Invisible Planets
An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese SF in Translation
edited by Ken Liu
translated by Ken Liu
Tor
2016
Invisible Planets is a collection of scifi short stories originally written in Chinese. The stories were selected and translated by Ken Liu, who's a science fiction writer in his own right, and a prolific translator of Chinese fiction. The authors included in this anthology have all won awards, and most of the stories are award-winners or nominees as well. As a result, the book functions as a kind of "best of" collection of recent Chinese science fiction.
According to Liu in his introduction, one of his other goals for the book is to show off the versatility of Chinese scifi by including the widest possible range of topics and writing styles. Because of this, it's difficult to identify any recurring themes. We get military scifi, a couple of cyberpunk stories, robots inheriting the planet after the humans are gone, a couple of dystopias, an homage to Italo Calvino, and from Liu Cixin, a pair of stories that have the same pro space exploration message and feeling as the so-called "golden age of American scifi." He'd be right at home on the pages of Amazing Stories, I think.
The one theme I think I notice is social commentary, which is common in the science fiction of any country. In his introduction, Liu discourages us from interpreting any of the stories as being 'about' Chinese social problems. On the one hand, this feels disingenuous, like including a story about a mass shooting in an anthology of American fiction and then telling the readers not to think of it as a commentary on gun violence in America.
On the other hand, I think part of what Liu means is that we shouldn't read these stories as being only about China. We get stories about young people having trouble finding employment, pollution, overcrowding in cities, economic inequality, the difficulty of caring for elderly people who can't support themselves. These are problems of capitalism, we have the same problems everywhere that people don't have the right to life's necessities, but only the right to buy those necessities if they can afford them. The one story that reminds me of the Chinese government's efforts to control the internet is also an intentional homage to 1984, and reading it makes me think about the way America and Britain starting to use age verification as an excuse to restrict online anonymity, or the way some websites censor certain words, so that people have to write 'unalive', because if they wrote 'dead' or 'killed' then no one else would be able to see their post.
The censorship story, "The City of Silence" by Ma Boyong is one of the best in the collection. It's one I think I heard of when it was first published in English, but never read until now. It's set in a city where everyone has a government issued internet username, there are only a handful of accessible websites, and people can only write using words from an approved list. Everyone also have to wear a listening device that beeps whenever they say an unapproved word, and that automatically calls the police if they say too many. So mostly people say nothing at all. Our protagonist is a man who notices a word puzzle hidden in plain sight online. When he solves it, it leads him to a small in-person gathering where the listening devices don't work, so people can talk about whatever they want (and enjoy casual sex). Joining the club revitalizes his love of language, and he starts to notice other ways that people try to use approved words to express forbidden thoughts.
"Folding Beijing" by Hao Jingfang (who also wrote the title story) is about a future where the capital city folds and rearranges itself like a Transformer robot, turning it into three different cities that share the same footprint. One is spacious and luxurious for the rich, another is kind of like a modern city, and the third is an overcrowded dystopia for the poor. Everyone uses a hibernation device to sleep through the other two cities' time on the surface. We follow a poor man who's trying to make some money by crossing between the different Beijings as a courier. "Invisible Planets" is written in the style of Invisible Cities, and it reminds me of Liu's own story, "The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species".
Two of Xia Jia's stories, "A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight" and "Night Journey of the Horse-Dragon" depict abandoned robots attaining consciousness and sentience after all the humans have disappeared from the Earth. They feel like ghost stories, or fairy tales. Cheng Jingbo's "Grave of the Fireflies" reminds me of Staislaw Lem's robot fables, except sadder and perhaps a bit more lyrical. There's a princess, a magician, a castle in the shape of a giant robot knight, and also last surviving humans migrating to an orbital city around the last star as the rest of the galaxy goes dark.
2016
Invisible Planets is a collection of scifi short stories originally written in Chinese. The stories were selected and translated by Ken Liu, who's a science fiction writer in his own right, and a prolific translator of Chinese fiction. The authors included in this anthology have all won awards, and most of the stories are award-winners or nominees as well. As a result, the book functions as a kind of "best of" collection of recent Chinese science fiction.
According to Liu in his introduction, one of his other goals for the book is to show off the versatility of Chinese scifi by including the widest possible range of topics and writing styles. Because of this, it's difficult to identify any recurring themes. We get military scifi, a couple of cyberpunk stories, robots inheriting the planet after the humans are gone, a couple of dystopias, an homage to Italo Calvino, and from Liu Cixin, a pair of stories that have the same pro space exploration message and feeling as the so-called "golden age of American scifi." He'd be right at home on the pages of Amazing Stories, I think.
The one theme I think I notice is social commentary, which is common in the science fiction of any country. In his introduction, Liu discourages us from interpreting any of the stories as being 'about' Chinese social problems. On the one hand, this feels disingenuous, like including a story about a mass shooting in an anthology of American fiction and then telling the readers not to think of it as a commentary on gun violence in America.
On the other hand, I think part of what Liu means is that we shouldn't read these stories as being only about China. We get stories about young people having trouble finding employment, pollution, overcrowding in cities, economic inequality, the difficulty of caring for elderly people who can't support themselves. These are problems of capitalism, we have the same problems everywhere that people don't have the right to life's necessities, but only the right to buy those necessities if they can afford them. The one story that reminds me of the Chinese government's efforts to control the internet is also an intentional homage to 1984, and reading it makes me think about the way America and Britain starting to use age verification as an excuse to restrict online anonymity, or the way some websites censor certain words, so that people have to write 'unalive', because if they wrote 'dead' or 'killed' then no one else would be able to see their post.
The censorship story, "The City of Silence" by Ma Boyong is one of the best in the collection. It's one I think I heard of when it was first published in English, but never read until now. It's set in a city where everyone has a government issued internet username, there are only a handful of accessible websites, and people can only write using words from an approved list. Everyone also have to wear a listening device that beeps whenever they say an unapproved word, and that automatically calls the police if they say too many. So mostly people say nothing at all. Our protagonist is a man who notices a word puzzle hidden in plain sight online. When he solves it, it leads him to a small in-person gathering where the listening devices don't work, so people can talk about whatever they want (and enjoy casual sex). Joining the club revitalizes his love of language, and he starts to notice other ways that people try to use approved words to express forbidden thoughts.
"Folding Beijing" by Hao Jingfang (who also wrote the title story) is about a future where the capital city folds and rearranges itself like a Transformer robot, turning it into three different cities that share the same footprint. One is spacious and luxurious for the rich, another is kind of like a modern city, and the third is an overcrowded dystopia for the poor. Everyone uses a hibernation device to sleep through the other two cities' time on the surface. We follow a poor man who's trying to make some money by crossing between the different Beijings as a courier. "Invisible Planets" is written in the style of Invisible Cities, and it reminds me of Liu's own story, "The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species".
Two of Xia Jia's stories, "A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight" and "Night Journey of the Horse-Dragon" depict abandoned robots attaining consciousness and sentience after all the humans have disappeared from the Earth. They feel like ghost stories, or fairy tales. Cheng Jingbo's "Grave of the Fireflies" reminds me of Staislaw Lem's robot fables, except sadder and perhaps a bit more lyrical. There's a princess, a magician, a castle in the shape of a giant robot knight, and also last surviving humans migrating to an orbital city around the last star as the rest of the galaxy goes dark.
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