Towards a Daoist futurity: aquatic posthumanism in Han Song’s Red Ocean

Chinese science fiction writer Han Song’s novel Red Ocean (2004) presents a future world in which humans utilize technology to transform into aquatic incarnations of themselves, in order to adapt to the collapsing ecosystems around them. This paper argues that Han’s novel constructs a transcultural “aquatic posthumanism” that is situated at the intersection of what Zygmunt Bauman terms “liquid modernity” (3) and the Daoist notion of “liquid vitality” (Miller 44). While the emergence of “liquid modernity” delivers a promise that a technological boom leads to a world that promotes open communication and swift action, a world without borders, it actually reinforces further invisible barriers between people, as well as between the human and the more-than-human world. Han’s conceptualization of aquatic posthumanism challenges a version of techno-determinist transhumanism, elevating the ecological theme of Red Ocean to the level of Daoist ecology in an effort to provoke an agile and adaptable form of resistance to anthropocentrism.