Zero and Other Fictions by Huang Fan (Trans. from Chinese by John Balcom. Columbia UP, 2011)

Huang Fan is a Taiwanese author who is worth reading, but who had the misfortune of having been translated too late. Zero is a dystopian novella written in the speculative tradition and originally published in 1981. To predict a world in which the upper classes live in a sterile environment in which they often interact only through computer screens, books have been digitized and print no longer exists, and the planet is a global village led by an international elite with a dubious past, would be impressive in 1981—but not in 2012.

The book has other short stories, some with political references (“Lai Suo”) and others told with dry humor within a sophisticated, metafictional frame (“How to Measure the Width of a Ditch”). For all these reasons, this should be a captivating book, and yet, it’s not. As often with Chinese literature, it is hard to know whether the problem is the translation, the original, or both. The reader can tell that the writer is intelligent and (sort of) witty, but the humor is sometimes flat. And the stories are uneven, oscillating between the (desire for the) sublime and the ridiculous.