Chinese science fiction first arose in the early twentieth century when late Qing Chinese intelligentsia proselytized the genre with hopes of combating mythical interpretations of reality in order to establish a culture based on the scientific rationality of the “West.” Sf scholar Nathaniel Isaacson attributes this phenomenon to a widespread epistemological crisis, ignited by China’s defeats at the hands of European colonial powers. Yet, a century later, a new generation of Chinese sf writers are populating their stories with the very tropes disparaged by the genre’s original propellers. In this chapter, I investigate representations of the mythical, fantastical, and superstitious in the Chinese sf stories by contemporary writer Chen Qiufan. I excavate the thematic weight of mythical material in his stories “Coming of the Light,” “Fish of Lijiang,” and Waste Tide, placing it in dialogue with the sociohistorical anxieties spuming underneath a modern, enlightened China. In particular, I pay attention to how myth complicates instrumental interpretations of rationality, and serves as expressions of yearning for intersubjective connection. Through combining literary analysis with the disciplinary perspectives of critical theory and science fiction studies, I demonstrate the ways in which Chen’s works unveil the historical-dialectical relationship between myth and science, and offer a nonintellectual mode of apprehension to a technologically fetishized world.