There’s something very timely about its play with gender fluidity and the social construction of identity. There’s also something timeless about Chi’s future, because of how it bends and defies time itself. The novel is about how identity is a story we tell ourselves through time — or back through time. And that story, for Chi, is queer ... The Membranes doesn’t have a plot so much as a complicated schematic ... a playful book and a sad one too. It seems to have predicted our cultural moment, a time when identity is being constantly evaluated and reconstituted, far better than it did our technology. English readers who finish it now, 25 years after it was first published, may regret finding it so late, and missing out on all the stories and selves we could have been, even as it seems like it’s been here the whole time. A new story is a new skin; Momo makes you ask who or when you’ll be once you finish this one.

A classic of queer speculative fiction in Chinese—one that is, with this agile translation from Ari Larissa Heinrich, accessible to an English-language readership for the first time ... Chi’s novel reaches across time to massage at that loneliness of being, to pluck at the question of what our humanness relies on. Are we made of stories, or of other people’s affections, or of our electric strange imaginations? ... The power of The Membranes isn’t in the unsettling accuracy of its extrapolations, though—it’s in what Chi does with those observations through the characters. Queerness (and trans-ness!) as both a norm and a subversive potentiality reverberate throughout The Membranes. Gender and desire, bodies and their flesh, intimate detachment and emotional consumption are all deeply significant to the narrative plot. As the novel progresses, the reader is immersed within Momo emotionally and physically ... Heinrich’s translation retains Chi’s combined sharpness and liquidity, which makes for a reflexive reading experience. Repetition and reflection, observations delivered multiple times with slight tonal shifts, build us cleverly toward the unexpected turn of the novel’s ending ...a brilliant work of craftsmanship, and I’m deeply honored to finally be able to read it in translation after all these years.

... feels relevant, even urgent, in spite of its multi-decade linguistic hiatus ... Beyond all of this is a frank engagement with issues of gender that made the book cutting-edge for its era and still engaging now ... a distinctly Chinese-language novel in its style, showing rather than telling and avoiding deep dives into the protagonist’s psyche. Where a western novelist might spend chapters exploring Momo’s sense of self and the symbolism of her birth story, Chi Ta-Wei provides a leaner narrative, focused on events and encounters and leaving meaning for the reader to explore. The effect is wonderful and deeply engaging. The Membranes is a marvelous book. Its discussion of isolation and the boundaries of self belong very much to the present, and its future feels as urgent as they were on the novel’s first release.

... the novella returns—very effectively—to the image of the membrane time and time again...This clever refrain allows the story to constantly consider the conditions needed for life, and humanity’s simultaneous desire to control those means and incapacity to look after them properly ... So often in speculative science-fiction, especially shorter works such as this, the ingenuity of a story’s concept can drown out its narrative. The contextual backdrop—whether that be life on a distant star, or a world of perpetual darkness—is either underdeveloped to the point of feeling like a gimmick, or overdeveloped at the expense of plot and character depth. The Membranes avoids these pitfalls, and lives up to its reputation as a classic of the genre. Chi weaves a complex contextual background (the migration to a subaquatic society) into the story, providing a succinct yet satisfying rundown of political and territorial disputes, before returning to Momo. What’s more, the novella’s final third delivers a sucker-punch of a plot twist. In this climactic moment, the world of the novella and its plot overlap with such precision that it feels effortless ... What makes The Membranes so compelling though, is Chi’s ability to interweave these broader issues with questions of gender, sexuality and queer identity, as we watch Momo interact with her own body and the bodies of others. It should come as no surprise that Chi brings these themes together in such a graceful communion—he is renowned for both his contribution to queer fiction and the study of Taiwanese queer literature. The addition of this cornerstone work in English is very welcome—not only as an opportunity to discover Chi’s work anew, but also as a slice (in translation) of the diverse landscape of queer sci-fi fiction published in Taiwan during the 1990s by authors such as Lucifer Hung ... Chi’s story—and translator Ari Larissa Heinrich’s prose—never feel weighed down with didacticism or overly preoccupied with asking the 'big questions'. Instead, the story is meticulously crafted to lead the reader to those questions of their own accord through a gentle crescendo of revelations about Momo and her life.

Chi Ta-wei, renowned Taiwanese novelist, tackles a central problem of existentialism: how do we account for the estrangement between ourselves and the world? The thrilling sci-fi classic (originally published in 1995) then proceeds to compellingly insist on exploring the question’s social dimensions, getting under the skin of its queer, inscrutable protagonist. A slim, intelligent novella that ambitiously projects a militarised and corporate new world order in the rubble of environmental collapse, Chi’s brand of world-building is equally invested in envisioning new global formations as it is in attesting to emerging sexual subjectivities. It bristles with the emancipatory energy that characterises the novels coming out of post-martial-law Taiwan ... What stands out in Chi’s approach to science fiction is that he does not only emphasise the way science shapes the individual, but also how fiction as a technology can reimagine the extensions and contours of the self.

Chi’s classic queer Chinese-language SF novel, first published in 1995, makes its English-language debut and invites a new audience into its strange, subtle world ... Readers will notice prescient echoes of modern life in Chi’s depictions of all-absorbing media consumption and loneliness in the midst of hyper-connection. Translator Heinrich closes with helpful context, situating the tale in the cultural boom of post–martial law Taipei. Though Chi’s meandering, restrained style will be unfamiliar to many Western readers, this captivating novel is rich and rewarding.