Arts Studies and Criticism

Han Song’s early work, Cosmic Tombstone, narrates a future archaeological endeavor, where the temporal relationships within this future setting reconfigure our “present” understanding of time, spurring discussions on temporality. The novel frames our “history” in a future context, reflecting on themes of history and archaeology within that framework. With the appearance of “history” from a future perspective, the novel achieves both an aesthetic resonance and historical authenticity, merging a social experiment with fictitious “historical value”. The novel presents our present reality as history in the eyes of future beings, granting our “reality” a dual existence of presence and absence. However, this vast temporal and spatial scope also serves to obscure individual life, and in this sense, both the tombstone and the science fiction novel can be seen as mutually intertextual forms of resistance.