Taking a cue from Laurence Buell’s seminal argument that “the environmental crisis is also a crisis of the human imagination,” I explore how the customary literary imaginary hinges on the primacy of vision underwritten by the telescopic perspective of the West, and how this scopic vantage is being transformed into an imaginary based on experiential vantage embodied and lived encounters with the unfamiliar, unknown, and indeterminant forces. To that end, I engage in a round of close reading of stories by Chinese sf writers like Xia Jia 夏笳 and Chen Qiufan 陈楸帆 through the mode of proximity-orientation underpinned by cognitive-affect theories. I begin with a critique of the infamous project of Ordos 100, in which the hegemonic authority of the scopic perspective is exposed through an oddly designed blueprint for a would-be residential district of modern villas. Located on a waterless and sand-swept steppe zone in China’s Inner Mongolia, this project of visualizing a lucrative future reveals an entrenched imaginary for the typical Chinese technocrats that is rudely stripped of proximity in favor of a fantasized future. In a similar vein, the two narratives field tech-savvy characters who push for widely stretched robotic technology to create heartless and costly schemes in real-life situations for self-centered gains. By comparing these encounters via the mode of “visceral perception,” I hope to gain a better grasp of the evolving stages in humans’ encounters with the robotic modality to shed light on elemental agency in studying the human imaginary in the Anthropocene.