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Chen, Chen

University of British Columbia

This study sheds new light on how Liu Cixin’s SF writing goes beyond a human-centred narrative structure and investigates the systematic appearance of ghosts and weapon fetishism in The Three-Body Problem trilogy and Ball Lightning. The narrative functions of ghosts and weapon fetishism are shown to establish what I call a “heaven-centred narrative (tianjie zhongxin xushi 天界中心叙事)” within a SF framing to replace the narrative centre that a human-centred narrative usually occupies. “Heaven-centred narrative” means a narrative that centralizes a fictional non-human world with advanced physics rules unknowable to humans. “Ghost” here refers to spirits from the dead (hauntings that can be metaphorical or literal). Weapon fetishism means the intimacy with, desire for, and/or aesthetic appreciation of, weapons (specifically those that are SF innovations). Tianjie 天界 (heaven) in my study means a realm above the human realm that influences the latter uni-directionally, and it also suggests the outer universe or another space that appear in the novels. This study argues that ghosts and weapon fetishism enhance the heaven-centred narrative by shifting the plot and cognitive centre to a transcendent non-human-centred space.

Text

2025-04-08

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/90607

Asian Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/