My review of Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation:
A wonderfully diverse (and wonderfully translated) anthology. Highly recommended.
My impressions of the individual stories (I've bolded my absolute favorites):
~ Han Song's "Salinger and the Koreans" was the first story here that made me chuckle:
No one knows what the Observer intended, but as a result of his interference, the armed forces of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea conquered the United States of America. The North Korean scientists did not rely on their primitive nuclear weapons; instead, they used the newly invented Quantum Reambiguator, which changed the topology of space-time and allowed anything to happen.
As a result, the invincible Korean People’s Army not only unified the Korean Peninsula, but also conquered the rest of the world. To be honest, the KPA really was an impressive army: disciplined, orderly, never looting as much as a single needle or thread from the conquered civilian populations. If there were no barracks in the conquered cities, the soldiers slept in the streets and left the residents secure in their houses. They were solely interested in liberating the entire human race, freeing both their bodies and minds. The world had been without hope of salvation, just as Salinger described in his book: capitalism was rotten through and through. Oh, how the people suffered from spiritual crises, and economic catastrophe followed economic catastrophe! Each day was worse than the day before, and the next day worse yet. The living envied the dead. Maybe this was why the great author had retired to his cabin in the woods—he was the only one who understood how bad things were.
The Koreans saw Salinger as a precursor to the full liberation of humanity. It was because of his book that the Koreans had vowed to liberate the entire human race in the first place. These gentle, unsophisticated, earthy people from Asia loved Salinger from the depths of their hearts. Under the direction of the Supreme Commander in Chief, Salinger’s book had been translated into Korean many years ago and been read by generation after generation of North Korean students. The translator had even written the following in the preface: Our youths grow up in a Socialist motherland in which they’re constantly bathed in the loving care of the Workers’ Party of Korea, the Kim Il-sung Socialist Youth League, and the Young Pioneer Corps. As a result, they’re endowed with the lofty ideals of Communism and blessed with colorful and vibrant spiritual lives. Therefore, by reading a book like The Catcher in the Rye, they can contrast their own environment with the ugly conditions persisting under capitalism, thereby broadening their horizons and gaining more wisdom….
Chuckle darkly, but still.
No one mentioned the name of Salinger anymore in public, and he was quickly forgotten. Even his fans had dismissed him from their minds. Salinger thought this wasn’t such a bad outcome, as he could now live as a true hermit. Gratitude to the KPA! When he had nothing else to do, he observed the Koreans who kept him under surveillance. They are so young and handsome, he thought, each like a member of a herd of reindeer from the distant East. And their thoughts are in fact unique, like building blocks through which they could understand the world objectively and thoroughly. Despite being rulers of the world, their behavior reminded Salinger of his Holden. That’s right, just like Holden. Salinger experienced a pleasurable dizziness, as though drunk with fine wine.
But the happiness didn’t last. Mass economic reconstruction began with the goal to transform America into a gigantic paradise, an attempt to realize the complete revitalization of the country. Under the leadership of the KPA Real Estate Corps, everything proceeded according to a unified and comprehensive plan. Naturally, New Hampshire had its own role to play in this beautiful future.
One morning, Salinger was woken from sleep by deafening noises. Dazed, he gazed outside the window and saw a row of gleaming Baekdu bulldozers, which had been modified from Chonma-ho battle tanks, bearing down on his cabin. Angrily, Salinger rushed out the door—something he rarely did—and argued with the workers who had come to break down his house, arguing that it was his inviolate private property. Of course, such reasoning was useless and revealed a secret hidden in Salinger’s subconscious, a secret that perhaps he had not even known himself: the human race’s universal greed for wealth. It was truly tragic.
The gentle jabs remind me a little of our own
Васил Цонев at his more acerbic.
Since he was homeless, he began to wander around America. His previous life as a recluse meant that few photographs of him had been published, and no one recognized him in the streets or gave him generous gifts. So, please remember this: if you are ever famous or enjoy success, don’t keep too low a profile.
~ Baoshu's "What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear" contains a remarkably gentle and authentic depiction of young love. Culminating in:
That night, we slept in the same tent. We talked about the national and international situation and the movement’s prospects, but we couldn’t agree on anything and started to argue. Eventually, we stopped talking about these matters and simply held each other.
We reminisced about our childhood together, and then I could no longer hold back. I kissed her, first her face, then her lips. That was the first time we really kissed. Her lips were soft and chapped, which broke my heart. I kissed her deeply and would not let go….
In the dark, it happened naturally. With so many young people in the square, our lovemaking was an open secret. Normally I despised such behavior, and felt that couples who engaged in it tarnished the sacred nature of our protest. But now that it was happening to me, I couldn’t resist, and felt our actions were a natural part of the movement itself. Maybe some nameless anxiety about the future also made us want to seize this last moment of total freedom. Every motion, every gesture was infused with awkwardness and embarrassment. We were clumsy and raw, but passion, the irresistible power of youthful passion, eventually brought that fumbling, ridiculous process to a conclusion of sweet intimacy that surpassed understanding.
