A review by seeyf
Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation by Ken Liu
3.0
This was my first time reading Chinese sci-fi and it’s a varied collection but the quality is uneven, perhaps a result of Liu’s approach of choosing stories he found personally memorable rather than trying to curate a “best of” anthology. There are stories inspired by western authors including one that remakes Douglas Adams’ “Restaurant at the End of the Universe”, but also stories that draw from China’s rich history and popular Chinese genres like chuanyue (穿越, where a protagonist travels back in time to historical periods).
I particularly enjoyed these stories: Xia Jia’s “Goodnight, Melancholy” which juxtaposes human-AI relationships as theorised by Alan Turing vs those realised in a possible future; Liu Cixin’s “Moonlight” whose protagonist contemplates the enormity of changing humanity’s fate while also searching for answers for his own happiness; Zhang Ran’s “The Snow of Jinyang” for its imaginative recreation of modern technology in the 10th century; and Baoshu’s “What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear” and Gu Shi’s “Reflection”, which both challenge our conventional notions of time and progress, the former at the scale of Chinese history and global affairs while the latter at an intimately personal level.
I particularly enjoyed these stories: Xia Jia’s “Goodnight, Melancholy” which juxtaposes human-AI relationships as theorised by Alan Turing vs those realised in a possible future; Liu Cixin’s “Moonlight” whose protagonist contemplates the enormity of changing humanity’s fate while also searching for answers for his own happiness; Zhang Ran’s “The Snow of Jinyang” for its imaginative recreation of modern technology in the 10th century; and Baoshu’s “What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear” and Gu Shi’s “Reflection”, which both challenge our conventional notions of time and progress, the former at the scale of Chinese history and global affairs while the latter at an intimately personal level.