by Ken Liu
BROKEN STARS
Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation
Translated and edited by
Ken Liu
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About this Book
About the Author
Table of Contents
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About Broken Stars
Here are sixteen short stories from China’s ground-breaking SF writers, edited and translated by award-winning author Ken Liu.
In Hugo award-winner Liu Cixin’s ‘Moonlight’, a man is contacted by three future versions of himself, each trying to save their world from destruction. Hao Jingfang’s ‘The New Year Train’ sees 1,500 passengers go missing on a train that vanishes into space. In the title story by Tang Fei, a young girl is shown how the stars can reveal the future.
In addition, three essays explore the history and rise of Chinese SF publishing, contemporary Chinese fandom, and how the growing interest in Chinese SF has impacted writers who had long laboured in obscurity.
By turns dazzling, melancholy and thought-provoking, Broken Stars celebrates the vibrancy and diversity of SF voices emerging from China.
CONTENTS
Welcome Page
About Broken Stars
Dedication
Introduction
XIA JIA
Goodnight, Melancholy
LIU CIXIN
Moonlight
TANG FEI
Broken Stars
HAN SONG
Submarines
Salinger and the Koreans
CHENG JINGBO
Under a Dangling Sky
BAOSHU
What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear
HAO JINGFANG
The New Year Train
FEI DAO
The Robot Who Liked to Tell Tall Tales
ZHANG RAN
The Snow of Jinyang
ANNA WU
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: Laba Porridge
MA BOYONG
The First Emperor’s Games
GU SHI
Reflection
REGINA KANYU WANG
The Brain Box
CHEN QIUFAN
Coming of the Light
A History of Future Illnesses
ESSAYS
A Brief Introduction to Chinese Science Fiction and Fandom by Regina Kanyu Wang
A New Continent for China Scholars: Chinese Science Fiction Studies by Mingwei Song
Science Fiction: Embarrassing No More by Fei Dao
About Ken Liu
The Dandelion Dynasty Series
Also by Ken Liu
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
Copyright Acknowledgments
To my authors, who guided me through their worlds
INTRODUCTION
by Ken Liu
Since the publication of Invisible Planets in 2016, many readers have written to me to ask for more Chinese science fiction. Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past series (sometimes known as the “Three-Body” trilogy), praised by President Barack Obama as “wildly imaginative, really interesting,” showed anglophone readers that there is a large body of SF written in Chinese to be discovered, and Invisible Planets only whetted their appetite.
This has been a gratifying result for me and my fellow translators; fans of Chinese SF; the agents, editors, and publishers who help make publishing translated works possible; and above all, the Chinese authors who now have more readers to delight.
Compared with the first anthology, I curated Broken Stars with an eye toward expanding the range of voices included as well as the emotional palette and the narrative styles. Beyond the core genre magazines, I also looked at stories published in literary journals, on the web, and in gaming and fashion magazines. In total, there are sixteen stories in this anthology from fourteen authors—twice as many as were present in Invisible Planets. Seven of the stories have never been published before in translation, and almost every story was first published in Chinese in the 2010s. I included stories here longer than the longest story in Invisible Planets as well as stories shorter than the shortest story there. I picked established writers—the sardonic, biting wit of Han Song is showcased here in two stories—as well as fresh voices—I think more readers should know the works of Gu Shi, Regina Kanyu Wang, and Anna Wu. I also intentionally included a few stories that might be considered less accessible to readers in the West: Zhang Ran’s time-travel tale plays with chuanyue tropes that are uniquely Chinese, and Baoshu’s entry deepens its emotional resonance with the reader the more the reader knows of modern Chinese history.
One regretful consequence of the shift in editorial approach is that I’m no longer able to include multiple stories from each author to illustrate their range. I hope that the inclusion of more authors makes up for this lack.
Despite the broader range of authors and stories, I must continue to caution readers that this project is not intended to be “representative” of Chinese SF, and I make no attempt at curating a “best of” anthology. Given the diversity of stories that can be called “Chinese SF” and the heterogeneous makeup of the community of Chinese SF writers, a project that aims to be comprehensive or representative is doomed to fail, and I am skeptical about most methods for picking the “best” stories.
Instead, the most important criterion I used was simply this: I enjoyed the story and thought it memorable. When wielded honestly, very few stories pass this filter. Whether you’ll like most of the stories in here will thus have a lot to do with how much your taste overlaps with mine. I don’t believe in picking “perfect” stories; in fact, I think stories that do one thing really well are much better than stories that do nothing “wrong.” I claim no authority or objectivity, but I am arrogant enough to be confident in my taste.
*
A few quick notes before we get to the stories.
For readers interested in some context on Chinese SF, I’ve added three essays at the end from Chinese SF scholars (some of them are also authors). These essays focus on how the rising commercial and popular interest in Chinese SF has affected the community of fans and authors.