On the whole, this a striking, sweeping novella about a reversal of world history (and many other reversals), as bittersweet as out very real history. Here's one of its lighter moments (and in-jokes):
However, I could also see signs that America was on the decline. At the time of my visit, a new blockbuster had just been released: Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. I remembered seeing Episodes I through III when I was little and had always wanted to find out what would happen next. To reexperience the wonder of my childhood memories, I bought an expensive ticket. But Episode IV turned out to be far less spectacular than the previous three, and the special effects were so bad that you could almost see the strings on the spaceships. I was really disappointed. Apparently the Cold War had drained America’s resources into the arms race, and the economy wasn’t doing so well.
~ The ending of Hao Jingfang's "The New Year Train" struck me as a bolt of epiphany:
Reporter: Why did those passengers want to stay on the train? It doesn’t make sense to me. Don’t people who visit family for Chinese New Year want to get there as quickly as possible?
Li: I can’t answer that. You’ll have to ask the passengers themselves. But think about this: if the starting point and the destination are already set, and if no matter how many days it takes to get there, you’ll arrive on time, then wouldn’t you want to prolong the trip as much as possible to enjoy it?
Reporter: I guess so. It’s like free time.
Li: It’s simple when you put it like that, right? What doesn’t make sense to me is this: lots of times, when the starting point and the destination are fixed—say, birth and death—why do most people rush toward the end?
A most brilliant case of creating a sense of wonder through changing the scale of the theme.
~ Fei Tao's "The Robot Who Liked to Tell Tall Tales" is so delightful I'll let it speak for itself:
“When I was a young ruler, I thought solemn honesty was the pinnacle of virtue. I rewarded those who worked hard and tried to reform those who deviated from the straight path. My subjects were thus preserved from petty sins, and their hearts untroubled. However, it would be wrong to declare my kingdom back then as a heaven on earth. As I matured, I began to understand the frivolous and irresponsible better, and grew more lenient with the ridiculous and disrespectful. The people’s lives grew more relaxed and joyful, but moral corruption followed. As an unbiased observer, tell me, between the solemn and the absurd, which is more worthy of encouragement? Between the hero and the clown, who is more lovable?”
“Your Majesty, my view is that Fate has always loved to give birth to twins. Each person you named is their own twin.”
And this--this is why I can swallow nearly any kind of fiction but have such a hard time with non-fiction (or Serious Stuff):
“(...) Then let me ask you: do you believe you can carry out your duty? If you return home, will you truly qualify as the unprecedented, peerless, one-and-only, unparalleled, unsurpassed, irreplaceable, unreproducible, history-defying, future-mocking master of bullshit?”
As the robot promised, it invoked 256 different verification routines and carried out 97,466,000,000,000,000 calculations. After exhausting nearly every ounce of energy, it answered, “Yes, Your Majesty.”
The old man nodded slowly. “We’re obviously in the middle of a very serious and solemn situation right here, so I won’t ask you to prove yourself with a few demonstration tales. Maybe you could tell me about your understanding of the art of bullshit, and I’ll then be able to assess whether your confidence is warranted.”
Having devoted almost its entire life to this career, the robot launched into its answer without delay. “I believe tall tales please both the teller and the listener. This is partly because the sharp glare of the truth can injure mortal senses and strike fear into the hearts of the common people. It’s thus necessary to disguise the truth in the form of ridiculous stories so that they may then seep into fragile and suspicious nerves. Even if these dull minds cannot extract the beneficial truth hidden therein, at least the blunted instrument would not injure them too much….”
The old man’s frown, which had relaxed just a fraction, tightened again. He was not entirely satisfied.
The robot continued, “However, after many years of worldly experience, I think tall tales give pleasure simply from the imagination’s leap into the infinite. It’s no different from humanity’s desire to fly. The pleasure alone is reason enough; no other explanation is needed.”
~ The mix of eras in Zhang Ran's
"The Snow of Jinyang" is hilarious:
The whole gang trooped back inside, latched the door, pressed the battered window panels back into their frames as best as they could, and gingerly took their seats. Minister Ma Feng pulled General Guo Wanchao toward a chair, but Guo shook him off and stood right in the middle of the room. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to sit; rather, the archaic armor he’d worn for its formidable appearance had nearly scraped his family jewels raw on the bumpy journey.
Old Ma Feng put on his cap, scratched at his grizzled beard, and introduced Guo Wanchao. “I’m sure everyone has seen the general at court before. We’ll need his help to accomplish our goals, so I secretly invited him here—”
A tall, rangy scholar in yellow robes interrupted. “Why does he wear those black spectacles? Does he hold us in such contempt that he covers his eyes to spare himself the sight?”
