UC Riverside

From literature to the broader media landscape, time travel has become a global cultural phenomenon. In China, time travel narratives have captivated a wide audience and exploded in popularity, although they remain under the scrutiny of media authorities due to a noticeable trend: a shift from future-oriented stories to immersive historical explorations. Adopting a comparative approach, this study embarks by delineating the genealogy of Chinese time travel narratives from the pre-modern era times to the present by weaving together historical records and literary scholarship. From the earliest classics such as Zhuangzi to zhiguai and chuanqi tales, to its transformation into modern science fiction and Internet fiction, the imaginations of time and space have been continuously shaped by cultural values and social ethos. Subsequently, it explores the entanglement of time travel and chuanyue narratives in the digital era. While questioning the rigid approach to clear-cut boundaries, it also recognizes the necessity of genre categories from an audience’s perspective. By proposing the concept of “speculative fiction” as a more encompassing umbrella, I argue that time travel serves more effectively as a narrative device than a mere subgenre. This foundation supports an analysis of two texts, Illumine Lin’gao and The Mandate of Heaven, which demonstrate the dual modes by which time travel interacts with China’s past: altering historical trajectories and offering fresh interpretations. Whether through constructing techno-uchronia or engaging in speculative historiography, these texts illustrate time travel’s capacity to challenge and enrich our understanding of time and history.

This study suggests that within China’s current cultural-political context, uchronia serves as a compelling alternative to the utopia desire that often drives time travel writing. Time travel, in turn, expands the temporal scope of uchronia, offering a nuanced perspective that spans from past to future, rooted in concern for the present. Therefore, I propose a new translation of “wuyou shí”乌有时instead of the existing “wuyou shǐ”乌有史. The potential of uchronia narratives within the discourse of Chinese speculative fiction warrants further exploration.