Science and speculative fiction have become important interpretive resources for hermeneutic technology assessment (TA) because they do not merely represent future technologies but also shape the imaginative frameworks through which societies understand them. This article argues that imagination should not be approached through Heidegger’s nostalgic turn toward pre-technological poetics, but through Kant’s conception of reflective judgment, in which beauty and sublime mediate cognition, morality and technological experience. From this perspective, contemporary Sinophone science/speculative fiction offers a non-Western contribution to TA. Through the aesthetic reflection of Mu Ming, the technological sublime of Cixin Liu, and the technosocial critique of Qiufan Chen and Song Han, Chinese science/speculative fiction demonstrates how literary imagination can assess technological futures, social values, and cultural anxieties.

Hermeneutic TA model is to address the uncertainty inherent in technological development (Børsen 2025) and to understand narratives about techno-related futures (Grunwald 2019). Reflections on broader technovisions entail not only assessments of present techno-infrastructure and corresponding ethics, but also extrapolations toward possible futures and re-evaluations of possible value-systems. It requires narratives that are capable of articulating anticipatory, experiential and culturally embedded understandings of technological world-building. Science/speculative fiction, therefore – as varied perspectives from different stories, and as non-linear and future-oriented modes of techno-thinking – can be legitimately incorporated into hermeneutic TA. For example, science fictional portrayals of robot offer more than entertainment value, but are able to help with normality of robotic companions (Grunwald 2016, chapter 6 and 9). Here, science and speculative fiction are closely related modes of writing, for both are structured by a speculative engagement with relation between scientific development, social transformation, and alternative possible worlds (Vint 2021). Or, to be precise, the speculative function in the genre can be regarded as two ways: within science fiction, it constitutes a cognitively valid contemplation of technology; within speculative fiction in a broader sense, it enables speculation on social transformation and an assessment of its tendencies. Although the imagination of science/speculative fiction contains artistic dimension of fantasy, it also serves as interpretive frameworks for technology and changes of its value.

Contemporary mass-media and public reflections on emerging technologies have been partly mediated by science/speculative fiction. For example, in the science fictions about engineering published in Nature, narratives explicitly engage with ethical problems arising from natural sciences (Wan and Zhan 2026). Here, science/speculative fiction is able to reflect upon the dilemmas and risks inherent in technological development and to articulate moral-anticipatory forms of evaluation (Dolan 2020). Subsequent studies further demonstrate that fictional narratives in science fiction can function as thought experiments, stimulating public interpretation on technological issues and supporting public engagement with ethical assessment (Chan 2009). The imaginative capacity of science/speculative fiction can also inspire scientists and engineers at the level of cognitive and technological creativities (Torras 2020). Meanwhile, it cultivates the interactive arena in which scientific communities and the public are able to work together on emerging technological trajectories (Reinsborough 2017), cultivating long-term and more wide-ranging anticipatory understandings of technological change. From a non-Western perspective, a growing body of scholarship has begun to examine the cultural contributions of science/speculative fiction to TA. For example, science fiction from the Global South offers alternative frameworks for thinking about technologies (Das and Ray 2024). The relevance of science-fictional narratives for understanding cultural and historical formation of scientific futures should be emphasized.

Epistemic and hermeneutic tensions generated by imagination deserve more systematic attention.

To explain the core contribution of science/speculative fiction aligned with hermeneutic TA, is also to show that imagination itself intervenes in the interpretation of future technologies. The epistemic and hermeneutic tensions generated by imagination – especially its capacity to open up alternative configurations of technological futures – deserve more systematic attention. For this reason, the next section will briefly revisit the distinctive features of Heidegger’s philosophy of technology and Kant’s account of imagination. From the perspective of philosophical hermeneutics, both thinkers establish the foundational interpretive role of imagination in relation to TA. It will be presented that imagination in TA is not an auxiliary resource for ethical or other more important evaluations. Rather, it operates as a fundamental faculty, participating in the constitution of technological – social worlds, and in the formation of what may be described as an ‘ethical-cognitive-aesthetic’ framework, through which technology is interpreted and experienced. Accordingly, science/speculative imagination could be explained in this interpretive process.