“Aha, I was waiting for someone to ask.” Guo Wanchao took off the black lenses nonchalantly. “It’s the latest curiosity from the East City Institute. They call it ‘Ray-Ban.’ They allow the wearer to see normally, and yet be spared the glare of the sun. A marvelous invention!”
“It hardly seems right for a man interested in enlightenment to reduce the reach of light,” grumbled the yellow-robed scholar.
“But who says banning rays is all I’m capable of?” Guo Wanchao proudly drew a teak-handled, brass-headed object from his sleeve. “This device, another invention from the East City Institute, can emit dazzling light that pierces darkness for a hundred paces. The staff from the institute didn’t give it a name, so I call it ‘Light-Saber.’ The banisher of rays and the sword of light! Brilliant, eh? It was a match made in heaven, haha….”
Also, a certain theory claims that the Great Wall of China was built to protect the ancient Chinese from the ancient Bulgars. And here, finally, some definitive proof!
Below the city walls was a field of char, smoke, and wailing. Above, the Han defenders poked and pointed into the distance, counting their kills. For every kill, they drew a black circle on their hand, and used the circles to collect their reward money from the East City Institute. By Prince Lu’s calculations, two million Song soldiers had died these months below the city. Everyone else, looking at the Song camps that still covered the horizon end to end, came to an unspoken consensus not to bring up the problem with statistics derived from self-reporting.
And:
A crowd was gathered in front of the gate: imperial messengers, merchants, government officials in search of glory by association, commoners seeking aid in redressing wrongs done to them, craftsmen bringing their own inventions in the hopes of an audience, idlers trying to return the novelties they purchased after they grew bored, laborers looking for work, prostitutes looking for clients. The guard recorded them one by one in his ledger, gently refusing, reporting, and chasing off with a stick as appropriate. If he saw anyone he was uncertain about, he went ahead and took the bribe, then told them to try their luck again in a few days. He was quite orderly and methodical in this work.
... What d'you mean, "how's that a proof"? It proves--beyond a shadow of a doubt--that we, Chinese and Bulgarians, are
the same!!!
(Okay, or at least our ancestors were.)
Overall, this is my favorite story so far. But for its
crappy back-to-normal ending, it would have shot straight into my all-time hall of glory.
~ Ma Boyong's "The First Emperor's Games" offers another hilarious premise:
The emperor deserved a break. After conquering the other six states, the Qin Empire had successfully carried out multiple complicated reforms: getting everyone to write in the same script, regrading all roads to be the same width, standardizing units of measurement, and promulgating an all-encompassing encoding for all computer text that subsumed the incompatible encodings used by the former warring states. With this Uni-Code in place, citizens of the Qin Empire could confidently launch any program without worrying about conversion plug-ins or screens filled with random glyphs. Moreover, he had constructed a Great Firewall up north, which shielded the empire from all barbarian attacks as well as pop-up ads.
These tasks had taken up decades of the emperor’s youth. With the world at peace, he needed to take a long, relaxing vacation and play some games, just like any ordinary citizen.
The news that the emperor was in search of quality games soon spread throughout the land and became the talk of every teahouse and tavern. Most greeted the news with joy because a good gamer made a good administrator. It was said that Zhang Yi, the great Qin strategist who had furthered the emperor’s ambition by sowing discord and suspicion among the other six states, thereby dissolving their anti-Qin “vertical alliance,” had adapted his line-breaking strategy from Candy Crush—swipe, match, gone! Back when Zhang had been a student, he had devoted all his free time to playing games instead of studying. Yet, look how far he had risen! Obviously, playing games taught important management skills.
However, a few nobles expressed reservations. They thought of games as addictive, cheap entertainment suitable only for plebeians. A great leader like the emperor should stay as far away from them as possible. Their suggestion for curing the emperor of this “electronic opium addiction” was electroshock therapy. The emperor soon declared the nobles guilty of attempted treason and sentenced them to capital punishment.
From then on, it's a romp. How would
Civilization and its requirement that you should keep your subjects (reasonably) happy fare against someone who insists that subjects exist to entertain him? What about
The Sims and the need to pay visits to your neighbors if you want to stay popular?
Go on. Find out.
Then somebody please give this poor Qin Shihuang
Planescape: Torment. What can change the nature of an emperor?
~ Chen Quifan's "Coming of the Light" is both hilarious and incisive in its insights of modernity:
That was when my phone rang.
It was Lao Xu. I glanced apologetically at my wife, who gave me her usual unhappy look when my work intruded on our time together—this was certainly not the first time. I answered the call, and that was how I ended up here, sitting in this room.
The last thing my wife said to me was, “Tell your mother to quit pestering me about a grandchild. Her son is such a pushover he might as well be a baby.”
