Invisible Planets by Ken Liu (ed.)

Published by Tor Books on November 1, 2016

Invisible Planets is a collection of science fiction stories and essays by writers in China, translated into English by Ken Liu. The stories are, on the whole, quite imaginative. As a reader might expect, they reflect Chinese culture and concerns and are very different from American science fiction. The term “science fiction” is used broadly — some of the stories might be more accurately classified as fantasy — but I suspect most of the stories will appeal to science fiction fans.

The first three stories are by Chen Quifan:

“The Year of the Rat” - College students join a government program that is akin to military service. They fight genetically engineered Neorats in exchange for food, shelter, and a guaranteed job after discharge. The story touches on problems of unemployment, the government’s love of slogans, masses of people serving the narrow interests of the elite, the revision of history, and China’s role in providing cheap labor so that prosperous citizens of other countries can enjoy affordable consumer goods (or rat pets). The story also asks whether rats might be smarter than humans. This is an excellent story although not one of my favorites in the collection.

“The Fish of Lijiang” - Experimental programs expand the sense of time in the aging while compressing the sense of time in workers, encouraging them to do 24 hours of work in an 8 hour shift. In a related storyline, a worker who goes on a rehabilitation vacation learns to understand his dream, but it is less clear that he understands his life. I like some of the concepts in this story, but I was disappointed that they weren’t developed in more detail.

“The Flower of Shazui” - Using technical wizardry, a friend tries to make things better for people he cares about. The results are quite the opposite of his expectations. Perhaps the story is a lesson in reverse karma, or in fatalism.

By Xia Jia:

“A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight” - Ning, a young boy, is told that he’s the only living person on Ghost Street. As Ning ages, we learn why that is true, and we learn the truth about Ning. This is an odd but interesting twist on a traditional western ghost story, although (I assume intentionally) it leaves quite a lot unexplained.

“Tongtong’s Summer” - A robotic solution to eldercare leads to a touching ending. The technology described in the story will probably be available in the near future, and if it were actually used as the author describes, it would be revolutionary. I don’t expect that to happen (no profit in it), but it’s a nice thought.

“Night Journey of the Dragon-Horse” - An immense mechanical dragon-horse comes alive one night and goes for a stroll. The dragon-horse is philosophical, wondering whether its walk is real or only a dream. Joined on its journey by a bat that recites poetry, the dragon-horse discovers that humans have all departed. The dragon-horse and bat then tell each other science fiction stories. The story — odd but enjoyable and thought-provoking — might be seen as a celebration of poetry and mythology.

By Ma Boyong:

“The City of Silence” - This dystopian story of repression is the most overtly political entry in the volume. The struggle between those who object to the potential harm caused by web anonymity and those who value privacy animates the story. Of course, outlawing anonymity makes it possible for the government to punish its critics, which is always the ultimate goal of governments that object to privacy. In the story, web users are required to select government-approved words from the List of Healthy Words in emails and web postings. The same restrictions apply to speech, which the government monitors, while requiring citizens to speak in a halting cadence so that the monitoring machines will be sure to understand them. This is a cautionary vision of extreme censorship, illustrating the point that technology enables a free people to enjoy their freedom even as it enables a totalitarian government to suppress freedom. It’s one of my favorites in the volume.

By Hao Jingfang:

“Invisible Planets” - The narrator provides fanciful descriptions of the wonderful planets she has visited. My favorite of those imagines a planet on which different species rule during different seasons (one being suited to lush forests, the other to barren winter plains), each hibernating when the other is dominated, neither aware of the other. I’m sure there’s a metaphorical moral to the concept of similar people living in separate worlds on the same planet. In fact, all of the stories might be viewed as metaphors for our own planet.

“Folding Beijing” - Lao Dao needs money for his daughter’s kindergarten, so he agrees to smuggle a message from Third Space into First Space. He does that by staying awake (illegally) while the city transforms. People in Second and Third Space are required to sleep while First Space occupies the city and vice versa. The Spaces are divided by social class, a theme that surfaces in different ways throughout the story. The story struck me as the sort of thing that China Mieville might write — allegorical science fiction that serves as a commentary on the human condition. It’s one of my favorites in the volume.

By Tang Fei:

“Call Girl” - A young girl provides services to old men, but the services involve summoning stories in which the men live. This is an intriguing story that I didn’t fully grasp, but I nevertheless appreciated its imagery.

By Cheng Jimbo:

“Grave of the Fireflies” - Something about birds, planets, dying stars, magicians, and the Weightless City. Again, lots of interesting images, but I didn’t understand how they were meant to assemble into a coherent story.