One of major hermeneutic sources in the philosophy of technology stems from Heidegger. He criticizes modern science, arguing that technology perpetuates the representational tradition that began with Plato and thereby conceals the authenticity of truth (Heidegger 2002). His theoretical misalignment lies in the fact that he partially equates technology with the representational character of science. In rethinking of Kant’s concept of imagination (‘Einbildungskraft’), Heidegger proposes that behind imagination there lies a more primordial ontological dimension. Though Kant defines imagination as a faculty of representation (‘Vorstellung’), Heidegger regards imagination as a non-representational, foundational capacity that grounds the possibility of experience itself, the common root of sensibility and understanding (Heidegger 1997). However, Heidegger’s creative insight is, in fact, obscured in his later years by what might be called a ‘nostalgic perspective’. He elevates poetics, instead of imagination, to the central position, and hopes that certain language, as German and Ancient Greek, can solve problems of modernity. Poetry, in its primordial and authentic sense, becomes a path of resistance against the representational domination of science and technology.

The central limitation of Heidegger’s later position is that his attention turns toward the divine presence of ancient art or fine art, while neglecting the innovative core of the modern technological world. Heidegger’s nostalgia leaves three problems. First, we cannot simply follow his path of TA by condemning science as formalist and representational system that imprisons human existence. Second, Heidegger’s interpretation of poetry explains a form of ‘non-scientific presentation’ of language – a mode outside the technodeductive system. Against this background, the question inevitably arises: Can such primordial, non-deductive poetics offer genuine introspection of science and technology? Or it is just an elusive path. Third, Heideggerian critique of technology is founded upon one assumption: that modern science and technology originated in the West, and that their problems can likewise be resolved only by returning to the roots of Western poetics. However, the cultural differences and colonial contradictions confronted by non-Western contexts, as well as the developmental demands of technological societies, cannot be addressed through similar poetics. Therefore, when Heidegger’s position is translated into the context of TA, a central implication emerges: When technological development gives rise to ethical problems and negative social consequences, a hermeneutic approach should not presuppose that primordial, pre-technological, or Western past resources, are capable of providing a superior normative framework for TA. Rather than grounding technological critique in a nostalgic return to an allegedly untainted past, what is required is a future-oriented horizon.

At this point, a return to Kant becomes theoretically significant. In Kant’s account, imagination is explicitly and tightly integrated into the reflective judgment (‘reflektierende Urteilskraft’), which is capable of establishing bridges across scientific cognition, moral reasoning, and aesthetic experience (Kant 1998). Reflective judgment, in this sense, performs a function analogous to TA. Kant’s imagination is not confined to aesthetic or artistic domain, nor reducible to a single originary function. Rather, he conceives it as a mediating faculty, which bridges the phenomenal and the noumenal worlds (Kant 1998). Thus, imagination, when re-examined through the lens of hermeneutic thinking, already anticipates the constructive and systemic role that speculative fiction embodies – a form of thought that is both representational and world-generative.

Kant’s philosophy of Enlightenment affirms the cognitive power of imagination in relation to scientific knowledge. Therefore, his classical aesthetics is centered on representational art, which constitutes a system of artistic taste (‘Geschmack’). Imagination, through the ‘free harmony’ of representations and on the basis of reflection, produces judgments of beauty (Kant 2000). When turning to the judgment of the sublime, imagination must transcend the sensuous or cognitive levels, and relate to reason as the totality of representational world (Kant 2000). In other words, the judgment of the sublime endows imagination with a power that transcends the representational system – a capacity to exceed the limits of sensibility while still engaging reason through reflection. This transcendence marks the point at which imagination becomes both speculative and generative. In sum, the reflective judgment of the beauty is understood as a harmonious free play between cognition (the understanding) and imagination, whereas the judgment of the sublime is grounded in a transcendental relation between imagination and reason. Imagination hence can be defined as a comprehensive evaluative system with reflective processes.

Although Kant’s analysis is concerned with aesthetic judgment, it still articulates a model for reflective judgment, that can be extended to the assessment of cognition and reason, and also to hermeneutic understanding of technology. Within artistic narrative, imagination provides reflective evaluation on the harmony between human beings and cognition, morality, and possible technological development. It therefore possesses an interpretive significance insofar as it enables a form of reflective thinking that traverses art, cognition, and morality, which can be regarded as hermeneutic and speculative. As artistic form that contemplates technology, science/speculative fiction indicates a kind of imaginative process of hermeneutic TA, which does not regard art as an originary domain detached from science, but instead seeks to understand and reflect upon science through artistic speculation, participating in the construction of technosocial interpretation so as to provide concrete and effective evaluation.

