primeideal

So we've already had one anthology of speculative short fiction translated from Chinese, and here's another! This volume features the work "of female and nonbinary creators" as writers, translators, and editors. All of these are new in English, although I did a double-take at "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: Tai Chi Mashed Taro" by Anna Wu--a different short story from the same "frame story" setting appeared in "Broken Stars," but this one is new.

There are several motifs that pop up across stories here--several stories in this book deal with visual art as a theme, and others focus on animals. (I saw a headline a few months ago, although I only skimmed the article, about "the percentage of (kids'?) books that deal with animal characters is trending down over time, is this a sign of how detached and alienated we've become from the natural world?" But I wonder whether that's the case cross-linguistically.)

Overall, the stories here didn't have the same sense of timey-wimey whimsy that "What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear" or "The First Emperor's Games" did, but there are still some lovely turns of phrase. A few highlights:

"The Tale of Wude's Heavenly Tribulation," by Count E, is about a fox who becomes a cultivator. I appreciated having read "Journey to the West" to give me some context for these tropes!

When Wude first attempted human form, he dared only reveal the fruits of his accomplishments to a creek next to his home. First it was a fox head and a human body, then a human body with foxy paws or furry legs. When he finally managed four complete limbs and clear human features, his pesky tail insisted on coming out to play.

"Baby, I Love You" by Zhao Haihong: the idea of contrasting the real-world struggles of parenting with the challenge of simulating an enthralling virtual life isn't necessarily original, but can still be well-executed:

I had to acknowledge the greatness of creation. Here I was, tearing my hair out over one virtual baby, while that mysterious force churned out a few billion humans and hundreds of trillions of plant and animal species, plus the infinite starry cosmos to boot.

the title story, by Wang Nuonuo, is a cute blend of fantasy fairy-tale-like tropes and more scientific narration:

The axis extends from the North Sea into the earth's core, where it connects to a gear wheel. When Pangu split heaven and earth apart, his heart became the gear at the center of the world. His heartbeat makes the gear move a little bit every day, and the earth above slowly tilts accordingly. This gradually adjusts the angle of the earth. The sunlight changes according to these rules, which is how we get the four seasons in order.

"A Brief History of Beinakan Disasters as Told in a Sinitic Language," by Nian Yu, features large-scale worldbuilding--and the end, describing how it ICly came to be written, makes the experience of reading it in translation particularly compelling. However, the narrator's frequent italicized comments tended to pull me out of the story.

Cameras attached to the drilling machinery had exploded seven seconds after exposure to this space devoid of matter. But in those seven seconds, those images had flown into ten million cocoon-shaped abodes. On that day, Ilians and Beinakans faced the heavens, the universe, the world beyond the ice barrier and took their first--albeit delayed--glance at the world beyond ours.

Like "Broken Stars," "The Way Spring Arrives" also features nonfiction essays, although interspersed rather than clustered at the end. Again, some of it was boring, but some was interesting. I have not seen the live-action "Mulan" film, but apparently, a line of dialogue about the virtues of the ideal woman gets reused to describe the virtues of the ideal soldier: "quiet, composed, graceful, disciplined." In the Chinese translation, the word used for "quiet" has some specifically feminine connotations, which make the parallels across gender lines less effective. Also, learning about the history of web novels in Chinese (which have given rise to television adaptations like "Nirvana in Fire" and "The Untamed") was an interesting look at fandom outside English-language spaces.

Ultimately, anything that tries to make a statement about fiction written or translated by women is probably going to come with handwringing about "can we make any generalizations, I mean, really, when you get right down to it," but the stories can still stand on their own!

Bingo squares: two or more authors, published in 2022, five-plus short stories, author of color.