By Liu Cixin:

“The Circle” - This story is an adaptation of a chapter from the novel The Three-Body Problem. In 227 B.C., a Chinese mathematician computes pi by using 3 million soldiers to perform binary calculations, turning them into a rudimentary and very large computer. The king commands that the calculation be performed, convinced that the secret of eternal life lies in pi to the 100,000th digit. The king turns out to be a fool, but he isn’t the only one. Great story, one of my favorites in the volume.

“Taking Care of God” - A family in this story lives with God, who coughs all the time and forgets to turn off the gas stove after he warms his milk. He is one of 2 million gods who are supported (not always happily) by 5 billion people. They came to Earth in spaceships, all claiming to be God and asking for a bit of food. I think the story is meant to illustrate the difference between traditional Chinese veneration of the elderly and modern China’s celebration of the economically productive. It also advances some interesting ideas about the intersection of evolution and stagnation. I particularly like the story’s message, which combines themes from 1950s American science fiction with a modern sensibility. This is my favorite story in the collection.

The book includes three essays on Chinese science fiction for the academically inclined.

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Happy New Year 2017

From Tzer Island

Everything Belongs to the Future by Laurie Penny

Published by Tor.com (an imprint of Tor Books) on October 18, 2016

Everything Belongs to the Future is billed as a novella, although it might be more aptly classified as a long short story. It advances some interesting ideas but does so in a bare-bones fashion. The story would have benefited from additional meat.

Every day a user takes the fix is a day the user does not age. Most people cannot afford to be forever young, although Oxford doesn’t need to replace its dons as often as it did in the past.

Daisy Craver, who helped write the anti-aging patent, is 98 but she looks like a little girl. Daisy has a plan to make a version of the fix available as a generic, a plan that she furthers with a commune of subversive artists. Unbeknownst to Daisy or the group, one of the subversives is an undercover employee of the company that makes the fix.

Eventually the story becomes one of love and betrayal. It is the kind of story that asks a reader to parse the difference between political action and terror, to ask whether means are justified by ends. Even the story’s characters have trouble answering that one.

The themes are more interesting than the underdeveloped characters, none of whom gave me a reason to care about them or their cause. Laurie Penny calls into question the government’s use of informants as well as the cozy relationship between the government and big business, but those issues are nothing new, and the story doesn’t have the kind of dramatic power that is likely to open a reader’s eyes to injustice. There are broader implications to both issues that the story glosses over. Still, the questions raised in the story are important, even if the story is bit superficial.

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Desolation Flats by Andrew Hunt

Published by St. Martin's Press/Minotaur Books on November 15, 2016

Desolation Flats takes place in the late 1930s. The Ovesons are Mormons. Art Oveson is a police detective in the sleepy Salt Lake City Police Department. Art’s wife Clara suffers from depression that was triggered, or at least worsened, when the church encouraged her to quit her job so she could raise her three children. She is at war with her daughter, Sarah Jane, who has rebelled against the church. Art would like to take Clara on a cruise to snap her out of her doldrums but he can’t afford it. All of that background comes early in the novel but Clara and Sarah Jane never become significant characters. Perhaps they play a larger role in the first two novels of the series, neither of which I’ve read.

In any event, family drama quickly fades into the background as the crime drama takes center stage. An additional bit of family drama emerges, however, as Art’s brother, an ambitious FBI agent, confronts Art in an accurate illustration of the politics of crime.

The story opens with Art saving the life of Clive Underhill, a wealthy and famous Englishman who lost control of his racecar on the salt flats. Clive’s racing team is competing with a German team to develop the world’s fastest car. Back in England, Clive received death threats after he disassociated himself from the fascist cause.

Art’s beat is missing persons, but when Clive goes missing, Art also becomes involved in a related murder investigation. The primary suspect is Art’s best friend, a former police detective who is now a private detective. Investigating for the FBI is Art’s brother.

All of that makes for an interesting and unusual setting, something I always like to see given the relative sameness of so many crime stories. Being a good Mormon, Art loves his ice cream but doesn’t drink liquor. He also resists a sexual advance from (of all people) Leni Riefenstahl. Art’s moral strength make him kind of a dull character, but the book itself isn’t dull, so that can be forgiven.

Also interesting is the intersection of pro-fascists (some from Germany, some from Utah) with homebred organizations that have infiltrated the Salt Lake City Police, preaching hatred of blacks, Mexicans, Jews, and pretty much everyone else who might be a threat to racial purity or narrow-minded thought. In that regard, Desolation Flats is a timely reminder of the past (just when you think things have changed, it seems they haven’t changed all that much).

