From Nature to Humanity: Renaissance of Chinese Cosmology and Technology in Ken Liu's The Grace of Kings

Abstract

Abstract What is the value of the difference brought by traditional Chinese culture to worldwide science fiction and fantasy writing today? The pessimistic argue that due to the heterogeneity of Chinese culture, such writing with Chinese background has to identify itself as the monster Other in order to get along with Western notions of scientific progress, whereas the optimistic believe that this genre welcomes possibilities, and thus will embrace the difference positively without demeaning Chinese culture. This article takes Ken Liu's Nebula winning novel The Grace of Kings (2015) as an example to illustrate how Chinese writing may blaze an alternative trail for the genre and suggest a possible way out for the alienated humanity in the era of advanced technology by adopting the philosophical, the political, and the scientific technologies in classical Chinese thoughts, especially correlative cosmology, organic naturalism, and scientific mysticism, following the Chinese literary line of Tao Te King, Zhuangzi, The Book of Changes, and Shan Hai Jing.