Heinlein’s definition of science fiction as speculative effectively expands the semantic and conceptual scope of the genre (Heinlein 1959). The emphasis on ‘speculation’ highlights elements which exceeds the scientific dimension and demands reflection upon science itself. The imagination operative in speculative imagination hence aligns with the Kantian conception – a systemic process of judgments of poetics with extrapolation, evaluation and reflection. Within the domain of speculative fiction, genres such as science fiction, detective fiction, and utopian or dystopian narratives, are characterized by certain logics of systemic construction, capable of engaging with epistemic conditions of modernity. Science/speculative fiction, in particular, enables imaginative and interpretive approaches that map holistic frameworks of technology.

In this sense, contemporary Chinese science/speculative fiction offers a hermeneutic TA experience of a non-Western-centered perspective, within which technological development and reflection upon technologies of China have been showed. Meanwhile, Chinese science/speculative fiction articulates a critical response to Heidegger’s poetic nostalgia of TA, and opens an East Asian configuration of Kant’s reflective judgment of beauty and sublime. It does not simply translate Western frameworks into a different cultural context; rather, it reworks the relationship between technology, ethics and aesthetic reflection through its own technohistorical experience.

The significance of the May Fourth Movement in modern Chinese history lies not merely in a rejection of tradition at political or cultural level, but in its attempt to reconstruct the conceptual framework through which Chinese society understands the relationship between world and science. It constitutes a distinct Chinese form of Enlightenment that affirms scientific rationality and the modern system of knowledge. In recent years, researches on late-Qing Chinese science fiction have confirmed that, around the May Fourth Movement, Chinese science fiction also functioned as a form of enlightenment inquiry grounded in imagination (Jia 2021). Its imaginative faculty was not limited to literary invention, but extended to reflections on pre-Enlightenment traditions of China, expressing critical acceptance or ideal projection toward the technological society. In the twenty-first century, Chinese science/speculative fiction has inherited the May Fourth tradition more directly: It synthesizes artistic sensibility, scientific cognition, and ethical reflection, producing author’s own reflective judgments which implies TA. As The Three Body Problem trilogy has attracted global attention, the trend of the development of Chinese science/speculative fiction could be understood on three levels: the evolution of the genre in Chinese culture, China’s increasing emphasis on technoscientific discourse, and shifts in international politics.

First, Chinese science/speculative fiction, which originates in the late Qing, has undergone wars, political upheavals, and the decline following the ‘science-literature debate,’ before finally, since the 1990s, entering a period of relatively stable and uninterrupted development. Academic attention to Chinese science/speculative fiction began in the early 2000s, as represented by Professor Yan Wu. Song Han and Fei Dao (Jia Liyuan) once referred to it as ‘lonely ambushers.’ Owing to this earlier accumulation, in the past decade Chinese science/speculative fiction has evolved from a marginal genre into one that enjoys broader public and mainstream cultural recognition. From the ‘post-1960s’ to ‘post-1990s’ generations, successive waves of authors have formed a continuously creative community, giving Chinese science/speculative fiction both a firm literary foundation and a coherent developmental trajectory. Over the past five years, the institutionalization of science/speculative-fiction studies and associations, has enhanced the genre’s self-awareness and promoted broader formal exploration of speculative fiction.

Second, the rise of Chinese science/speculative fiction is closely tied to the advancement of China’s technological society. National policies supporting technological innovation have indirectly facilitated the growth of science fiction literature. Most contemporary Chinese science/speculative fiction writers either have formal backgrounds in the natural sciences or possess doctoral-level education. Having witnessed China’s post-reform technological acceleration, they combine a deep understanding of science with stronger literary training. Consequently, whether technological optimists or technological pessimists, nearly all writers affirm the transformative role of technology in society and civilization, while their skepticism tends to focus on human nature and the structural dimensions of social institutions.

Finally, the rise of China’s position within the international system in the twenty-first century has prompted other countries to pay greater attention to how Chinese society culturally understands science and the future. In this sense, science/speculative fiction, as a literary genre that integrates science, technology and society, becomes a form of ‘conceptual design’, performing a function of cross-cultural interpretation. Taking Cixin Liu as an example, his works have achieved international sales far exceeding those of other non-science fiction Chinese writers. The state promotion of The Wandering Earth series, along with official recognition of writers such as Cixin Liu and Song Han – including a certain degree of institutional tolerance in censorship – reflects the government’s emphasis on scientific and science-fictional narratives. These tendencies render Chinese science/speculative fiction a mirror of technology and of reflective engagement with technology.