As is my standard translation practice, the names of Chinese characters in the stories are rendered in customary Chinese order, with surname first. However, there are some complications when it comes to author names. Reflecting the diversity of self-presentations in the online age, Chinese authors have different preferences for the name they’d like to use in publication. Some authors write under their personal names (e.g., Chen Qiufan) or pen names that are based on their personal names, and so I treat them as standard Chinese personal names. Some authors, however, prefer using an English name for their foreign publications and/or rendering their Chinese name in Western order (e.g., Anna Wu and Regina Kanyu Wang), and in such cases I follow the author’s preference. Still other authors write under pen names that cannot be treated as standard Chinese names because they’re allusions or wordplay (e.g., Baoshu, Fei Dao, and Xia Jia), in which case I make a note in the author intro that the name should be treated as a single, indivisible unit (think of these as being somewhat analogous to Internet user IDs).
Unless otherwise indicated, the stories and essays in this volume are all translated by me. (Footnotes will indicate when I collaborated with another translator or when the contribution was originally written in English.) All footnotes should be assumed to have been added by me (or my cotranslator) unless prefaced with “Author’s note” or similar language.
I’m grateful to Tor Books in the US and Head of Zeus in the UK for publishing Broken Stars. In particular, at Tor, I wish to thank Lindsey Hall for editorial suggestions, Deanna Hoak as copy editor, Jamie Stafford-Hill for cover design, an
d Patty Garcia in publicity. At Head of Zeus, I wish to thank Nicolas Cheetham and Sophie Robinson as publishers, Clémence Jacquinet in production, Jessie Price in art, the sales team led by Dan Groenewald, and Blake Brooks in publicity. Without their contributions, this book would not exist or reach you, the reader.
Finally, you can find the original publication information (with author names and story titles in hanzi) as well as copyright notices at the beginning of the anthology.
XIA JIA
As an undergraduate, Xia Jia (a pen name that should be treated as an indivisible unit) majored in Atmospheric Sciences at Peking University. She then entered the Film Studies Program at the Communication University of China, where she completed her master’s thesis: “A Study on Female Figures in Science Fiction Films.” Later, she obtained a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and World Literature at Peking University, with “Fear and Hope in the Age of Globalization: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction and Its Cultural Politics (1991–2012)” as the title of her dissertation. She now teaches at Xi’an Jiaotong University.
She has been publishing fiction since college in a variety of venues, including Science Fiction World and Jiuzhou Fantasy. Several of her stories have won the Yinhe (“Galaxy”) Award and Xingyun (“Nebula”) Award, China’s most prestigious science fiction honors. In English translation, she has been published in Clarkesworld and Upgraded. Her first story written in English, “Let’s Have a Talk,” was published in Nature in 2015.
“Goodnight, Melancholy” won the 2016 Yinhe Award. Like much of Xia Jia’s recent fiction, it belongs to a loosely connected series called “The Chinese Encyclopedia.” These stories take place in the same near-future universe, where ubiquitous AI, VR, AR, and other technologies present age-old questions about how and why we remain human in new forms, and tradition and modernity are not simple binary opposites, but partners in a complicated dance.
More of Xia Jia’s fiction and nonfiction may be found in Invisible Planets.
GOODNIGHT,
MELANCHOLY
LINDY (1)
I remember the first time Lindy walked into my home.
She lifted her tiny feet and set them down gingerly on the smooth, polished wooden floor, like a child venturing onto freshly fallen snow: trembling, hesitating, afraid to dirty the pure white blanket, terrified of sinking into and disappearing beneath the featureless fluff.
I held her hand. Her soft body was stuffed with cotton, and the stitches, my own handiwork, weren’t very neat. I had also made her a scarlet felt cape, like the ones in the fairy tales I had read as a child. Her two ears were of different lengths, and the longer one drooped, as though dejected.
Seeing her, I couldn’t help but remember all the experiences of failure in my life: eggshell puppets that I had ruined during crafts class; drawings that didn’t look like what they were supposed to be; stiff, awkward smiles in photographs; chocolate pudding burnt to charcoal; failed exams; bitter fights and breakups; incoherent classroom reports; papers that were revised hundreds of times but ultimately were unpublishable …
Nocko turned his fuzzy little head to regard us, his high-speed cameras scanning, analyzing Lindy’s form. I could almost hear the computations churning in his body. His algorithms were designed to respond only to speaking subjects.
“Nocko, this is Lindy.” I beckoned him over. “Come say hi.”
Nocko opened his mouth; a yawn-like noise emerged.
“Behave.” I raised my voice like a mother intent on discipline.
Reluctantly, Nocko muttered to himself. I knew that this was a display intended to attract my affection and attention. These complicated, pre-formulated behaviors were modeled on young children, but they were key to the success of language-learning robots. Without such interactive behavior feedback, Nocko would be like a child on the autistic spectrum who cannot communicate meaningfully with others despite mastering a whole grammar and vocabulary.
