Broken Stars Edited by Ken Liu

3.5 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

Good Night Melancholy – Xia Jia
This story took a little while to get into, but once I had got my head around what she was trying to do, I thought it was really well done. The questions she poses about machine learning and the Turing Test are really quite poignant. Plus, there is a parallel story of Lindy, a modern robot who is there as a companion for the narrator and the way she explores the boundaries between human and artificial intelligence.

Moonlight – Liu Cixin
A man takes three calls in one evening. Each caller knows exactly who he is because they are calling him from the future. In each call, his future self says that he is going to send him details of a technology that his future self says will change the world and give a greener future. I thought that this was a really neat time travel book that sounded utterly plausible.

Broken Stars – Tang Fei
This begins as a coming-of-age story of a girl at school who is undertaking exams. There is a pale woman in this girl’s life who has given her advice based on the stars. I won’t reveal any more but I thought this was quite a disturbing short story!

Submarines – Han Song
A strange story about a Chinese peasant class who live in small submarines on or in the Yangtze River. I did feel that this wasn’t over sci-fi in feel, more alternative history vibes.

Salinger and the Koreans -Han Song
This is a short story about the North Koreans inventing a device called the Quantum Reambiguator and taking over the world with it. When they have conquered America, they want to find the home of the reclusive author, JD Salinger, one of their heroes and turn up there unannounced… Quite an imaginative and amusing story.

Under A Dangling Sky – Cheng Jingbo
A haunting beautiful story about a woman who is searching for singing dolphins. To find them, she is listening though a strange hydrophone that a professor left her, but one day she hears something most unexpected…

What Has Passed Shall In Kinder Light Appear – Bao Shu
I liked this story a lot. It is a bit of a love story between two people who are caught up in world events. But the clever thing is that these events are real things that have taken place, but as the order is completely different, I found it to be a quite unexpected take on history.

The New Year Train – Hao Jinfang
A very very short story about being lost somewhere in the space time continuum. I almost inhaled it it was that short, but it is very good though.

The Robot Who Liked to Tell Tall Tales – Fei Dao
This is a strange story, it feel like an older type of Hans Christian Anderson story, but this one has a robot in it. This robot is commanded to travel the Kingdom and tell as many tall tales as possible so he can out bullshit the King. Really enjoyable story!

The Snow of Jinyang – Zhang Ran
Ancient Chinese culture mees steampunk meets and a time traveller from another dimension. What is there not to like about this combination? I thought it was really good too. There is not much character development; it is not really long enough for that, but there is plenty of intrigue and tension in the story.

The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe: Laba Porridge – Anna Wu
A strange story about a writer who wants to have the abilities from five different authors from Earth, a playwright, a poet, a science fiction author, a suspense writer and a classical scholar. However, absorbing their skills and abilities has a great cost. Quite strange and dramatic!

The First Emperor’s Games – Ma Boyong
A short but innovative story about the first emperor of China, who was an avid gamer. The games he plays are a pastiche of the actual things that he should be doing as an Emperor. I.e. the game Civilisation where conquering all the countries around you has a knock on effect. I thought it was very well done.

Reflection – Gu Shi
Another very short story about a clairvoyant. She has no memory of the past, rather, her memories are of events that are yet to happen. I thought there were a couple of flaws in the premise, but I did like it.

The Brain Box – Regina Kanyu Wang
An implant called the brainbox keeps the previous five minutes of all the thoughts you have just had. These can then be read and imparted into anyone else’s mind. If you know you’re going to die, what would go through your min,d and what would you actually want anyone else to know?
Zhao Lin’s thoughts were recorded, and Mr Fang is just about to learn what they were!
I thought it was an excellent story

Coming Of The Light – Chen Quifan
An interesting concept of blending the high-tech world with the Buddhist religion. A monk blesses a light in an app and then the people who use the app start to tell of cures and miracles. I didn’t feel the ending was that strong, but it was nicely written.

A History of Future Illnesses – Chen Quifan
An interesting collection of short stories about various maladies that have affected a future human race. They vary from a reliance of on iPads, fragmented personalities and the arrival of a second moon whose tidal forces affect humans and pople who can master team. Of all of the stories in here, it was this one that made me think the most.

Essays
The three essays at the end f the book add some context into the universe of Chinese scifi. I has ebbed and flowed for a while and almost disappeared at some points in the past. However, with two Chinese authors winning the Hugos in consecutive years, it is approaching the mainstream at warp 10.

I thought that this was a very interesting collection of stories. As usual, there were some stories that I liked more than others. It was good to read another cultures perspective on sci fi. Some of the themes and tropes that they write about were familiar, but there were lots in here that were refreshingly different. If you are scifi fan then I would highly recommend this as a good entry point for Chinese scifi.