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Author: Lorenzo Marsili
Chinese literature has been taken by storm by an expected science fiction boom, as the country becomes one of the most inspiring literary factories of imaginary futures. This should perhaps come as little surprise: no country is experiencing a historical acceleration as powerful as China's. In the span of a few decades the country has moved from rags to riches, from peripheral status to the one true challenger to US hegemony, and from producer of cheap goods to leader in artificial intelligence and automation. Such a powerful inclination forwards translates into a strong presence of the future in everyday perception. And as social norms and customs morph as rapidly as the skyline of Chinese cities, the cultural world embarks on a space odyssey of speculative imagination.
Europe has long experienced the close interrelation between cultural, political and economic reality. Indeed, the very first cultural "crisis" of the continent was informed by a dynamic at once identical and yet opposite in direction to that driving contemporary Chinese obsessions with sci-fi. The memorable words pronounced by Paul Vale...
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