In dialogue with worldwide research on Martian literature, this essay charts the history of how Mars was fantasized and fetishized in modern Chinese science fiction. Although writings of Mars have garnered considerable attention in the West, Chinese Martian novels wait to be scrutinized, indicating an avenue to prompt reflections on the pivotal role of Mars in articulating terrestrial affects, anxieties, and believes embedded in the fabric of world literature. Ever since H. G. Wells’s (1898) most renowned The War of the Worlds was translated into Chinese in 1915, Western Martian fiction continued to be translated and trans-adapted into Chinese, alongside domestic creations that likewise attempted to symbolize the Mars. Inspired by Ray Bradbury’s own comment on his The Martian Chronicles, “Mars is a mirror, not a crystal.” This essay employs Mars as a method to “mirror” not only the perceived images of modern China in the eyes of Chinese writers but also the specular intersection between Chinese and Western Martian fiction. The 1915 translation of The War of the Worlds marks a pivotal moment in the development of Chinese Martian fiction that regardless of its degree of adherence or innovation, falls under the influence of Wells’s literary legacy. Chinese Martian fiction therefore is somewhat cognate with its Western counterpart, embodying as a mirrored pair. I resort to the trope of “the distorting mirror” to underscore this reflective process mediated by translations of not only Wells’s novel but also other foreign Martian narratives. Seventeen years later, in 1935, Lao She’s Cat Country developed and sophisticatedly localized this genre. I draw upon the metaphor of the “demon-revealing mirror” (zhaoyao jing) from Chinese mythology to examine Lao She’s satire, which is a self-evident parody of Western Martian fiction characterized by evident touches of traditional Chinese fiction—the non-human feline inhabitants of Mars aptly incarnate the spirits of both Western science fiction and Chinese gods-and-demons fiction (shenmo xiaoshuo). In the post-1949 period, Zheng Wenguang’s From the Earth to Mars (1956) is hailed as the socialist state’s first science fiction. The symbolic importance of Mars within Chinese science fiction is again affirmed. Over the span of three decades, Zheng’s three Martian novels, of varying lengths, manifest the influence of socialist aesthetics on Chinese Martian literature. The concept of “the prophetic mirror” is adopted to address the futuristic and socialist-realist features within Zheng’s work, wherein the goal of terraforming Mars is intertwined with the goal of constructing socialist China. I end with a brief survey of more contemporary Martian writings, along with an elaboration on the visual structure of “mirroring the mirror” drawn from the investigation of the Chinse Mars as well as on its implication for the nexuses between Chinese and Western science fiction.

The future is wet. Imagining the future means imagining our relationships with the waters of our planet. Floods abound in climate change fiction, apocalyptic literature and film, and even our daily news. Indeed, troubled waters are part of our collective understanding about what the future will be. The increasing awareness in climate change fiction about water is testament to the growing global anxieties about water and our imagined control over it. Fiction about the future recognizes the problems, and in terms of what will be affected, everything is on the table—the marshes, the oceans, the streams, the rivers, the ponds, the lakes, the estuaries, the aquifers, the ice-sheets, the bogs, the glaciers, the clouds. There are very few places left on the planet where we can safely dip a cup and have quick drink. The rivers and streams that run through all large cities in the world are, to varying degrees, filthy. The oceans are full of plastic. The ice is melting everywhere. The global sea levels are rising. We have long known of the many problems, and fiction about the future is vitally concerned with solutions. Habit, exposure, and scale, however, have weakened our sense of immediacy (as if the problems are in a distant future) and our confidence in our abilities to act effectively (as if individual actions mean nothing). Building on work from seemingly different fields (cognitive psychology, mycology, ecocriticism, cryology, and others), this article will offer an organized set of analyses that demonstrates how preconceptions create the blind spots that prevent us from doing our work as environmental citizens. The future is wet—just how wet depends on how we see and act today. Part of this means confronting the rhetoric of defeat and the apparatus of failure that structures our understandings of things that are either below the surface (thermohaline patterns, for instance) or that are dissolved beyond visibility (such as radiation-contaminated waters). Using texts as varied as Moby Dick and Odds Against Tomorrow (among others), I will offer a methodology for understanding both that our perceptual horizons are limited with regard to water and, perhaps more importantly, that change is still possible.

