Ken Liu is an award-winning (Nebula, Hugo, World Fantasy) American writer of Science Fiction; with a sideline of translating Chinese (mostly, but not exclusively SF) into English, besides having a law degree and working as a programmer! For Invisible Planets - An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction he is not just the translator for all the stories, but also listed as Editor.
The book starts with an Introduction by Ken, titled China Dreams. It introduces the reader to some background on Chinese SF, explains his selection for this book, and some pitfalls to avoid for the reader. This mainly can be summarised as 'Chinese SF is huge and varied, don't project your own preoccupation of China onto the stories'. Fair point, I felt.
After that we get started on the 13 short stories contained in the book. These are ordered by author, each of which gets a short introduction/bio before their stories. All of those, save one (Night Journey of the Dragon Horse, by Zia Jia) have been previously published in English. This is followed by three Essays on Chinese SF.
Below is a run-through of the individual stories, with a brief capsule review for each. This contains, by its nature, spoilers; if this bothers you then stop here with my recommendation that this, as is usual for such a colleciton, very varied in scope and approach, but also fascinating and very much worth your time and money!
They say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, and I guess they're right, even if covers frequently are following an optical/design code indicating what's inside. Because we Do choose books by their covers; or at least I do. So, this is one I picked up for its cover, because it put me in the mental frame of things I'd read in the past, and loved. And you know what? I greatly enjoyed that one, too, after a few hard-to love initial pages.
Ben Berman Ghan is a Canadian author, editor, and MA student; with now 2 novels (and next year a non-fiction book) plus loads of short fiction and non-fiction articles to his name. His first novel, Wychman Road, is out of print, and next year's release is called Bruce Meyer: Essays on his Work. What We See in the Smoke starts in realism with a social undertone, and heads from there into the future – all parts set in Toronto, even if you wouldn't recognise it at times if it didn't declare itself to be so!
But to start at the beginning – this is not a straight up story, but what I normally would term a patchwork novel, ie a collection of short stories which, whilst independent in actual topic and story arc, tell a larger story in combination. He himself terms the book a fix-up novel, as he re-wrote the individual pieces, previously unconnected stories, to refer to each other and tie them together into some kind of single narrative (I don't think they would have created a larger picture otherwise). But terminology aside, this is a collection of short stories, in 3 larger parts of 5 or 6 chapters/stories each: These Memories of Us (2016-2026), These Violent Machines (2040-2280), and An Uncertain and Distant World (2280-3036). But if this sounds all very Accelerando to you then I have to tell you that the book at hand is a much looser collection of impressions.
Earlier this year the latest installment of the Pan-African science fiction anthology AfroSFv3, edited by Ivor W Hartmann, was released.
To whet the appetite we are given free access to the short story Njuzu by Zimbabwean author TL Huchu from it; interweaving traditionally SF vocabulary and setting about an accident on a mining colony on Ceres with Shona mythology to dazzling effect. Telling from this freebie in the Johannesburg Review of Books I reckon that we are in for a treat with the collection!
AfroSFv3 Author Spotlight: T.L. Huchu’s work has appeared in Interzone, The Apex Book of World SF 5, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, The Year's Best Crime and Mystery Stories 2016, AfroSFv1, and elsewhere. He enjoys working across genres, from crime to sci-fi to literary fiction. Currently, he is working on new fantasy novel. Find him @TendaiHuchu
What, I ask you, would have been if the Tsar Nicholas would not only have had his Cossacks to harrow the provinces, and especially the Jews, but also Dragons? And if Lenin didn’t only have his Red Army to send out and spread terror, but if the Red Terror would have included Dragons, too?
Well, wonder no longer, Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple provide us with The Last Tsar’s Dragons, a revised version of their revised version of the history of the Russian Revolution, and of the days and events leading up to it, which includes Dragons. Because... - well because why not? It makes about as much sense as everything else that went on.
And so we join the last Tsar (not that he knows that he is!) sending out his black dragons to harrow the Jews – to absolutely no point, the Jews are safe, having seeded their shtetls with drachometrs, early warning devices. And so they sit in their underground burrows and let the dragons have a go at other targets, to the chagrin of the affected Russians and thus the Tsar. But one of these Jews, sitting out a dragon attack, is Bronstein, latterly known by his revolutionary name of Trotsky, who has at some point tracked down another brood of dragon eggs in faraway lands, and is now hatching and imprinting them, to put them at the service of the revolution, under the command of his comrade Lenin.
Nominally the story is being told by a nameless (and essentially faceless, by definition) court functionary, telling it to his guard. It is also told with a lot of hindsight, as he describes himself as “a man who has turned against the revolution that employed him for nearly thirty years” - of course he was, as such functionaries do, employed by the Tsar at the time of the story. And freshly married, to the delightful and much younger Ninotchka, which adds some personal frisson to the story.
Splitting his time between the UK and Crete, and being back in the groove of writing regularly after a bit of a gap triggered by personal issues, Neal Asher is best known for his larger-than-life Space Opera series set in his 'Polity' universe where humanity have spread to the stars, only to be usurped by their own AIs. Which, surprisingly, are benign in their outlook concerning humanity and human-ness (as well as towards most other kinds of races and beings, to), at least the ones in charge. The body of work here is large – Neal has written 19 novels (set in a number of only loosely inter-connected series) and 2 collections of short stories set in the Polity, plus he's been writing stories outside that setting, too. And, as a general rule, what he writes is interesting and entertaining, and so far free from displaying his (for me) less palatable political views, despite some of the settings being a rather obvious candidates for this.
The Soldier, as the book at hand, is the first in a new series (planned as a trilogy) titled Raise of the Jain. It is worth noting that Jain has nothing to do with the religion, but is the name of an ancient, extinct spacefaring race which has left behind rather dangerous remains and artefact. And I don't think I give away too much if I mention that the 'extinct' part is questionable, given the series title... The 2nd book in the series, called The Warship, is due out in May or June (depending on source) 2019, whilst the third is tentatively called The Human (interesting in the light of the first one) and has no official schedule yet.
The story told in the Soldier is essentially a follow-up on the events and some of the characters from Infinity Engine. You don't need to have read this book/series (Transformation) or the rest of his work, but having done so obviously helps with characters, settings, and preceding events. For those who do not have this background, and have chosen not to acquire it first (your loss!) he provides a Cast of Characters and a Glossary explaining terms and concepts before kicking off – it will get you going without feeling too lost, but you will not get the same embedding in the larger history of this universe, obviously. Still, this is clearly set up as a jumping-on point for those who have not been reading along; and it should work as such I would think.
Future Tense Fiction is a series of short stories from Future Tense and the ASU (Arizona State University)'s Center for Science and the Imagination.
It is published monthly on Slate - the theme for April-June 2019 was Space Settlement. The series focuses on how technology and science will change our lives.
And I would suggest you have a look at the May installment, the short story 'No Moon and Flat Calm' by Elizabeth Bear; mixing space exploration with the lessons learned from the Titanic.
