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Those Who Wait for the Future: Asynchronous Temporality in the SF of Xia Jia and Kim Choyeop

  • Cross-Cultural Studies
  • 2026, 78(), pp.1~24
  • DOI : 10.21049/ccs.2026.78..1
  • Publisher : Center for Cross Culture Studies
  • Research Area : Humanities > Literature
  • Received : May 10, 2026
  • Accepted : June 5, 2026
  • Published : June 30, 2026

권혜진 1

1고려대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how waiting reveals the unequal distribution of futures in trans-East Asian women's SF, focusing on Xia Jia's "The Time You Cannot Reach" and Kim Choyeop's "If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light." It redefines waiting not as emotional passivity or narrative delay, but as a form of asynchronous temporality in which beings with different mobilities and paces cannot arrive at the same future together. In Xia's story, waiting appears through relational asymmetry between beings inhabiting divergent temporal rhythms. In Kim's story, it emerges through cosmic distance, broken transport infrastructure, and unequal access to futurity. Drawing on Hage, Bloch, Suvin, and feminist SF criticism, this paper argues that these works do not imagine the future as technological progress, but as a set of delayed, inaccessible, and unevenly distributed temporal possibilities.

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