Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translatio

I heard of the this book in passing and thought I would give it a try. I read a least one science fiction book per month and this book is by far, one of my very favourites. I haven't finished it yet because once it is done, it is done. But I am going to read it again, something I *very rarely* do! I love this book and the each piece. Every single one. Thank you to the editor for translating the text into English! Thank you, thank you, thank you!

A really good collection of short stories, complete with short author biographies. Some of stories are a bit mystical compared to western sci-fi and can end quite abruptly.

A youthful generation of sci fi writers is flourishing in China. Their writing is cousin to the American genre, it features robots, bio-engineered creatures, and dystopian cities. The inspiration comes from closer sources, from their childhood science books, from modern Chinese history, and from the rise of a technological and surprisingly wealthy China. The translator is Ken Liu, an American science fiction writer. He warns American readers of the temptation to read the stories as a veiled critique of the People’s Republic, because that’s not always the intention.The anthology opens with ‘Year of the Rat’, by Chen Quifang. This a mysterious story about an unemployed and demoralized university graduate who is drafted into a civil defense force. His unit is armed with spears and sent to the countryside to fight a plague of bio-engineered rats. These might be the mutant descendants of cute and intelligent rats who were bred for export to Europe as pets. I’ll leave you to discover what follows.The best story is Hao Jingfang’s ‘Folding Beijing’, which won a Hugo for Best Novella in 2016. The story has attracted the attention of engineers in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). In the story, robots and AI produce an abundance of goods. The bulk of the profits accrue to the governing class of 5 million and some to the middle class of 25 million. The lower class of 50 million struggles to survive by laboring long hours cleaning and maintaining the city.She imagines a coldly dystopian Beijing, optimized to manage this distribution of wealth and work. Beijing within the Sixth Ring Road is a giant urban machine that folds the city upside down every 48 hours. The governing class lives above ground for 24 hours, then the city rotates upside down to expose the buildings of the middle & lower classes. The middle class enjoys the surface for 16 hours, then its buildings retract and the buildings of the lower class unfold. They have 8 hours to clean and maintain the city.The story is about a lower class worker, hired to carry a message from a grad student in the middle class sector, to the student’s lover on the reverse, wealthy side. Near the close of the story, the protagonist discovers that his life of hard labor in the lower class sector was unnecessary. The work could have been done by robots, but the governing class prefers to keep workers busy.I was charmed by an explosively colorful and original short story, ‘Call Girl’, by an apparently LGBT writer, Tang Fei. The final short stories are by the modern Sci Fi master, Cixin Liu. For those of you who’ve missed it, I highly recommend his trilogy of novels, The Three-Body Problem. The anthology closes with short essays on the state of Chinese sci fi.No single message unites these stories. It’s hard however to miss the pervasive mood of anxiety and foreboding. Perhaps that's about what's challenged every Chinese government, the absorption into employment of the annual cohorts of graduating students that emerge from China’s population of 1.4 billion. Or perhaps the darkness relates implicitly to the tragedies of Chinese history: Cixin Liu begins his trilogy with a scene from the Cultural Revolution. Or perhaps Ken Liu is at least partly wrong ,and the source of the darkness is the shadow cast by an enormously powerful state.

When you pick up an anthology of purportedly Science Fiction stories, what do you expect?Spaceships, aliens, journey to stars, galactic conspiracies, epic quests...!This book has NONE of them. Well, the spaceships are mentioned in couple of stories, but they are barely there. And yet, it is perhaps the most profoundly scientific and fictional anthology that I have read.Why scientific? Because most of these stories are based upon human expectations and anticipations, loves and losses, hopes and fears. Their sheer realism makes them understandable, with results that can be obtained repeatedly under different circumstances.Why fictional? Because none of these stories are 'true' in literal sense.Ken Liu firmly states that trying to club all these stories within the same bracket other than that of using the same language, would be something like 'fatal error'. I concur, and hence would express my thoughts story-by-story, or work-by-work:1. Chen Qiufan's "The Year of the Rat": One of the best and the most haunting stories that I have read, presented as a parable of near future.2. Chen Qiufan's "The Fish of Lijiang": A chilling, and all too probable story of near future.3. Chen Qiufan's "The Flower of Shazui": A brilliant, poignant, and truer than true story of near future.These three stories, combined with Chen Qiufan's non-fiction piece "The Torn Generation: Chinese Science Fiction in a Culture in Transition" constitute some of the greatest pieces of scifi writing that I have read in recent times.4. Xia Jia’s “A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight”: Now THIS was a haunting read! It was poetic, poignant, confusing, at times infuriatingly oblique, and sublime.5. Xia Jia’s “Tongtong’s Summer”: A story that sounds simple, but has lots of layers within.6. Xia Jia’s “Night Journey of the Dragon-Horse”: God! Grant me the power to translate this story into Bengali. I can never write something like this. But like the moon, let me glow in the light of this sun. Please.These three stories, combined with the non-fiction piece “What Makes Chinese Science Fiction Chinese?” place science fiction in China against a rich, humane, volatile, at times violent and fluid landscape. Believe me, I would NEVER forget them.7. Ma Boyong’s “The City of Silence”: 1984 revisited.8. Hao Jingfang’s “Invisible Planets”: I’m not comparing, but this is a Sheherjade-esque story that doubles as parable of human expectations, general theory of relativity, explorations of sexuality and identity, all the while infusing a sense of loneliness and longing in the reader. Exquisite.9. Hao Jinfang’s “Folding Beijing”: Depressing and overlong.10. Tang Fei’s “Call Girl”: A stunner! No, I won’t say anything about it.11. Cheng Jingbo’s “Grave of the Fireflies”: Depressing and boring.12. Liu Cixin’s “The Circle”: THIS is an unbelievable story that combines history, ambition, ruthlessness, mathematics and computing together against a backdrop of ancient past, with projections towards our immediate future, all in a very hard, very realizable format.13. Liu Cixin’s “Taking Care of God”: T…H…E B…E…S…T!Once again, these last two stories and Liu Cixin’s essay “The Worst of All Possible Universes and the Best of All Possible Earths: Three-Body and Chinese Science Fiction” define not just Chinese SF, but our expectations and apprehensions with respect to SF, science, technology and humanity.All these stories are literally brimming with the excitement of present and apprehensions regarding future. There are no “same old” concepts here. Life, in these stories and pieces, are unforgiving, haunting, beautiful.A separate word for Ken Liu. These translations are simply awesome, and I literally would like to fall at his feet to pay my obeisance. Or I may simply offer him a cup of tea.My submission: READ THE BOOK ASAP! If you like SF, Fantasy, surreal stories, hard-hitting dystopia, or merely thoughts regarding our future, this one is truly an essential read.

I am surprisingly becoming more and more addicted to eastern sci fi!!