Nocko extended a furry flipper, gazed at me with his oversized eyes, and then turned to Lindy. The designer had given him the form of a baby white seal for a reason: anybody who saw his chubby cheeks and huge, dark eyes couldn’t help but let down their guard and feel the impulse to give him a hug, pat his head, and tell him, “Awww, so good to meet you!” Had he been made to resemble a human baby, the uncanny valley would have filled viewers with dread at his smooth, synthetic body.
“Hel-lo,” he said, enunciating carefully, the way I had taught him.
“That’s better. Lindy, meet Nocko.”
Lindy observed Nocko carefully. Her eyes were two black buttons, and the cameras were hidden behind them. I hadn’t bothered to sew a mouth for her, which meant that her facial expressions were rather constrained, like a princess who had been cursed to neither smile nor speak. I knew, however, that Lindy could speak, but she was nervous because of the new environment. She was being overwhelmed by too much information and too many choices that had to be balanced, like a complicated board situation in weiqi in which every move led to thousands of cascading future shifts.
My palm sweated as I held Lindy’s hand; I felt just as tense.
“Nocko, would you like Lindy to give you a hug?” I suggested.
Pushing off the floor with his flippers, Nocko hopped a few steps forward. Then he strained to keep his torso off the floor as he spread his foreflippers. The corners of his mouth stretched and lifted into a curious and friendly grin. What a perfect smile. I admired him silently. What a genius design. Artificial intelligence researchers in olden times had ignored these nonlinguistic interactive elements. They had thought that “conversation” involved nothing more than a programmer typing questions into a computer.
Lindy pondered my question. But this was a situation that did not require her to give a verbal answer, which made the computation much easier for her. “Yes” or “no” was binary, like tossing a coin.
She bent down and wrapped two floppy arms around Nocko.
Good, I said to myself silently. I know you crave to be hugged.
ALAN (1)
During the last days of his life, Alan Turing created a machine capable of conversing with people. He named it “Christopher.”
Operating Christopher was a simple matter. The interlocutor typed what they wished to say on a typewriter, and simultaneously, mechanisms connected to the keys punched patterns of holes into a paper tape that was then fed into the machine. After computation, the machine gave its answer, which was converted by mechanisms connected to another typewriter back into English letters. Both typewriters had been modified to encode the output in a predetermined, systematic manner, e.g., “A” was replaced by “S,” and “S” was replaced by “M,” and so forth. For Turing, who had broken the Enigma code of the Third Reich, this seemed nothing more than a small linguistic game in his mystery-filled life.
No one ever saw the machine. After Turing’s death, he left behind two boxes of the records of the conversations he had held with Christopher. The wrinkled sheets of paper were jumbled together in no apparent order, and it was at first impossible for anyone to decipher the content of the conversations.
In 1982, an Oxford mathematician, Andrew Hodges, who was also Turing’s biographer, attempted to break the code. However, since the encryption code used for each conversation was different, and the pages weren’t numbered or marked with the date, the difficulty of decryption was greatly increased. Hodges discovered some clues and left notes, but failed to decipher the contents.
Thirty years later, to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of Turing’s birth, a few MIT students decided to take up the challenge. Initially, they tried to brute force a solution by having the computer analyze every possible set of patterns on every page, but this required enormous resources. In this process, a woman named Joan Newman observed the original typescript closely and discovered subtle differences in the abrasion patterns of keys against paper on different pages. Taking this as a sign that the typescript was produced by two different typewriters, Ne
wman came up with the bold hypothesis that the typescript represented a conversation between Turing and another interlocutor conducted in code.
These clues easily led many to think of the famous Turing test. But the students initially refused to believe that it was possible, in the 1950s, for anyone to create a computer program capable of holding a conversation with a person, even if the programmer was Alan Turing himself. They designated the hypothetical interlocutor “Spirit” and made up a series of absurd legends around it.
In any event, Newman’s hypothesis suggested shortcuts for future code-breakers. For instance, by finding repetitions in letter patterns and grammatical structures, they attempted to match up pages in the typescript to find questions and their corresponding answers. They also attempted to use lists of Alan Turing’s friends and family to guess the name of the interlocutor, and eventually, they found the cyphertext for the name “Christopher”—possibly a reference to Christopher Morcom, the boy Turing had loved when he was sixteen. The young Alan and Christopher had shared a love of science and observed a comet together on a cold winter night. In February of 1930, Christopher, aged only eighteen, died from tuberculosis.
Turing had said that code-breaking required not only clever logical deduction, but also intuitive leaps, which were sometimes more important. In other words, all scientific investigations could be understood to be a combination of the exercise of the dual faculties of intuition and ingenuity. In the end, it was Newman’s intuition and the computer’s cleverly programmed logic that solved the riddle left by Turing. From the deciphered conversations, we learned that “Christopher” was no spirit, but a machine, a conversation program written by Turing himself.
A new question soon presented itself—could Turing’s machine truly respond like a human being? In other words, did Christopher pass the Turing test?