For Will Alexander, a contemporary African-American poet strongly influenced by

surrealism, our current time of ecological crisis is occasioned by the legacies of

colonial inhabitations. While outlining how colonialism’s first victims were groups and

races of people, he insists that this planetary schema implicated ecosystems and

nonhuman life. His writings are therefore pervaded by colonialism’s ecological effects

as well as pervasive antiblackness, and in response generate imaginaries beyond

Occidental logics. Beginning with Vertical Rainbow Climber in 1987, his poetry and

related writings persistently attack racialization and ecological exploitation via a

transformative language that ‘simultaneously exists and de-exists’. Destabilizing a

metaphysics of reality sedimented by colonial capitalism, his works create hybrid and

persistently futurist imaginaries that reject linear logic in favour of nonlinear

associations drawn across multiplicities of theories, disciplines and lexicons, where

geology, physics, climatology, astronomy, biology and chemistry, are woven together

with explorations of African and Oriental cultures, spiritual systems and stories. The

relative lack of critical studies on Alexander is a major omission given these

powerfully original renditions of human-nonhuman relations, anthropogenic

disruption and contamination, apocalyptic visions of global warming, shifts from

microcosmic to macrocosmic phenomena, human migration and drift, and

speculations about future life on and beyond Earth. My study therefore presents the

development of Alexander’s global vision up to Exobiology as Goddess of 2004. I

trace the pervasive influence of Caribbean surrealism and its mix of politics,

environmental concerns and universalism, before examining the development of

climatological, geological and evolutionary biological terminologies and images. I

then chart how this develops into questions of collectivity, contamination, and

circumstance, which leads into texts haunted by the sense that Anthropocene life

has crossed a threshold of sustainability, and therefore to potentialities for a poetics

of nomadism, hybridization, and ecological entanglement.

In his later years (1980-1984), Michel Foucault turned to the study of Western classics and explicitly proposed the concept of "Aesthetics of Existence", conducting a comprehensive investigation of ancient Greece, Hellenistic Rome and the early Christian world around this concept. Since Foucault's death in 1984, this concept has had a huge impact in the Western theoretical circle and has become increasingly important in guiding real life. With the successive publication of Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France in recent years, it has been discovered that the concept of "Aesthetics of Existence" holds a pivotal position in Foucault's entire intellectual career. So, what is the "aesthetics of existence"? Why did Foucault turn to the study of the aesthetics of existence in his later years? This article attempts to explain the specific connotation and practical inspiration of the aesthetics of existence within the context of Foucault's thought on Ethics , arguing that Foucault's genealogical exploration of the aesthetics of existence is not a break from his earlier analysis of the relationship between Power and Knowledge, but rather a response to the crisis of subjectivity and ethical predicament of modern neoliberalism.

The future of the Environmental Humanities is increasingly arboreal. There is a profound importance, now more than ever, for recognizing and understanding the agency of plants in our world and for acknowledging that without plants, humanity simply would not exist—a fact that contemporary literature is increasingly addressing. In The Overstory, by American author Richard Powers, the central issue is the correlation between current environmental crises and failures to communicate with trees. Powers predicts that our continuing dysfunctional relationship with the plant world will culminate in a catastrophic disaster in the near future, and he thus shows that it is critical to re-examine how we conceptualize trees. Drawing on the research of botanists and humanities scholars who engage in “thinking with plants,” particularly anthropologist Eduardo Kohn and philosopher Michael Marder, I will argue that communication is not restricted to language and that traditional anthropocentric notions of intelligence and subjectivity preclude the possibility of recognizing the unique properties of plants—such as their decentralized and networked intelligence, modular structure, and relational modes of existence. For Powers, Kantian anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism, along with the various beliefs that stem from them, blind us to what trees are and how they communicate. Anthropocentric thinking obscures the vital functions and values of trees, leaving visible only those aspects that are directly related to fulfilling human needs. By focusing on plant semiosis and cognition and considering how they might inspire transformations in human social structures, with Marder and Kohn as my touchstones, I will provide a theoretical framework for examining The Overstory’s central questions and will suggest that how we see and conceptualize trees is central to our future.