Abstract
By engaging with and bringing together Chinese environmental humanities and science fiction studies, this article argues that the narratives of weather and climate revealed in late Qing science fiction serve as a metonymic vehicle and a medium for addressing China's social and political crises. The author analyzes three late Qing science fiction works—Bingshan xuehai 冰山雪海 (Iceberg and Snow Ocean), Dianshijie 電世界 (Electrical World), and Xinshitouji 新石頭記 (New Story of the Stone)—and delves into the intellectual history of modern Chinese environmental ideas. In exploring literary representations and environmental ideas surrounding topics on the air, this article makes three contributions. First, it compels us to reconsider the promises and pitfalls of evading the narrative of nature's decline. The imagination of the air in late Qing science fiction is characterized by its global scale, inclusive of the surface, but imperial in nature. Second, it illustrates that Chinese domestication of modern environmental ideas is not a one-way street when Chinese intellectuals appropriated Western notions for their own discursive maneuvering. Third, it suggests that the defamiliarization of the air serves as a barometer of understanding the repressed modernity in Chinese literature from an environmental perspective.
