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- Title
REIMAGINING DAOIST ALCHEMY, DECOLONIZING TRANSHUMANISM: THE FANTASY OF IMMORTALITY CULTIVATION IN TWENTY‐FIRST CENTURY CHINA: with Emanuelle Burton, "The Nuts and Bolts of Transformation: Science Fiction's Imagined Technologies and the Civic Imagination"; Michelle A. Marvin, "Memory Altering Technologies and the Capacity to Forgive: Westworld and Volf in Dialogue"; Nathan Schradle, "In Algorithms We Trust: Magical Thinking, Superintelligent AI, and Quantum Computing"; and Zhange Ni, "Reimagining Daoist Alchemy, Decolonizing Transhumanism: The Fantasy of Immortality Cultivation in Twenty‐First Century China"
- Authors
Ni, Zhange
- Abstract
This article studies a new fantasy subgenre that emerged in contemporary China, xiuzhen xiaoshuo (immortality cultivation fiction), which builds imaginary worlds around the magical practice of Chinese alchemy and fuses it with science and technology. After the arrival of the modern, Western triad of science, religion, and magic/superstition, alchemical practices of the Daoist tradition were labeled as a "superstition" to be eradicated; however, they persisted and began to flourish within and beyond the realm of fantasy literature in the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries. Immortality cultivation fiction has generated a magical form of transhumanism, which envisions human enhancement through techniques beyond the boundaries of "proper" science and "legitimate" religion. While transhumanism in the Euro‐American West is popular among white bourgeoisie males and dominated by tendencies to reaffirm the human subject constructed by excluding the various subhuman others, magical transhumanism in Chinese fantasy explores the possibility of transcending that antagonistic relationship and making a posthuman subject and a utopian world.
- Subjects
CHINA; TWENTY-first century; SCIENCE fiction; TRANSHUMANISM; QUANTUM computing; ALCHEMY; BOLTS &; nuts
- Publication
Zygon: Journal of Religion & Science, 2020, Vol 55, Issue 3, p748
- ISSN
0591-2385
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/zygo.12634