Han Song – Chinese Literature Today,  Vol 7, #1 (2018)

Han Song’s benighted subjects inhabit multiple ver- sions of the “iron house,” sealed iterations of a suffo- cating social milieu from which there is little hope for escape.1 Like Lu Xun’s 鲁迅 diarist in the 1918 short story “Diary of a Madman” (“Kuangren riji” 狂人日記),2 Han Song’s protagonists are conspiracy theorists compulsive- ly rifling through a hodgepodge of textual, historical, and circumstantial evidence in order to produce accounts of alien invasions, environmental disasters, wormholes, and other human catastrophes that have banished them to their fate.