Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.22210/ur.2025.070.1/08
On the Post-Socialist Utopianism of Liu Cixin
Sven Cvek
orcid.org/0000-0002-3330-9421
; Sveučilište u Zagrebu
Abstract
Since the 1980s, contemporary culture, in which U.S. hegemony remains deeply inscribed, has been portrayed in terms of a crisis of historical or utopian imagination. Notions such as capitalist realism, presentism, or immediacy have been employed in subsequent cultural diagnoses that, despite their different emphases, register a dramatic change in our sense or experience of time. In it, to the extent that it appears at all, the future figures only marginally, and certainly not in any utopian form. This development may be understood as the mark of a global post-socialist condition. In this paper we will offer a reading of Liu Cixin’s brand of SF, which appears as a utopian exception in the context of a global post-socialism and the simultaneous integration of China into the capitalist world-system.
Keywords
Liu Cixin, post-socialism, utopia, science fiction
Hrčak ID:
349196
URI
Publication date:
13.7.2026.
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