Invisible Planets: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese SF in Translation

by Ken Liu

The phrase “China Dreams” is a play on President Xi Jingping’s1 promotion of the “Chinese Dream” as a slogan for China’s development. Science fiction is the literature of dreams, and texts concerning dreams always say something about the dreamer, the dream interpreter, and the audience.

Faced with such variety, I think it is far more useful and interesting to study the authors as individuals and to treat their works on their own terms rather than to try to impose a preconceived set of expectations on them because they happen to be Chinese.

This is all a rather long-winded way of saying that I think anyone who confidently asserts a definitive characterization of “Chinese science fiction” is either a) an outsider who doesn’t know what they’re talking about or b) someone who does know something, but is deliberately ignoring the contested nature of the subject and presenting their opinion as fact.

Imagining that the political concerns of Chinese writers are the same as what the Western reader would like them to be is at best arrogant and at worst dangerous. Chinese writers are saying something about the globe, about all of humanity, not just China, and trying to understand their works through this perspective is, I

think, the far more rewarding approach.

We do the works a disservice when we neglect these things and focus on geopolitics alone.

Liu Cixin, China’s most prominent science fiction author, praised Chen’s debut novel, The Waste Tide (2013), as “the pinnacle of near-future SF writing.”

A language virtuoso, he has written speculative fiction stories in Classical Chinese—a feat akin to a contemporary English writer composing a story in the language of Chaucer—as well as Cantonese and Modern Standard Chinese.

In order to discourage desertion, all the students in the Rodent-Control Force are assigned to units operating far from their homes. We can’t even understand one another’s dialects, so everyone has to curl his tongue to speak Modern Standard Mandarin.

I gritted my teeth as I did each push-up. I thought, If someone would just get a revolt started, I’m sure all of us together can whip him. Everyone else thought the exact same thing, so nothing happened.

From time to time, I feel many bright eyes are hidden in the dark, observing us, analyzing us, day or night.

Black Cannon laughs coldly. “You need to stop thinking they’re people.”

From the tree, eighteen dead male rats hang, their bellies open like unzipped sacks. A light layer of white sand is spread evenly around the tree. Countless tiny prints can be seen in the sand, surrounding the tree in ever-widening rings. I imagine the ceremonial procession and the mystical rituals. It must have been as wondrous as the scene in Tiananmen Square, when the flag is raised on National Day.

My paranoia is getting worse. The woods are full of eyes, and the grass is full of whispers.

After a battle, every man handed the Drill Instructor the tails of the rats he had killed so a tally could be made. The records were supposed to influence what jobs we’d be recommended for after discharge. They knew just how to motivate us; this was just like final exams and posting scores.

No single factor means anything. Everything has to be contextualized. There are too many hidden relationships, too many disguised opportunities for profit, too many competing concerns. This is the most complicated chess game in the world, the Great Game. But all I can see is my broken heart.

“I try to see it as just a well-engineered product,” Pea said. “A bundle of modified DNA. But emotionally I can’t accept that.”

“Let me tell you something,” Pea said. He leaned over, sipping from a bottle. “Living is so … like a dream.”

the rats are now capable of chemically manipulating our perceptions, generating illusions to cause us to kill one another, then the war is going to last a long, long time.

The camera shifts to a scene by the ocean. A gigantic multicolored carpet is moving slowly from the land into the ocean. As it touches the ocean, it breaks into millions of particles, dissolving in the water. As the camera zooms in, the Neorats appear like soldiers in a killing frenzy. Crazed, each attacks everything and anything around itself. There’re no more sides, no more organization, no more hint of strategy or tactics. Every Neorat is fighting only for itself, tearing apart the bodies of its own kind, cruelly biting, chewing others’ heads. It’s as if some genetic switch has been

flipped by an invisible hand, and their confident climb toward civilization has been turned in a moment into the rawest, most primitive instinct. They collide against one another, strike one another, so that the whole carpet of bodies squirms, tumbles into a river of blood that runs into the sea.

Li Xiaoxia was right. Pea was right. The Drill Instructor was also right. We are just like the rats, all of us only pawns, stones, worthless counters in the Great Game.

The pictures of the tourist sights around Lijiang were so beautiful they almost seemed fake.

Normally, because these experiments often fail, no one volunteers. But the idea of living in Lijiang is so attractive—even as a dog—that many have jumped at the opportunity.

“Swim, swim, swim. Before you know it, life is over.” I repeat the same words I said ten years ago. “Just like us,” she says.

I strain to play my foolish song of seduction, but she sees through me with no effort. I have nothing in my chest but a mechanical heart made of iron.

