ABSTRACT
Chapter 9 discusses recent dystopias that take contemporary China as their subject, melding realism with elements from dystopian fictions of the past. Chan Koonchung’s The Fat Years (2009) and Maggie Shen King’s An Excess Male (2017) offer variations on the last man. These works are notable for the extent to which dystopian settings are treated in terms familiar from realism, with little of the emphasis on political warning associated with the dystopian tradition. I end by suggesting that this marks a new phase in dystopian fiction in which the future has been absorbed into the present.