Here, we proceed to case-based discussions of recent Chinese/Sinophone speculative fiction. First, when Chinese science/speculative fiction chooses to return to the past, employing historical or archetypal modes of writing, its goal is not Heideggerian nostalgic longing, but rather to re-appropriate classical resources for contemporary technological reflections.

Mu Ming’s The Serpentine Band (宛转环) illustrates Kantian beauty and reflective judgment on technics. While Mu Ming presents a story about time travel, its theme focuses on jade carving, painting and garden-building, showing Chinese cognitive archetypes of the judgment of beauty (Mu 2023). The Western Baroque aesthetics – characterized by the non-Euclidean space, the folding of all things and the ornamentation of cathedral interiors – is replaced in Chinese aesthetics by the soft spatial logic of jade craftsmanship and landscape design. While Baroque art leaves no empty space, striving for the maximum density and complexity of time-space composition, The Serpentine Band embodies soft curvature and void (留白) – emptiness as presence (以空为实) – achieving, through ‘form that makes formlessness,’ a static ethereal totality. Though The Serpentine Band shares with Baroque art and science a similar cognitive construction, its aesthetic unfolding and material expression articulate a distinctive depth of Chinese reflections on beauty. The story concludes by merging the integrity of the literati and the creativity of the feminine, endowing them with world-making power to create a future that combines Chinese beauty and Baroque science.

Mu Ming’s fiction, rather than treating classical resources as pre-technological or ontologically prior to modern technical systems, her narratives activate non-Western classical resources and embed them within contemporary technology. She gives rise to an aesthetic reflection on an entire mode of thinking – a reflection on the paradigms through which technology, culture and value are jointly interpreted and organized within judgments of beauty, which resonates closely with what Kant’s theory of imagination. Heterogeneous technological issues are integrated into a shared horizon of aesthetic reflection to show a perspective of hermeneutic TA.

In the case of Cixin Liu, his works convey the totality and transcendence associated with the technological scale, offering a cosmic perspective in response to Kant’s judgment of sublime. On another level, his narratives demonstrate a reflective quality akin to New Wave science fiction, engaging deeply with the future of humanity and the legacy of history. Whether in The Three-Body Problem and Ball Lightning, which reflect on historical contingency; or in Full Spectrum Barrage Jamming and The Wandering Earth, which depict the tensions of science and human conflict; or in The Village Teacher, which dramatizes the dialectic between marginal humanity and the vast cosmos – Liu consistently reflects upon the fragility of human existence. This non-anthropocentric perspective, grounded in the technological sublime, constitutes a literary mode of reflection on humanity itself. Consequently, Liu’s work achieves a dialectical balance between genre and literature: He adheres to the formal logic, aesthetics and thematic expectations of genre fiction, while simultaneously reaching toward the New Wave sensibility that displays critiques for the human condition (Song 2023).

Liu’s fiction foregrounds a sublime dimension of the aesthetic judgment on TA. Though technological development may exceed human imagination, this does not imply that imagination is rendered incapable of performing a hermeneutic TA of the uncertainty and transformative power of technologies. On the contrary, the experience of the sublime as articulated in science-fictional narratives functions precisely as a sensuous and affective form of reflection on technology. Within this reflective horizon, the sublime does not merely register human powerlessness; rather, it opens a space in which the limits, risks and implications of technologically mediated futures can be interrogated and subjected to assessment.

Different from Liu, Qiufan Chen demonstrates a more optimistic speculation with science-fictional realism. The co-authored work AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future by Qiufan Chen and Kai-Fu Lee, creatively combines theoretical foresight with narrative speculation, juxtaposing literary imagination with concrete TA. The book adopts an international perspective, with ten stories set in ten countries, functioning as a curatorial project that extrapolates toward global technologies.

