Books: Invisible Planets Curated By Ken Liu

(Drivebycuriosity) - Coronacrisis or not, China`s star is rising. There are about 1.3 billion people who are gaining more global influence, not alone because of their sheer number. Such a huge country has a legion of talented people of course. No wonder that China`s contemporary literature is getting more and more interesting and important. The anthology "Invisible Planets",  curated by Ken Liu, gives an glance into China`s contemporary fiction (amazon). The anthology is a mixture of science fiction, fantasy & speculative literature. Unfortunately the curator has a bias for fairy tales and gives the speculative parts too much room for my taste.

There are just 2 real sci-fi stories, both are by Liu Cixin, the Chinese superstar who wrote the "Remembrance Of Earth`s Past" trilogy, also known as "The Three Body Problem" (my review ).  His story "Taking care of God" relates to the "Remembrance" universe and touches issues like religion, history, evolution and inter-generational  responsibility.  Cixin`s story "The Circle" is a fable about military strategy and the basic of computers. Both stories are strong enough to justify to read this book.

The rest of the stories are speculative fiction and fairy tales.  I enjoyed Tang Fei´s (image above) story "Call Girl". We follow Xiaoyi, who delivers services to wealthy men. It is unclear what she actually does, but it is not what the title lets expect. I enjoyed Fei`s poetic style and sentences like "there`s no sound around her. Sunlight slices across her shoulders like a knife blade". Curator Liu did a fine job as translator.

Chen Qiufan delivers 3 interesting stories. I indulged into the unique aesthetic of "The Fish of Lijang" & "The Flower of Shazui". Chen`s "The year of the Rat" is a somewhat surreal tale about soldiers who are fighting genetic modified rats, who seem to become intelligent.

The collection includes Hao Jingfang`s speculative fiction novella: "Folding Beijing", which won the Hugo Award in 2016. According to Wikipedia it took her around one month to plan, and 3 days to write (wikipedia ). "Folding" is a piece of absurd dystopian literature. Her Beijing has a population of 80 million people, who are separated in 3 classes. They are all living in the same area but in  3 different time zones. When one time zone ends and another starts, the whole citiscape, streets, places, parks, skyscrapers and other buildings, gets folded, packed away (! ) and replaced by a new citiscape. The basic idea, which reminds me of pop-up-children books, Brothers Grimm`s fairy tales & Escher`s paintings, is fascinating. Unfortunately Jingfang entangled her concept with a dull story line and crude economics (you can find a synopsis here  Beijing). The book includes also her essay "Invisible Planets" which touches topics like evolution, politics, sociology and more.

I could do without the rest of the fairy tales. There are three paranormal stories by Xia Jia:  "A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight"; "Tontong`s Summer" & "Night Journey of the Dragon-Horse". They are all too conservative for my taste.
And I disliked Ma Boyong`s "The City of Silence", a tedious mixture of Kafka & the novel 1984. Hardly digestible.

The book ends with three essays about contemporary Chinese science fiction written by 3 authors (Liu Cixin, Chen Qiufan & Xia Jia ). Liu Cixin describes science fiction "as a literature of possibilities. The universe we live in is also one of countless possibilities". He reports "as modernization accelerated its pace, the new generation of readers no longer confined their to the narrow present as their parents did, but were interested into the future and the wide open cosmos. The China of the present is a bit like America during science fiction`s Golden Age, when science and technology filled the future with wonder, presenting both great crises and grand opportunities".

"Invisible Planets" is entertaining & thought provoking but the book leaves the appetite of a science fiction aficionado unsatisfied.