Invisible Planets

[extrapenguin]

So! I finally finished the anthology Invisible Planets: 13 Visions of the Future from China, ed. and tr. Ken Liu. The stories were good, and I appreciate reading it. I have some thoughts!

Firstly, the byline calls it an anthology of contemporary Chinese science fiction. I wouldn't actually class that many of the stories as science fiction – a lot of them were more fantasy/mythology/hard to classify. Chinese Weird, if you will. (In analogy with Finnish Weird.) This is not necessarily a negative, merely misleading marketing (just like the marketing that called The Three-Body Problem hard SF when it imo isn't).

Secondly, the stories all had very similar tones. I don't know if Ken Liu has very particular likes or whether Chinese SF is all like this, but: it was all a bit dark and had a thread of focusing on the futility of existence/victory of entropy; no-one won big, everyone either lost or continued on trudging as they were. It's a tone not that easy to describe but also very familiar – it's ubiquitous in Finnish SF! You could've slotted something by someone like Shimo Suntila right in and I don't think I'd have even noticed. I'm trying to figure out whether there's some parallel tonal evolution going on for whatever reason, or whether Anglophone SF is just the outlier.

I still have some essays at the back to read about Chinese SF (by authors featured in the collection), but I figured those'll take me another few months to get to (*g*) so I had better post this now.

Comments

[tinny]

Well, I've mostly just compared Chinese/Japanese fairy tales to German ones, and it is obvious how those are different in the morals they want to show. And I found that consistent with how movies etc. show the same thing: "Western" things often concentrate on good/bad and on punishing the bad guys /the Wolf, and Asian ones just don't. They have a much more resigned attitude (which is what I picked up from your post about the Chinese stories, too) - it's not about good vs. evil as much as just... life, and generally doesn't cast people in bad guy/hero roles as much. Just my 2c.

[extrapenguin]

Ahh yeah fairy tales will of course have different sets of morals depending on the region. I haven't read any actual fairy tales recently enough to recall them; I was more discussing adult literature. That's of course more of a globalized phenomenon, but I was struck by both Chinese and Finnish SF sharing a tone that Anglophone/American SF doesn't have.