Broken Stars

Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation, translated and edited by Ken Liu and published in 2019 by Tor Books. 

Last year I read Ken Liu's earlier anthology of Chinese science fiction, Invisible Planets. This collection is somewhat larger, having sixteen stories by fourteen different authors and three essays about Chinese science fiction. On the other hand, although many of these stories are good, there were none that had the impact on me of, for example, "Folding Beijing" in the earlier book.

The collection opens with Xia Jia's "Goodnight, Melancholy", which alternates a story about an AI therapeutic doll with (somewhat fictionalized) sections about the life and work of Alan Turing, one of the founders of modern computer science. The second story, "Moonlight", is by Liu Cixin, the best-known science fiction writer from China, who wrote the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, which is available in the Library.) This story considers alternatives to fossil fuels, and ironically concludes that we could destroy ourselves whatever technology we choose. The title story, "Broken Stars" by Tang Fei, is about a high school girl from a dysfunctional family, and I'm not sure why it is considered science fiction at all, though it was an interesting story. There are two quite short stories by Han Song, "Submarines" and "Salinger and the Koreans": the latter is a satiric story about an alternative world in which North Korea under its illustrious leader Kim Il Sung liberates the entire world and creates a golden age of socialism; J.D. Salinger, the author of Catcher in the Rye, appears as a dissident. (Many of these stories have literary allusions.) Cheng Jingbo's early story, "Under a Dangling Sky", is a folktale-like story about a talking dolphin.

The longest and probably the best story in the book is Baoshu's "What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear", in which history runs backwards from the present to the Second World War, with tragic results for the protagonists but a lot of fun allusions for the reader. Sartre is one of the characters. Hao Jingfang's "The New Year Train" is another short work, based on the averaging over many paths approach to quantum mechanics. Fei Dao's "The Robot Who Liked to Tell Tall Tales" reminded me of Lem's robot stories in the Cyberiad. Zhang Ran's "The Snow of Jinyang" is a time-travel story of a particular subgenre of Chinese science fiction. Anna Wu's "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: Laba Porridge" is the first in a series of stories she has written set in the restaurant famous from Douglas Adam's novel; it is full of inside jokes about Chinese writers, some of which I got and some of which I didn't. Ma Boyong's humorous story "The First Emperor's Games", starts from the premise that the first emperor of ancient China was a video gamer, and all the ancient Chinese philosophers present him with video games (which all happen to be popular games of today.) Some of the allusions are quite funny. Gu Shi's "reflection" combines Buddhism with quantum theory; Regina Kanyu Wang's "The Brain Box" is about recording memories.The last two stories, "Coming of the Light" and "A History of Future Illnesses", are by Chen Qiufan, whose novel Waste Tide is available at the Library.

The book ends with three essays on the history of Chinese science fiction and the academic study of it. I won't repeat what I said about the differences between Chinese and American science fiction in my review of the first collection; one difference which was obvious here is that exactly half the authors here are women.

Watch Me Disappear

 

Watch Me Disappear by Janelle Brown

A year after the disappearance of Billie Flanagan, while hiking alone in a remote area, her family is still struggling to come to terms with her loss.  As they face the upcoming hearing that will finally declare Billie legally dead, questions begin to surface: is she really dead, or could she actually be alive somewhere? Was she abducted, or could she have left of her own free will? As new information comes to light, husband Jonathon and daughter Olive are faced with a web of secrets and left with the disturbing question: "Did we really know her at all?"

Watch Me Disappear was an interesting read that kept me guessing right up to the end.  It is a compelling portrait of a family dealing with grief and tragedy, and what happens as the sands of what they thought they knew, begin to shift beneath their feet.  Believable, well-crafted characters brought this story to life. I enjoyed it!

Mary Crow Dog

Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman, published in 1990 by Harper Perrenial.

 

Lakota Woman is the autobiography of Mary Crow Dog, the wife of Leonard Crow Dog, a traditional Sioux medicine man who was the "spiritual leader" of the American Indian Movement at the time of the Wounded Knee Occupation.

Born Mary Brave Bird, she grew up in a one room shack without indoor plumbing or electricity, raised largely by her grandparents as her father abandoned the family before she was born and her mother worked in another city. As a child, she was taken like many other Native Americans to a Catholic-run boarding school, where she was mistreated and indoctrinated with Christianity until she finally ran away in her teens. She wandered a while with groups of other "lost" teenagers, drinking, doing drugs, and living by shoplifting, until she ran into the American Indian Movement and discovered her ancestral religion. She participated in many of the well-known actions of AIM, such as the Custer Courthouse fight and the takeover of the BIA offices. She had her first baby at Wounded Knee during the siege.

Later, she married Crow Dog, and had to adapt to life as the wife of a prominent medicine man. Shortly after their marriage, he was arrested and sentenced to twenty-three years in prison for his role as religious leader of the Occupation, and for defending his home against invasion by some drunken whites (who it later turned out had been sent by the FBI as a provocation). While he was imprisoned she developed into a leader and speaker in her own right, touring for his defense committee. He was finally released on appeal after three years. As in many books about AIM, Mary Crow Dog describes the extreme lengths to which the FBI and even the military went to destroy the organization and its leaders, and the illegality and corruption of the South Dakota and even Federal courts when the defendant was an Indian, let alone a militant one.

As Crow Dog's wife, her perspective on AIM is quite different from those of Dennis Banks and Russell Means, whose autobiographies I have also read (Ojibwa Warrior and Where White Men Fear to Tread, both available in the Library). She sees the struggle less as a political than as a religious one, essentially as a struggle against religious persecution. Of course, one of the surest ways to destroy a native culture is to supplant its religion, and Native American ceremonies were outlawed by the government and suppressed by the Christian missionaries for over fifty years in an attempt to force the Indians to convert to Christianity; they are still subject to harassment to the present day. Leonard Crow Dog played a role in reviving these ceremonies, and organized the first Ghost Dance in almost a century at Wounded Knee. One of the most interesting aspects of this book is the description of the Sun Dance, Ghost Dance, and yuwipi ceremonies.