Mr. Wan is our god, the CEO of an Internet company. Out of any ten random people who accost strangers in the streets of Zhongguancun—“China’s Silicon Valley”—one would be engaged in “network marketing,” two would be trying to hook you on pyramid schemes, three would be trying to talk to you about Jesus, and the rest would all be founders or C-whatever-Os of some startup.
But if you got these individuals to engage in one-on-one conversion bouts—time limited to three minutes—I’m sure the last group would achieve complete victory. They’re not interested in selling you a mere product, but an idea that would change the world. They’re not there to speak for some deity; they’re gods already.
Mr. Wan is just such a god.
What keeps this story from becoming a favorite is its abrupt, sad ending.
~ The essayistic vignettes in Chen Quifan's "A History of Future Illnesses" reminded my of David Eagleman's
Sum: Forty Tales of the Afterlife, only broader in scope and more ingenious. Some of them were scarily plausible too.
~ Regina Kanyu Wang's "A Brief Introduction to Chinese Science Fiction and Fandom" contains some astonishing information--at least astonishing to a member of a nation whose population is two hundred times smaller than the Chinese (as of our last census, there're about seven million people in Bulgaria) and whose history goes back (at most) half as much as that of China (if we discount the fact that for seven centuries, Bulgaria used to be subsumed by external empires--Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire).
To wit:
The first Chinese SF fan group appeared in Shanghai in 1980.
The first Bulgarian SF fan group appeared in Sofia in 1962.
Unfortunately none of [these early SF fandoms] exist today.
The oldest continuously surviving SF club in Bulgaria is Ivan Yefremov SF & Futurology Club in Sofia, which was founded in 1974. (If you're curious about its history, look for the forthcoming
ФантАstika: Almanac of Bulgarian Speculative Fiction.)
China’s first fanzine was Nebula («星云»), edited by Yao Haijun from 1989 to 2007. During these years, forty issues were published. (...) Nebula played an extremely important role in the development of modern Chinese fandom, and even in the history of Chinese science fiction at large. It was the bridge between editors, writers, researchers, and readers. The peak circulation was more than 1,200 copies per issue.
Our oldest surviving fanzine is
Tera Fantastika, established in 1999. Its peak circulation (which was also its first issue
) was 500 copies. Its publication schedule is irregular, yielding a total of 19 issues until last year (2019).
New Realms of Fantasy and Science Fiction («新幻界») [an ezine] published thirty-two issues from 2009 to 2013, which seems like a miracle, since all the issues are of very high quality and could be downloaded online for free.
Our most longstanding ezine is
Shadowdance, established in 2000. When it stopped using the issues format in 2012, it was at number 69. From then on, it has published articles--both short-form and long-form--plus the occasional short story at the rate of ten to twenty per month.
There is a bus theory describing Chinese SF fans. The fans’ love toward science fiction is just like taking a bus. When they are young, they get on the bus and start to read science fiction. When they grow older (and reach their destination), they stop to read it and get off the bus. It is true that the majority of the readers of Science Fiction World are middle school, high school, and university students. In comparison, adult fans read more foreign SF works, either in English or in Chinese translation.
In Bulgaria, it's precisely the opposite. The vast majority of fans who read Bulgarian SF (or are even aware such a beast exists) are adults. Younger readers are overwhelmingly exposed to translated SF.
There are dozens of projects in development, and we can certainly expect to see more Chinese science fiction movies in the coming years.
Ah, movies.
It's interesting, though: China has a relatively scarce SF literature, but its SF cinema is going strong--and getting stronger. Can this have something to do with the predominance of visual thinking over verbal thinking in the East? That's an
old question that has been tickling my mind for more than half a decade now.
). Тъй като нямам навика да пиша рецензии, се извинявам ако не съм много интересен, или ако има спойлери надолу - вероятно ще има. 
И това, приемайки че гугъл не е станал универсално-намиращия алгоритъм, който познаваме. Първо, че всякакви по-религиозни хора ще дигнат рев до бога против тази технология, второ че повечето потребители, и аз в т.ч. си търсят удобството и искат бързо и ефикасно да намират това което им трябва. Трето, но не и по важност, че макар за някои неща, като протези на крайници, или начина по който Хокинг общуваше със света, технологията наистина да е напреднала, е далеч от това да интегрира Мозъка с Мрежата, отделно че много хора биха били против, защото би им се струвало опасно, несигурно, страшно, ненормално и тн.
. А ако и Болеслав Прус пише добре, май ще зачета "Фараон" или "Еманципантки" - което изровя по-скоро. Може туй да ми е вратичката към историческите романи, които от години ги пренебрегвам – още от българската част на филологията. От конспекта имам и "Случаят Джем" на Вера М. за Джем бей и заради името ми е любопитно. Хм, преиздадена е от Жанет, може би е добра книгата.
Категория чисто словоблудство.
сwишАwеш 