Ecocriticism and Speculative Fiction in East Asia: Rethinking the Human

This volume illustrates Asian speculative fiction's potential to interrogate and inspire humanity's ecological and ethical responsibilities, seeking to fill a major lacuna in previous academic literature around ecocriticism in speculative fiction. Contributions are thematically organized into three sections—Human-Nature Co-evolution and Ecomedia, Technologies and East Asian Heritage, and Posthuman Ecology. Chapter authors draw on global viewpoints to provide a multi-dimensional analysis that includes Indigenous knowledge, trans-local (inter-Asian) exchanges, and perspectives from the Global South. To end, the book provides a reflection on how speculative fiction promotes a vision of interconnected kinship among humans, the nonhuman, and the natural world.

Xinmin Liu is Associate Professor of Chinese and Comparative Cultures in the School of Languages, Cultures, and Race at Washington State University, USA. His previous book publications include Signposts of Self-Realization: Evolution, Ethics and Sociality in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (2004) and Embodied Memories, Embedded Healing: New Ecological Perspectives from East Asia (2021, co-edited with Peter I-min Huang). 

Hua Li is Professor of Chinese at Montana State University, USA. Her previous book publications include Chinese Science Fiction During the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw (2021), Contemporary Chinese Fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua: Coming of Age in Troubled Times (2011), and Chinese Science Fiction: Concepts, Forms, and Histories (2024, co-edited with Mingwei Song and Nathaniel Isaacson).