, a science fiction novel that is available in English translation in addition to Chinese, also has earned high distinction from literary critics both domestically and internationally. In discussing Chen and Liu’s novels in this chapter, I read their work against ecofeminist theory, namely Greta Gaard’s recently published study, Critical Ecofeminism (2017), a work of fourth-wave ecofeminism that focuses on contemporary entailments of ecophobia and misogyny in ways that interrogate and move past older ecofeminist arguments hindered by essentialist and Eurocentric biases. I also compare Liu and Chen’s novels in making the argument that The Three-Body Problem, which has been far more successful from a purely financial and commercial point of view than The Waste Tide, defers to and indulges in masculinist fears and fantasies of ecofeminist militant agendas in the figure of the central female protagonist, the radical and angry, or literally mad, female scientist Yeh Wenjie. In contrast, The Waste Tide represents more recognizable realities and more accurate ecofeminist responses to and critiques of environmental crisis today. Its focus is the highly toxic environments in which migrant workers such as The Waste Tide’s female protagonist Xiaomi live and recycle electronic waste or otherwise making a living off the garbage of the planet’s richest urban-industrial populations. In responding to the two novels from an ecofeminist position, my purpose is to bring more attention to recent work in ecofeminism as well as to emphasize the need for more ecofeminist engagements with the burgeoning canon of Chinese science fiction.
