Chinese Sci-Fi Author Han Song's Stark Visions of the Future Prove Uncannily Accurate

Science fiction is often tasked with envisioning the future. Yet, when reading Han Song, one of China’s foremost authors in the genre, the experience sometimes feels closer to revisiting recent history.

In 2000, Han penned a novel depicting the collapse of the World Trade Center. Later, in 2016, he imagined a world transformed into a vast hospital, where doctors forcibly removed people from their homes—a scenario eerily similar to the lockdowns experienced in China during the coronavirus pandemic.

For Han, now 59, these parallels simply indicate that he had not ventured far enough in imagining how dark or strange modern life could become.

“I thought I was just writing fiction, and that such things were impossible,” he reflected on his novel Hospital, in which society is reduced to patients. “But it actually happened a few years later,” he said, referring to the pandemic. “It’s a case of reality becoming more like science fiction than science fiction itself.”

The theme of the unimaginable becoming real has been central to Han’s work over the past four decades. By day, he works as a journalist for China’s state news agency, documenting the country’s remarkable modernization. By night, he writes fiction to grapple with the disorienting pace of change.