The therapy began some twenty years ago. Back then, scientists discovered that by controlling the biological clock of an organism, it was possible to reduce the production of free radicals and slow down aging. But the decay of the mind and its eventual death could not be reversed or halted. Someone made another discovery: the aging of the mind was intimately connected with the sense of the passage of time. By manipulating certain receptors in the pineal gland, it was possible to slow down one’s sense of time, to dilate it. The body of a person receiving time sense dilation therapy remains in the normal stream of time, but his mind experiences time a hundred, a thousand times slower than the rest of us.

An electronic prayer machine begins to recite sutras. She puts on the mask,

and through the hideous eyeholes, I can see an ancient and alien light in her eyes.

Sin is like wine. The more it is hidden from sunlight, the more it ferments, growing more potent.

Yet history always surprises us with similarities. Shenzhen also had its own version of the taming of the West.

Besides writing fiction, Xia Jia is also a brilliant translator from English into Chinese. Her translations, like her own writing, are lucid, elegant, and graceful. Her translation of my novella, “The Man Who Ended History,” is in many ways an improvement on the original. In 2014, Xia Jia became the first Ph.D. in China with a specialization in science fiction. Her academic work on Chinese science fiction has been called groundbreaking, and she has presented her results in China as well as abroad. The critical essay she provided at the end of this book tries to tackle the question of what makes Chinese science fiction Chinese. (Most of her academic work is published under the name “Wang Yao,” as “Xia Jia” is a pen name used mainly for fiction.)

“How can I know for sure,” I ask, “that I’m a real person?” “You can chop off your head,” the crow answers. “A real person will die with his head cut off, but a ghost will not.” “But what if I cut off my head and die? I’ll be no more.” The crow laughs, the sound grating and unpleasant to listen to. Two more crows fly down, holding in their beaks antique bronze mirrors. Using the little moonlight that leaks through the leaves, I finally see myself in the mirrors: small face, dark hair, thin neck. I lift the hair off the back of my neck, and in the double reflections of the mirrors, I see a crimson bar code against the skin, like a tiny snake.

She says that to hide from the Calamity, a ghost must find a real person with a good heart to stay beside her. That way, just as one wouldn’t throw a shoe at a mouse sitting beside an expensive vase, the Duke of Thunder will not strike the ghost.

The old walls of Lanruo Temple, long in need of repairs, have been pushed down. Many giant mechanical spiders made of steel are crawling all over the main hall, breaking off the dark red glass shingles and sculpted wooden molding piece by piece and throwing the pieces into the snow on the ground. They have flat

bodies, blue-glowing eyes, and sharp mandibles, as ugly as you can imagine. From deep within their bodies comes a rumbling noise like thunder. The crows swoop around them, picking up bits of broken shingles and bricks on the ground and dropping them on the spiders. But they are too weak, and the spiders ignore them. The broken shingle pieces strike against the steel shells, making faint, hollow echoes.

We stand together and watch as the great and beautiful main hall is torn apart bit by bit, collapses, turns into a pile of rubble: shingles, bricks, wood, mud. Nothing is whole. They’ve destroyed all of Lanruo Temple: the walls, the main hall, the garden, the lotus pond, the bamboo grove, and Yan Chixia’s cabin. The only thing left is a muddy ruin.

So this is what the Thunder Calamity looks like. The ghosts, their faces burned away, continue to cry and run and struggle in the snow. Their footprints crisscross in the snow like a child’s handwriting. I suddenly think of Xiao Qian, and so I start to run again.

Mom told Tongtong that because Grandpa had been working for the revolution all his life, he just couldn’t be idle.

Grandpa spoke Mandarin with a heavy accent from his native topolect.

“When a robot smiles, it looks scary. But your smile isn’t scary. So you’re definitely not a robot.”

Tongtong was livid. He can’t climb trees anymore, and now he won’t let others climb trees, either? So stupid! And it was so embarrassing to have Dad show up and yell like that.

“A real robot would have played better,” Grandpa added.

If the plan succeeded, it would be a step to bring about the kind of golden age envisioned by Confucius millennia ago: “And then men would care for all elders as if they were their own parents, love all children as if they were their own children. The aged would grow old and die in security; the youthful would have opportunities to contribute and prosper; and children would grow up under the guidance and protection of all. Widows, orphans, the disabled, the diseased—everyone would be cared for and loved.”

Tongtong knew Ah Fu was crying.

“Like all poets who make dreams their horses.”

walk. There’s nothing better than a night journey with conversation.”

“I don’t know what death is, either.” The dragon-horse falls silent. The nameless sorrow and terror have returned. If he is considered alive now, is that essence of life scattered among the tens of thousands of components making up his body, or is it concentrated in some special spot? If these components are all scattered along the path he has trodden, will he still be alive? How will he continue to sense all that is around him? Time flows like a river, halting for no one. There’s nothing in this world that can outlast time itself.

He starts to tell the stories of those people.

They are just like him, mixed-blood creations of tradition and modernity, myth and technology, dream and reality. They are made of Art, yet they are Natural.