In early 2019, the Kickstarter campaign for my first English science fiction collection A Summer Beyond Your Reach was launched by Neil Clarke. Around that time, my friend Regina Kanyu Wang—also one of the project planners—and I were invited to attend an art festival in Norway. Good news kept coming during our journey. In Tromso, we recorded a short video at the gate of Artic Cathedral, giving thanks to the enthusiastic backers, as well as announcing the third stretch goal of our project: to publish an anthology of writers who were previously unpublished in English. Our goal was to help more Chinese authors gain recognition from a broader international readership.
Being among the small group of Chinese science fiction writers to have seen their works published overseas, both Regina and I know well how such opportunities could impact a writer’s career. We also understand that beyond the quality of our work, luck and timing played an important role—the simple state of being acquainted with translators, editors, publishers and reviewers who appreciated our stories. The seeds of their kindness and generosity have generated beautiful flowers and sweet fruits in our hands. The best way to repay that kindness is to pass it on to those brilliant, though perhaps not as lucky writers, and wait for another turn to blossom.
The process of compiling this anthology was a little more challenging than we initially expected. We started from making a list of emerging new writers in recent years. From there we screened out “authors who have never been published in English before” and asked them for the stories they were most proud of. At that point, we narrowed it down by choosing our favorites while making sure we maintained a balance of lengths, subjects, and other factors. Regina and I made a table to list the summary and the comment of each story in English, with which Neil could provide his thoughts. Sometimes Neil had to use machine translation to fill in the gaps and better participate in the discussion. We cooperated by these means and eventually came up with a consensus on eight stories from eight authors, eight new voices that you might not have heard before.
Congyun “Mu Ming” Gu and Shuang Chimu are two of the most remarkable new authors—they are my age, but just embarked on science fiction writing in recent years. They are female authors—I feel like I have to emphasize their gender every time I introduce them, with a clear awareness that such modifier unavoidably implies the stereotype of female writing as exception, but it is as essential to understanding their works from that edge as to understanding Ursula K. Le Guin or Octavia E. Butler. They’re both scholarly writers. Mu Ming works in artificial intelligence, while Shuang Chimu has a PhD in philosophy. They explore and reflect on technological issues in academic approaches, while hold a much more inclusive vision which I tend to name as an “anthropological imagination.” They are the future masters of Chinese SF in the post-Liu Cixin era. They write more in the vein of Lem, Ted Chiang, and Ken Liu than of the Golden Age masters. Their most outstanding works are too long for this anthology, so that neither of the two stories included here can fully show their ambition and power. The story of “By Those Hands” takes place in Sichuan, while “My Family and Other Evolving Animals” in a space station named Shangri-La. Both involve with local cuisine, family ties, and “craftsmanship” of ordinary people; both explore what I personally appreciate and focus on—imagining alternative technological approaches, seriously yet with the beauty of “lightness.”
I have known Liao Shubo for a long time. As a college student, in the spring of 2010, she attended the first SF writing workshop I organized in Beijing. She’s called me “Teacher Eggplant” ever since. Her Exupérian stories, with airships, stars, visible and invisible planets, all organized in fantastic logic, have fans in contemporary Chinese SF community, but don’t receive the serious attention they deserve. That’s why Regina and I were determined to include one of her stories. My initial option was “The 2D Life,” about a girl who had to be transformed into 2D existence, lived a bitter and lonely life. Regina preferred “The Postman.” which for me is a metafiction about writing and reading. Liao Shubo is fond of whales, after which the postman who always listened and cared about the tiniest voices is named. Perhaps most writers can find a sense of identification with these big, quiet, beautiful, mysterious creatures and their secret communications.
Liang Qingsan and I have known each other even longer. He also attended my SF writing workshop in Beijing and joyfully told me afterwards, that the only and best lesson he had learned was how all the storytelling techniques I shared could not help him in any way with what he wanted to write. Since then, he has been writing in his own way and has published several novels. His writing isn’t part of the mainstream of contemporary Chinese SF, but has found its niche after all. His novels are mostly alternative history set in the late Qing, with rich and solid historical materials seamlessly woven with whimsical technological ideas—such as generating electricity by rubbing cats. “The Kite of Jinan” is a factually fictional history of technology, the kind of “fictional nonfiction” which I personally have interested in. The protagonist of the story is more or less a copy of the author himself: a “flaneur” who is wandering outside the literary circle and the academic system, climbing through old papers day by day for his very own interests.
Hui Hu, Yang Wanqing, Shi Heiyao, and Liu Xiao, are among the writers who have emerged via a variety of SF competitions in recent years. As a jury member, I was tremendously impressed by their works and have since become acquainted with them personally.
Shi Heiyao is talented in creating bizarre SF imagery embedded in seemingly normal everyday life and ordinary people. His writing, with a rich sense of allegory, is in the vein of Kafka, Philip K. Dick, and Han Song. ”Pixiu” describes an artificial creature with the name of an ancient Chinese mythical creature, as well as an industry and a family associated with it. The fate of the people and that of Pixiu are intertwined in a speechlessly bitter tone.
Yang Wanqing is a skilled and prolific storyteller. We finally picked “Tombstone,” a typical dystopian tale, from the fourteen stories he provided. Though Regina had some issues with its slightly stereotypical characterization (the lonely, sexually repressed hero, the uninhibited heroine as the enlightener, the rescuer as well as the sexual fantasies of the hero), I was struck by the eventually revealed dark secrets of the city, which is a horribly impressive SF image for the common dilemmas we have no way to escape from in this age.
Liu Xiao’s “The Bridge” stands out with its fascinating and vivid world building. The bridge jumper hops on the Canted Bridge sweeping across the town and rushes to another world named Magna Luna, such scenes find a delicate balance between the ethereality of the fairy tale and the gravity of reality. You can’t help but be attracted by the world of the bridge jumpers and feel empathy for them.
Hui Hu’s “PTSD” shows the entanglement between the three protagonists in the virtual as in the physical world. With VR helmets, aircraft, tele-presence robots, and mechanical exoskeletons, they are embedded into various agencies and carry out complex interactions and confrontations. They are traumatized human beings with physical and mental defects; they are cyborg monsters with infinite possibilities as well. I can’t say whether I fear, pity, or envy them, but I’m looking forward to seeing more of them.
So much has changed in the three years since 2019. It is to be congratulated that some of the authors have had works translated into English during this period and it is a testament to the quality of their work. I recently reread these stories in Chinese and English, feeling alienated and familiar all the same. In any case, I am wholeheartedly gratified that I have participated in such a meaningful project. Many thanks to the eight authors for believing in us, and may your voices be heard worldwide. Thanks to the brilliant translators. Thanks to Regina, Neil, and other editors. Thanks to all the backers of the project. This book, these stories, must be the best reward for all your kindness. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did when I first met them.
March, 2022
In Xi’an