The mystery that ties together Clive’s disappearance and various deaths kept me guessing about which of the potential suspects were actually involved and in what capacity. Near the end of the story, however, Art overhears a conversation in which two people tell each other things they already know. That helps Art and the reader piece together a solution to the mystery, but the conversation is so forced that it just isn’t credible. That’s my strongest gripe about a novel that in most other respects is well crafted, but it’s a significant gripe. I liked the story and the setting enough to recommend the novel despite an ending that I can only rate as disappointing.

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This Is the Ritual by Rob Doyle

Published in the UK in 2016; published by Bloomsbury USA on January 24, 2017

This Is the Ritual is a collection of stories that might be classified as experimental. As is the tendency in experimental fiction, some of the experiments work and others don’t. Doyle also tosses a bit of nonfiction into the collection. This is what you get:

“John-Paul Finnegan, Paltry Realist” is a rant by John-Paul Finnegan during a ferry ride, who explains to Rob Doyle that the Irish are afraid of literature and too stupid to read it. He defends Paltry Realism, a literary school of his own invention, in which writers eschew style or quality and produce as many never-to-be-published words as they can fit on a page each day. Paltry Realism contrasts with Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness style by presenting “a machinegun of consciousness, or a self-bludgeoning of consciousness, … a kind of insane vomiting of language.” The story (it’s really more of an existential rant than a story) is quite funny, despite the serious themes it raises, although readers who dislike foul language will want to stay far away from it. The story points to, and continues, the tradition of Irish writers having a love/hate relationship with Ireland.

In “No-Man’s Land,” a young man with mental health issues chats with an unemployed alcoholic while taking a walk through a largely abandoned industrial estate on the outskirts of Dublin. Listening to the older man, the younger man gets a glimpse of his future self.

“Exiled in the Infinite” is an essay about Killian Turner, an Irish avant garde writer who, like Beckett and Joyce, wished to be considered European rather than Irish (a comment upon Beckett and Joyce that Rob Doyle also makes in “John-Paul Finnegan, Paltry Realist”). The essay didn’t convince me to read Turner, although he seems to have lived an interesting life.

“Paris Story” describes a writer who is jealous of the success of another writer and gives her story collection a spiteful pseudonymous review, about which he feels guilty after they marry. Apart from the bare bones in that one-sentence synopsis, the story didn’t make a lick of sense to me.

“Outposts” is a collection of half-formed thoughts, existential observations made in various locations around the world. Whether the thoughts are produced by healthy minds isn’t at all clear. In his Acknowledgements, Doyle explains that the story consists of phrases snatched from a variety of sources. Some of the story seems self-referential — the struggling artist tiring of the struggle to make art, relationships torn apart by honesty or dishonesty — and a lot of it seems to be about the fear of life, but I can’t say that this collection of well-crafted half sentences resonated with me.

“Barcelona” is the city to which Alicia moved when she escaped from a bad relationship. With just a few observations of a few months in her new life, the story develops Alicia in surprising depth.

The aging youngsters in “Mexico Drift” explore nihilism and violent sex, having adopted attitudes of “world-hating defeatism.” There is barely enough content in this story to qualify it as a character sketch of dreary characters.

The narrator of “Anus — Black Sun” discovers the meditative benefits of watching a porn clip that shows nothing but an immobile anus. I’m just not sure what to make of that.

The narrator of “On Nietzsche” wants to write a book about Nietzsche but is so intimidated by the scope of the project, and so obsessed with the fear that he will die before he completes it, that he does nothing. This leads him to develop a philosophy of his own, centered around boredom (after he abandons a line of philosophical inquiry centered around a stinking toilet). Doyle’s observation that the best literature is fundamentally boring might apply to this story. It’s dull, but it is one of the better stories in the collection.

“Three Writers” purports to be a collection of essays exploring the work of three writers, two of whom never published. Since I can find no evidence that the writers actually existed, I assume this is a work of fiction, perhaps a place for Doyle to set down ideas for books that he didn’t bother to write himself.

The narrator of “The Turk” feels sexually inadequate (a common theme in these stories) in light of his competition with a Turk for a woman’s affection. I can’t say I found much value in this one.

“Final Email from P. Cranley” purports to be the reproduction of an actual email Doyle received, written in the abbreviated form that is common to text messages. The sender is in San Francisco and clearly struggling with mental health issues, including religious delusions that are exacerbated by his consumption of hallucinogenic mushrooms. It is what it is, and what it is isn’t terribly interesting.

“Jean Pierre-Passolet, a Reminiscence” purports to be a discussion of a writer the narrator interviewed. I think Doyle used this story to show off his own knowledge of literature and philosophy which, while impressive, does not make for compelling fiction.

There are moments of truth and clarity in these stories, but there are also moments of drudgery and insignificance. Since the former outweigh the latter, and because I like writers who take chances, I’m recommending this collection, but only for a few of the stories.

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