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.