Everything Everywhere All at Once: The New Taiwan in Egoyan Zheng’s Science Fiction

In 2003 and 2004, some emerging Taiwanese novelists established the society of “Novelist-Readers” (小說家讀者, later renamed “Eight Wolves” 八P狼) in an attempt to break down the wall between high and low culture, the intellectuals and the masses, “belles-lettres” and popular fiction. They staged a series of creative literary events such as flash mobs, literary workshops, and a “live” writing experience in a bookstore’s display window. Although conservative critics took a dim view of some of these “deviant” activities, the literary achievements of the Eight Wolves eventually justified themselves and arguably brought fresh inspiration and style to the increasingly conventional literary culture and the shrinking reading public. Their writings put a great deal of emphasis on local Taiwanese cultures, which has been criticized as “post-regional literature” (後鄉土) for their representations of Taiwan in the era of globalization. Among these young writers, Egoyan Zheng (伊格言) stands out for his use of sci-fi to express serious contemporary concerns under the guise of futuristic concepts such as artificial intelligence, dream “inception,” and transhumanism in his depiction of a distant future in Dream Devourer (噬夢人, 2010) and by imagining a horrific nuclear disaster in the near future in Ground Zero (零地點, 2013). At first glance, both novels appear difficult to situate in the history of Taiwan literature. However, in this chapter, I argue that Egoyan’s works are deep and provocative reflections on Taiwan’s recent political history and ongoing search for a distinctive Taiwanese identity. The exploration of infinite time and full-scale space in Egoyan’s sci-fi worlds should be read as metaphors not merely for globalization but also for the particularities of Taiwan—its specific aspirations, fears, perplexities, and sorrows in the abiding shadow of Japanese colonialization and the KMT’s “Free China” dictatorship.