High-Speed Rail

High-Speed Rail is the middle installment of Chinese science fiction writer Han Song's "Rail Trilogy" (Subway, High-Speed Rail, Rail), republished in a revised edition in 2020 by Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House in the "Han Song Works" series. Running about 220,000 Chinese characters, it is regarded as a segmented novel. The story begins with a high-speed rail accident: the train's control system fails, contact with the outside world is severed, and the train gradually evolves into a self-contained artificial universe, its passengers like projections of some collective consciousness. The protagonist, Zhou Yuan, is chosen as the "seed figure" to save the train but flees out of cowardice. Thereafter the train is repeatedly remade into new forms: from an artificial-muscle train, an artificial star and a newborn biological chain, to a "large farm" disguised as a mobile nuclear missile launch base, and then a looping space that returns people again and again to the starting point. Zhou Yuan's son, Zhou Tiesheng, is born and raised on the train; amid another round of turmoil he pursues his father's secret and encounters destruction and rebuilding with each "evolution" of the train. In the end, a passenger civil war destroys all life aboard, yet the train keeps speeding into the distance. Using the high-speed rail—the most symbolic technological object of contemporary China—as metaphor, the novel compresses the relationship between speed, order, the collective, and the individual into car after car, presenting a cyclical fable of civilization in a strange and poetic style. The "dark consciousness" pervading the book and its wariness of technological rationality have made it a frequently cited work in discussions of dystopian writing in Chinese science fiction.