Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation

Abstract

the voice notes that the couple complement each other, Artur says, “We complement each other.” When it announces, “The rhinos are outside,” Printz thinks, “It’s good that the rhinos are outside.” The voice becomes their shadow. Twentieth-century history has marked these lives. Isabella talks to her thirty-six garden gnomes, one for each family member lost to the Holocaust. Printz’s mother’s silver was confiscated from Isabella’s Jewish family . Kindhearted Printz obsesses over Bosnian war victims. Pervasive lists—Artur’s hats, “his past,” Isabella’s bonbon wrappers , Printz’s notebook of famed suicides and fateful events from his birth year—add backstory and history. Memories mingle violence and sex. As Isabella manipulates Artur, the voice lists alphabet letters, below each a Holocaustlinked noun. After “Z / Zyklon B” comes “Done . . . A one-minute wank, ten years of history, ten years of Isabella’s life.” Printz, meanwhile, frequently invokes the film The Night Porter, in which a Nazi officer and Jewish prisoner enact a doomed fusion of sex and power. These bodies have histories, too, aging and disease portrayed with graphic specificity . The old couple wear diapers; selfharming Printz cleans his mother after she defecates. Artur has epilepsy, Printz a mental condition. Alongside interior alter egos—former, repressed, or imagined selves—external doppelgängers emerge. Printz’s beloved rhinos , “tame and self-destructive,” resemble him. Spies watch citizens, commodified, tracking their compliance. Isabella asks if Artur is a spy; police report on both. Printz’s father was a spy, and Printz, to please him, reluctantly became one—he’d yearned to be a sculptor. Containers for the emptied and redundant , trash cans acquire spiritual weight. Those beneath Artur’s window signal “poverty”; landing beside them after his jump, Artur becomes waste. Expelled by his brother from their dead father’s flat, Printz subsists on rubbish- bin discards. Isabella , “a carapace,” tells Artur she’s “empty.” “Disappearing,” Printz removes his shirt in the final scene. The narrator declares his torso “fine,” but Printz comments, “Inside, my torso’s empty.” Newspapers and police report Artur’s and Isabella’s separate suicides on 1/1/2000. In 2001 Printz joins the rhinos, “an endangered species.” Imitating them, he crushes his head against an iron wall and, weeping, declares death “superfluous .” Forms drained of their content, these three enter the “dustbin of history.” Drndić’s memento mori reveals the skeleton . It warns: rhinos are our doppelgängers , too. Michele Levy North Carolina A&T State University Johannes Göransson Transgressive Circulation: Essays on Translation Blacksburg, Virginia. Noemi Press. 2018. 96 pages. If you’ve noticed that translated books are enjoying an uptick in popularity, you are not alone. Indeed, the griping about a widespread disregard for the artform has given waytotranslationsbeinglaudedasapanacea for the dark times we’re living in. Everyone is on board, it seems, from magazine editors to publishers, whose lists now include Books in Review Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation Ed. and trans. Ken Liu. New York. Tor Books. 2019. 480 pages. Broken Stars is author, translator, and editor Ken Liu’s second anthology of contemporary Chinese science fiction in English translation, and it’s been highly anticipated ever since Invisible Planets was published in late 2016. Like its predecessor, Broken Stars features some of the most accomplished Chinese authors writing in the genre today: Xia Jia, Zhang Ran, Tang Fei, Han Song, Cheng Jingbo, Baoshu, Liu Cixin (whose The Three-Body Problem won the 2015 Hugo for Best Novel), Hao Jingfang (whose Folding Beijing won the 2016 Hugo for Best Novelette), Fei Dao, Anna Wu, Ma Boyong, Gu Shi, Regina Kanyu Wang, and Chen Qiufan. Again, like Invisible Planets, Broken Stars includes essays on the growth and development of science fiction in China over the past few decades. What sets these two anthologies apart, though, is Liu’s decision to include a greater number of authors and fewer stories per author in Broken Stars, specifically so he could “expan[d] the range of voices included as well as the emotional palette and the narrative styles,” as he explains in his introduction. Despite this wider range of voices and styles, Liu emphasizes that this book and its predecessor are...