How Idivorced My Robot Wife
How Idivorced My Robot Wife
Visionary Futures between Science and Literature
The chapter discusses forgotten publications dealing with the technological futures of humanity, including popular science magazines, children’s literature, and science fiction and films from the 1950s through the1980s, showing that Chinese socialist culture participated in an imagination of the future shared across the Eastern and Western blocs during the Cold War. Overcoming distinctions between mental and manual labor was central to the Maoist vision of a future society. Various science-related genres considered this issue, especially at moments of intensified utopian aspirations: the Great Leap Forward (late 1950s) and the beginning of the Reform Era (late 1970s and early 1980s). While narratives of the Great Leap Forward glorify physical labor, post-Mao science fiction subverts this hierarchy by associating manual labor with vulgarity, primitive stages of human evolution, and with defective female robots. The laboring body becomes the residue of a technological regime about to be overcome.
Keywords: Chinese popular science, Chinese children’s literature, Chinese science fiction, Cold War, labor, Great Leap Forward, Maoist China, post-Mao China, utopia, technology
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