Invisible Planets is an anthology of Chinese science
fiction, translated by Ken Liu. I’ve talked rather warmly about Liu’s own works
before, and his translation of The Three Body Problem is particularly well
regarded. Here, then, is a sampling of other modern authors writing science
fiction in China – and, perhaps unsurprisingly, on the whole the collection
assembled is rather good.
The stories here are grouped by author, and there are often
two or three stories with the same author in the volume. It doesn’t suffer from
that per se – each tale has a scent of the unfamiliar about it, a frisson of
the unusual. The variety of settings is impressive – from a tired,
disintegrating ghost town of robots, given the souls of the departed, through a
city which folds in on itself, leaving two thirds of the population in
artificial sleep for periods of time. There’s a near future where the
overeducated and under-utilised serve in brigades fighting off swarms of seemingly
intelligent rats – and another that deals with the arrival of ancestral
creators to our world in their dotage. Each, constrained by the length of their
tales, is seen in microcosm – created in a few brush strokes here, or a line of
dialogue there – but I confess, I found each to be delightful, terrifying, or
on occasion, both. There were stylistic
differences of course – looking at the graceful form, the fairy tale smoke of
Night Journey of the Dragon Horse, and comparing it with the fraught, spiked
freneticism of Folding Beijing – both use their prose to layer further meaning
onto their worlds, to give an impression of the space that the protagonists
occupy. In the end, the worlds on display here have a sense of place, a sense
of alien otherness – but also a sense of familiarity, of humanity, which ties
them back to the reader.
The characters carry
a similar breadth. There’s the tired, driven, wondrous Dragon Horse – a creature
setting out on a journey, looking for understanding and finding sacrifice and
friendship, of sorts, in a world no longer quite what it recalls. There’s Rosamund,
daughter of the last queen, living inside a giant automaton, the price of
immortality – a woman determined to piece together the state of the universe.
There’s tales of love here – of a man driven to make unfortunate choices in an
effort to protect the woman whom he loves, unaware of him as she is – and of
loss, both social and personal. The protagonist of Folding Beijing lives at the
edge of a world with fewer places in it for him, and gives us the perspective
to see how the system within which he operates is not only unfair, but
deliberately so. There’s a parable there, a social commentary – but there’s
also a man trying to make a living, so that he can send his adopted daughter to
kindergarten. The fusion of the fantastical and the human is as intrinsic to
the characters as to the setting, broadly speaking – even when the human is,
perhaps, the transhuman instead.
There’s different types of story on display here – the muted
Year of the Rat is perhaps the one with the most straightforward action, odd as
battling hordes of rats may seem. But there’s a contemplative strand running
through all these works, something which made me stop and thing, as a reader,
consider what symbols, what meanings the text wanted to convey. It was not,
perhaps, an effortless read, but each story seemed to have something special
about it, something that kept me turning the pages. This is a collection which
is asking questions about people, about our place in the universe, and is
trying to shape a response. The differing cultural context of the works may
have suggested different answers, but the questions are, perhaps, universal –
and in any event, the narratives they’ve constructed in looking around for
answers were spot on.
At the end of the text are a series of essays on the nature
of science fiction in China, and those provided an interesting background to
the works themselves. They’re perhaps a little dry to pick through in one
sitting, but there’s a lot of value there, and an energy, enthusiasm and
determination coming off the page which provided a sense of hope.
In the end, this is a book filled with strange tales – and tales
of the strange. It’s looking at old questions with new eyes, and posing some
new and interesting questions I might not have considered on my own. It does so
with narratives which intrigue and excite, and offers a valuable new
perspective. It’s worth looking at, and will probably reward multiple readings.
No comments:
Post a Comment