kw: book reviews, science fiction, short stories, chinese literature
When I was a kid, we "all knew" that if you dug a hole straight through the Earth, you would reach China. Only after we got a globe did we figure out that, antipodal from nearly all of North America, you'll find ocean, except a little bit that is opposite a section of Australia. To tunnel to somewhere in China, I would have to dig parallel to the plane of the equator, at an angle of about 50°, rather than 90° straight down.
Metaphorically, however, the U.S.A. and China really are poles apart. How does this affect science fiction written in China versus that written here? In a word, "dramatically". For one thing, SciFi was banned in the People's Republic of China (PRC) for about half of the Communist era there, roughly 1949 to the present. An essay in Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation, edited and translated by Ken Liu, outlines the repeated submergence and resurgence of the genre in China. As I read in "A Brief Introduction to Chinese Science Fiction and Fandom" by Regina Kanyu Wang, whenever the gate opens, the Chinese SciFi "horses" race off in every direction. This book, a follow-on and companion to Invisible Planets (issued about three years ago), opens a window upon that amazing scene for the English-language reader.
Whatever you might find in Western SciFi, you are likely to find in Chinese SciFi, from space opera to post-apocalyptic dystopias, from time travel to psycho-thrillers. One thing I missed was alien encounter stories, not that they are absent, but seem to be very rare. I suspect that the Chinese think that Westerners are alien enough, and frequently dwell on the consequences of that.
Just statistically, there are about 3½ times as many people in the PRC as in the USA, and nearly twice as many as in the USA and Europe combined. That means there are huge numbers of excellent writers, writing in Chinese, about which the English-language world knows nothing. It is beyond me to survey the field, so I'll just comment on a very few stories I particularly liked.
The title story, "Broken Stars" is by Tang Fei (an indivisible pseudonym), in a genre I can't quite place. A central artifact in the interplay between the narrator and a "pale woman" is an "astrolabe", a "star-taker". Historically, the astrolabe was a measuring instrument that was later developed into the sextant, and then the theodolite, for measuring star positions. This infinitely-unfoldable paper device shows the planets' positions instead, and is for astrology. When the narrator, losing patience with wildly erratic prediction, draws on it, events are changed; cause and effect are tangled up. Is it a parable of "taking charge of one's own life?" Other threads in the story don't back that up, and I was left with an ambiguous feeling.
"What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear", by Baoshu (also a pseudonym), could be said to take a page from "Benjamin Button", but for all of China. This quasi-history of US-China relations and events within the PRC starts with the massacre in Tiananmen Square and moves forward through Premier Deng's era to that of Mao, in the apparent present. It is nearly all in reverse order, limned by the lives of three characters who experience it all.
"The History of Future Illnesses", by Chen Quifan, begins with iPad Syndrome, and runs through variations that culminate in the destruction of language. To say more is to give too much away, but the story could be a taken as a cautionary tale.
I didn't read Invisible Planets, so I'll have to scare up a copy.
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Looking over the post at a few days' remove, I find it indirectly implies that marginalized groups are murderous. Not my intention at all. There is a difference between people who are "naturally" at the extreme end of a distribution, and those who, because they are "more different", get marginalized. Sometimes, a marginalized group is actually a very large segment of the population.
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