A review by jazzypizzaz
China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh
5.0
A future world with technological and political upheavals that nonetheless feels very lived-in, concrete, plausible or almost, and with characters that similarly feel like real people living their normal lives trying to get by. This seems to be a recurring theme in books I've read recently, or maybe it's just what I need to be reassured about right now-- that despite tectonic shifts in social systems and physical realities, for better or worse, on an intimate close-up people are people are people living their lives in ways that feel actually pretty similar no matter what else changes.
In any of the vividly written settings the novel sweeps through, Zhang is both enough of an insider that he understands the nuances of his surroundings (and for us the world itself is similar enough to ours that we can recognize it), but also Zhang is enough of an outsider in how he doesn't quite fit in that he's able to question why things are the way they are (in a similar way that for us the future scifi setting allows us the distance to compare this to our reality, with what doesn't change and what may be fundamentally inescapable about human society). This is me attempting to connect ideas from this review and this one. I'd also like to connect the part about Daoist Engineering ("A team would not have constructed the building as a unit, but as a series of connected, but compromised and adjusted, ideas." while an organically engineered building by one person is an interconnected, exactly balanced complete system.) with Zhang's class discussion about technological/political transitions (societal progress is a complicated system that Marx/scientists/whoever attempt to understand as linear and predictable, but like any system is subject to change due to the most minute butterfly effects)... something about systems, about how with so many individual actors shaping it a perfectly balanced society will never be achievable? but like the weather, we can do our best to understand the factors at play anyway, attempt to plan accordingly... Utopia isn't possible, but humanity is? Your life won't turn out like how you expect or plan for or want, but all you can do is keep living and adapting and waiting and learning... Hmm.
I'm rambling, but what I enjoyed about this novel (other than the times it legit made me tear up) was how there were underlying political themes like a bass note to the character-driven melodies. It swept me away.
In any of the vividly written settings the novel sweeps through, Zhang is both enough of an insider that he understands the nuances of his surroundings (and for us the world itself is similar enough to ours that we can recognize it), but also Zhang is enough of an outsider in how he doesn't quite fit in that he's able to question why things are the way they are (in a similar way that for us the future scifi setting allows us the distance to compare this to our reality, with what doesn't change and what may be fundamentally inescapable about human society). This is me attempting to connect ideas from this review and this one. I'd also like to connect the part about Daoist Engineering ("A team would not have constructed the building as a unit, but as a series of connected, but compromised and adjusted, ideas." while an organically engineered building by one person is an interconnected, exactly balanced complete system.) with Zhang's class discussion about technological/political transitions (societal progress is a complicated system that Marx/scientists/whoever attempt to understand as linear and predictable, but like any system is subject to change due to the most minute butterfly effects)... something about systems, about how with so many individual actors shaping it a perfectly balanced society will never be achievable? but like the weather, we can do our best to understand the factors at play anyway, attempt to plan accordingly... Utopia isn't possible, but humanity is? Your life won't turn out like how you expect or plan for or want, but all you can do is keep living and adapting and waiting and learning... Hmm.
I'm rambling, but what I enjoyed about this novel (other than the times it legit made me tear up) was how there were underlying political themes like a bass note to the character-driven melodies. It swept me away.