The story Twin Sparrows (双雀), set in Korea, is written before the rise of ChatGPT, so it foresees the co-shaping of human and natural language processing (NLP) systems (Chen Qiufan 2021). The two AI companions – Atoman and Solaris – are paired respectively with identical twin orphans, Golden Sparrow and Silver Sparrow. They are not depicted as autonomous intelligences, but rather as AI agents calibrated by human supervision (the orphanage director, caretakers and adoptive parents). They reflect two children’s distinct personalities: Golden Sparrow’s bright, extroverted temperament; and Silver Sparrow’s introverted, Asperger-like disposition. Atoman’s fiery, solar nature and its worldly engagement, externalizes Golden Sparrow’s social interaction. Solaris, in contrast, represents a poetic, artistic AI, projecting augmented-reality bubble environments that function as Silver Sparrow’s emotional protection. Chen’s treatment of Atoman and Solaris anticipates the educational function of large language models in real society.

Twin Sparrows presents an optimistic futurist vision of how East Asia’s education becomes a shared process of cultivation for both human cognition and artificial intelligence, a vision at once imaginative, empirical and reflective. The case of AI 2041 also demonstrates that science/speculative fiction can be positioned and alongside with TA, as with Kai-Fu Lee’s interpretive commentaries, functioning as an expanded resource of reflection. On this basis, science/speculative fiction perform a participatory function of TA, in which the aesthetics and the interpretive judgments are jointly articulated.

In contrast, Song Han situates science/speculative fiction more explicitly within a framework of technosocial critique. The focus of most of his stories lies not in the direct extrapolation of science and technology, and his works do not fit typical science-fictional frameworks. Yet virtually all of his works fall within the dystopia mode of speculative fiction. His Hospital trilogy exemplifies how, amid the tensions between modernity and postmodernity, Chinese speculative fiction can construct frameworks that transcend the utopia/dystopia binary, reaching the limits technofuture (Han 2023).

The trilogy portrays the Age of Medicine, Wars of Medicine, Medical Empires and the hospitals of Earth and Mars. The true protagonist – the center of logical and narrative extrapolation – is medicine itself. In the Chinese context, ‘medicine’ functioning as the ‘novum’ is because of its genealogical relation to Lu Xun’s Medicine. The Hospital trilogy’s meditation on illness reconfigures the problem of ‘curing China’ first articulated since the May Fourth era. That is, it reopens the structural question: Can medicine (and, by extension, science) truly solve the Chinese problems of modernity? Lu Xun’s decision to ‘abandon medical studies for literature’ reflects his belief that literature (art) heals the soul, whereas medicine (science) merely treats the surface. Han inherits this reasoning: Scientific progress does not necessarily redeem the moral degeneration of humanity (Feng 2023). Thus, the critique of human evil – the recognition that technological advancement does not entail ethical progress – constitutes the core principle of Han’s fiction. Throughout The Hospital trilogy, the ‘dialectics of medicine,’ the narrative therapy, and the structure of past-life memories together extend the notion of bodily illness into a critique of both the institutional hospital and the historical narrative tradition of China. The motifs of the immortality of the elderly, the reversed evolution, the premature aging, as well as the presence of the dead – are manifestations of the real ‘disease,’ intensifying its metaphorical resonance with reality.

Han’s creative trajectory does not employ a humanistic critique of science; rather, it affirms the potential of science while using technological civilization as a platform to reflect upon the abyss of human nature as a whole. His reflective power thus reveals a critical paradox: At the very moment when technology advances human progress, it simultaneously exposes the degenerative traits of the human condition. Han’s work can hence be regarded as reflective and critical modes of hermeneutic TA. Against the increasingly affirmative narratives surrounding China’s contemporary development, his fiction raises a more unsettling question: Although China is situated outside a Western-centered technocultural horizon, might it nonetheless generate another, equally problematic, form of technocentrism? Han offers a powerful imaginative articulation of this possibility, presenting a deeply critical reconfiguration of China’s technological future.

For contemporary authors, science/speculative fiction has become performative arenas for interpreting the modern technological society and is able to contribute to hermeneutic TA. It transforms imagination into a reflective method for evaluating technological futures, by articulating anticipatory meanings, value conflicts and experiential horizons that are difficult to access through conventional analytical or normative approaches alone. The challenges faced by different civilizations are now convergent. Rather than Heideggerian nostalgia, we should adopt Kant’s affirmative account of imagination as reflective, through judgments of beauty and sublime, and we should understand technosocial problems as a whole in speculative ways. In this sense, Non-Western cultural systems can assume increasingly active and dialogical roles in the global discourse on technology, imagination and futurity.