Han Song (1965– ) is a prominent Chinese writer of science fiction who has won the Yinhe Award multiple times. Han attended Wuhan University (1984–91), studying English and journalism, and eventually graduating with a master of law degree. He subsequently became an editor and contributor to the government-owned journal Liaowang dongfang zhoukan (Oriental Outlook Weekly), for which he often writes on cultural and social dynamics, and new developments in science. Some of these writings saw print as Renzaoren (Artificial Humans, 1997). His continued position as a respected member of a high-profile publication allows him to effectively shrug off the fact that many of his fictional works soon vanish from bookshelves. Embracing science fiction’s subversive potential in a culture that once proclaimed itself to already be a futuristic utopia, Han’s works often run afoul of the official censors but endure in online samizdat form or elsewhere in the Chinese diaspora or in Japanese translation.
Han Song’s first notable success, the long story “Yuzhou mubei” (“Gravestone of the Universe”; Huanxiang, 1991) appeared in a Taiwanese magazine and was subsequently unavailable for a decade in the People’s Republic. The story details the memorials and artifacts left behind by astronauts across the universe, and the unusual effects this has on those who come upon them. Similarly, his short story “Wo de zuguo bu zuomeng” (“My Fatherland Does Not Dream”; Zhongguo kexue, 2007), in which an authoritarian state drugs its citizens to both optimize labor and redact memories of atrocities, was swiftly banned.
Much of Han’s work counterbalances his downbeat or decidedly pessimistic tone with a lyrical style. He prefers ambiguity, even in his description of grand schemes such as the one in “Hongse haiyang” (“Red Ocean,” 2004), which sends genetically engineered humans under the sea to escape ecological disaster on land. His English translation of his own “Gezhanshi de zhuanjingtong” (Kehuan shijie, 2002) for The Apex Book of World SF, under the title “The Wheel of Samsara,” seems to playfully accentuate the story’s inspiration in Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God” (1953), including the Tibetan location and the tone of its apocalyptic ending.
A recurring theme in Han Song’s work is the rise and possible supremacy of China in contention with the West, which Han often treats with an ambiguity of tone sure to confuse the authorities. Ditie (Subway, 2010), a collection of linked stories, explores the ruins and futurity of the Beijing metro system, held up since the 1970s as a triumph of modernity, but in Han’s fiction reimagined as a Kafkaesque dystopia in which the Chinese pointlessly struggle to emulate the bustle and energy of Western capitalism.
He has repeated this mode in several other stories, such as “Chengke yu changzaozhe” (Kehuan shijie, 2006; published in English as “The Passengers and the Creator,” Renditions, 2012), a surreal tale in which the entire population of China is forced to live out its existence in a fleet of midair jumbo jets. “Huoxing zhaoyao Meiguo: 2066-nian zhi xixing manji” (“Mars Shines on America: An Account of a Westward Journey in the Year 2066,” first published in 2001 and published in more complete form in 2012) focuses on a balkanized and declining United States in a Sinocentric world, notoriously featuring a terrorist attack on the New York World Trade Center several months before reality imitated fiction.
“Two Small Birds”—translated here for the first time by the Hugo Award–winner John Chu—showcases Han’s lyricism and the agility of his ideas, which often manifest in a surreal way. Although one of the shortest stories in this anthology, “Two Small Birds” contains multitudes.