PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThe volume gives voice to an eclectic group, serving as a who’s who of SF authors, critics, and other anchors in China’s burgeoning SF culture industry brought to Anglophone audiences by Ken Liu’s deft translation. The eclecticism of these works provides testament to the breadth, allure, and challenges of Chinese-language SF as a genre that miraculously thrives even in the repressive atmosphere of the Xi Jinping era ... The best stories in the collection, aside from evoking the marvelous future of worlds far from us, also evoke the most vexing aspects of our shared present. The Chinese have a word for this: chaohuan, or hyperrealism — the notion that reality in contemporary China is so bafflingly jarring as to exceed the limits of literary realism. To my mind, this phenomenon is not limited to the People’s Republic of China, and the best stories in the collection take aim at a globally familiar strain of technocratic state capitalism and its ability to worm into people’s conscious and subconscious ... If forced to rate it, I’d give it 4.5 broken stars. I am also wary of analogies proclaiming any of these authors to be China’s Arthur C. Clarke, William Gibson, Philip K. Dick, or Franz Kafka, as this reduces them to Chinese knockoffs of the real thing, but readers of the collection will surely see these resonances. These authors all deserve to be read on their own terms, and while the best of them will surely remind readers of many of the above giants, all of these stories strike me as evidence of a shifting geopolitical landscape and an evolving SF selective tradition, transforming the genre in their own unique ways.
