Invisible Planets: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese SF in Translation

by Ken Liu

I know enough to know that I don’t know much.

If one’s knowledge of China is limited to Western media reports or the experience of being a tourist or expat, claiming to “understand” China is akin to a man who has caught a glimpse of a fuzzy spot through a drinking straw claiming to know what a leopard is.

Chinese writers are saying something about the globe, about all of humanity, not just China,

I’ve learned much not just about translation, but also about writing fiction and living life across the boundaries of cultures and languages.

The rice tastes like crap mixed with the smell from wet socks

I want to say good-bye to my foes, who never existed.

Now I’m back. I have a car, a house—everything a man should have, including erectile dysfunction and insomnia.

I flip through a few books I’ve always been meaning to read (and will never finish) and think about “the meaning of life.”

A man is such a strange animal: fear and desire are expressed by the same organ.

Their lives are so simple, so pure. There’s only one direction—against the current. They do not have to hesitate, overwhelmed by an endless array of choices.

I smile at her. “I just want coffee, black.” This is the only truly free choice I have left.

Mangrove swamps surround the bay like congealed blood. Year after year, they shrink and rot like the rust-colored night that hides many crimes.

Pretending that the fake is real only makes the real seem fake.

Slowly the dragon-horse opens his eyes all the way and lifts his head to survey the world. The world has been desolate for a long time and now looks very different from his memory of it.

There’s nothing in this world that can outlast time itself.

“When the poets are gone, poems are even more precious.”

When you sing, the world will listen; when you are quiet, you’ll hear the song of all creation.”

Some said that outside the borders of the State there were other Web sites, but those were only urban legends.

The appropriate authorities did not recommend too many outdoor activities, as they caused people to make physical contact with one another, and what happened after that was difficult to control.

This whole city is an asylum, and in it, the stronger inmates govern the weaker inmates and turn all the sane people into madmen like themselves.

Let us build a healthy and stable Web! Fuck you, you sonovabitch!

Day after day passed; the List of Healthy Words continued to shrink; the air outside the window grew even murkier.

“In Oceania, it was still possible to pass secret notes to others and express one’s hidden thoughts. But now things are different. The appropriate authorities have forced all of us to live on the Web, where even if we wanted to pass secret notes to each other, the Web Regulators would see everything. There is no place to hide.

The radicals live in places so desolate that except for free speech there is nothing else, not even enough clean water,”

He suggested to the appropriate authorities that the regulations should no longer explain what was forbidden. Instead, the regulations should set forth what could be said, and how to say it.

Our ability to express ourselves continues to get poorer, and more dry and banal. More and more people will choose silence.

Sound familiar?

But they have never realized that they’re both the children called forth by the gods and the gods themselves.

Then they give birth by the edge of a brook, whose water bears the babies to the basin beneath the falls. The parents? They die and sink into the muddy earth.

The real key isn’t about whether what I say is true, but whether you believe it.

They cannot be silent. Silence is dangerous and makes them panic. Only by continuously talking can they ascertain their own position, be sure that they’re still alive.

We have been sitting here for an afternoon telling stories, and together, we possess a universe.

Lao Dao’s father had held fast to the thin reed of opportunity as the tide of humanity surged and then receded around him until at last he found himself a survivor on the dry beach. His father had then kept his own head down and labored away in the acidic rotten fetor of garbage and crowding

to eke out a living by performing the repetitive drudgery as fast as possible, to toil hour after hour for rewards as thin as the wings of cicadas.

Each time he strolled through the neon-bedecked night streets, Lao Dao thought he was walking under rainbows made of food scraps.

He knew that he was nothing more than a figure. He was but an ordinary person, one out of 51,280,000 others just like him. And if they didn’t need that much precision and spoke of only fifty million, he was but a rounding error, the same as if he had never existed.

I could only smell wind and earth from the wounds in that silver shell.

It was easy to feel in control looking at the fields, roads, cities, and military bases drawn on a map. The real land, so vast, sometimes made him feel powerless.

If you insist on dying, do so only after you’ve accomplished some things for me first.”

“Great King, the complexity in everything in the universe is built up from the simplest components.

The pure, cold moon floated impassively over the slaughter below, bathing the mountains of corpses and seas of blood in its calm, liquid light.

There was no halo over his head, but a few loyal flies did hover there.