任晓雯
岛上
2008

A mental patient who may or may not have killed her professor, with whom she may or may not have been having an affair, is shipped off to a strange island colony whose handful of inmates divide their time between long shifts of manual labor and sessions of vicious gossip about each other. Following instructions from the "ship's captain," the island's shadowy master, a bored cadre conducts criticism sessions in which he encourages the inmates to confess to elaborate crimes.

There's not much of a plot beyond a slow reveal of the island's purpose, but the narrator's desire to recover her lost memory and understand how she arrived on the island keep the book moving until the inmates' fragile society collapses and the dead bodies start piling up.

This is the author's first novel, written in 2002 but only published this year following a collection of short stories and a second novel, The Women (她们).

I was tapped for the "123 meme" a while ago and fulfilled my duty in the comments section of the Mutant Palm blog with a citation from a Xu Kun novel.

I've been asked to do the same thing for a SF book, so I'll use Pan Haitian's Run, Dajiao! Run, which actually happened to be the closest science fiction book around when I learned of the meme.

It's a short story collection by an author who's probably still best known for The Legend of Master Yan, an adaptation of an anecdote from the ancient classic Liezi that describes automatons who do their masters' bidding. Pan's most recent work has been in the realm of fantasy, and he's been involved with Jin He Zai in the Novoland project, an attempt to build an indigenous fantasy universe.

The title story in Run, Dajiao! Run! is constructed as a fable: on a quest for a drug that will save his dying mother, a young man runs from city to city, passing through cities of Hedonism, Industry, and so forth. It's an old trope, but Pan's writing is engaging and the various worlds are well-drawn.

Page 123 turns out to be in the centerpiece of this collection, the novella Out of the Darkness (黑暗中归来), which is an interesting take on the Space Ark story. A ship headed for some distant star has navigated into a cluster of dark matter, rendering all sensors ineffective. The crew, grown from test-tubes, take classes in stellar navigation and astrophysics, information that to them seems nothing more than faith-based superstition. They eventually revolt.

Just before the following excerpt, tensions among the crew are high. The narrator has spooked his crewmate Eberhard while he was holding a test-tube full of cockroaches, causing him to lose control and drop it, scattering the bugs everywhere.

After that moment of fright, I turned and glared at Eberhard: "Fine. You stupid blockhead, you think you're so special. You've let out the cockroaches. Are you satisfied?"

Flustered, Eberhard said, "I was just trying to help you." He was always trying to find was to help people, I though angrily. "Are those things dangerous?" "There won't be any problems, right?" He was always asking that, his voice shaking with fright. But whenever he was around, there was no chance for safety.

The cockroach infestation of the ship is just one symbol of the breakdown of order among the crew. The narrator eventually breaks with the paranoid conspiracy-mongers (who see the on-board computer as part of a vast conspiracy to hide the Real Truth) and learns the self-discipline necessary to take his place as captain of the ship and see it through to starry shores.

There are other interesting stories in this collection:

• A Ladder to the Stars: Hanuman, The Monkey King: The earth, which holds a backward society whose only hope is to escape to the stars, is visited by colonists who look like Monkeys and talk of their great King, Hanuman. Naturally, the earthlings kill off most of these monkey spacemen, or relegate them to concentration camps. A girl and her friends attempt to escape the planet with the help of one monkey who wasn't caught up in the security sweeps.
• The City of Clones: An empire has made extensive use of clones in its wars of conquest. The son of the emperor is sent out to deal with a clone revolt, but disagrees with his father's treatment of the clone army, because of his affection for a palace servant woman who has asked him to spare the leader of the rebels. It's a relatively straighforward story distinguished by its references to Plato.
• The Dark Side of a White Star: There's an accident at a mining colony and a team is sent to investigate. It discovers a strange life form that is killing off human life. The set-up of this story reminds me of a Star Trek episode, what with the search for a way to live in harmony, but some of the syncretic religious elements are fairly interesting.
• A Place Where Fate is Determined: The story of a "Non-Player Character" in a role-playing game.

Pan Haitian's English name is Peter, which at first glance you'd be inclined to chalk up to an unfortunate coincidence. However, Peter Pan has decided to make the connection to his literary namesake explicit with a pull-out illustration of a boy on a pirate ship. Nothing to do with the book's contents, I'm afraid.

The death of science fiction master Arthur C. Clarke last Wednesday drew reactions from science fiction authors and fans all over the world, China included. Here are some of the commemorations that Chinese SF enthusiasts posted online this week:

· Wu Yan, probably the most well-known SF critic in China, immediately posted an old appreciation piece he had written on the occasion of Clarke's 75th birthday. The article, which ran in Science Fiction World in 1992, told of the early encounters that Chinese SF had with Clarke: letters exchanged in which he expressed interest in Chinese SF.

· Liu Cixin, possibly the most popular Chinese SF currently writing, also wrote on his blog of drawing inspiration from Clarke:

Clarke has left us....

Twenty-seven years ago, he was the one who gave me the idea to write science fiction. 2001 taught me how SF could be used to exhibit the breadth and mystery of the universe. Rendezvous With Rama let me see how SF could be like a creator, fashioning an imaginary world real enough to practically reach out and touch. Later, all of my own novels are but clumsy imitations of those two classics.

Now, alas, that man is gone...

· The SFW group on the book-related social networking website Douban changed its name to "Farewell to Clarke." In its extensive obituary thread, Commenter BRDX wrote:

Arthur, have you become tired of the 21st Century?

We have no moon city, no space elevator to a synchronous orbit, no robot that can read our feelings -- we have nothing at all!

In the first year of the 20th Century, Marconi's wireless signal crossed the Atlantic. In the the third year, the Wright brothers took to the skies in the flying machine they built. In the fifth year, Einstein wrote out his mass-energy equation....

In the 21st Century, a complacent humanity has lost its spirit of adventure.

Sorry, we have let you down.

Farewell, Arthur, farewell.

The dreamer may die, but the dream never will...

· Another commenter, NStar, posted a link to a blog post:

More than twenty years ago, I read Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama. My enchantment with that book was probably one of the reasons I ultimately fell in love with science fiction. About one year ago, I happened to receive a letter from the master. When I opened it, I saw it was an invitation to join the Planetary Society. In my excitement, I couldn't help feeling confused: how did the master know of me? Thinking it through, I decided that it probably was because of a science fiction Sudoku -- just a small block of text -- that ran in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine that gave the Planetary Society the idea that I was a prospect. Probably, they had given the master a whole stack of things to sign, which they then sent to all the authors whose names appeared in the British and American SF mags, so their advertisement had been sent to me. Although it wasn't the master himself who had noticed me, at any rate I was fortunate to receive a letter with his autograph.

· Han Song, SF author and Xinhua journalist, remembered Clarke in a blog post that characteristically touched on contemporary Chinese politics:

When I heard the news that Clarke had died, it was already late, but although I was ill, I still wanted to get up and write a few words. I first read 2001: A Space Odyssey in Modern Foreign Science Fiction, editedby Shi Xianrong and published by the Shanghai Literature and Arts Press. This was probably around 1984-85, and at that time lots of publishers would go to universities to sell old books. I bought that book (it was only the second volume). Clarke's classic story was the first, and was translated by Guan Zaihan. Published in 1968, this story is still readable today. Clarke's strongest influence on me was on my outlook on the world and on the universe, just like Marx, the Buddha, Einstein, and Plank. Like Kubrick said of Clarke, he gave us a new perspective, letting us see humanity in its earthly cradle extending its hands to a future in the stars. Very few people you meet in your life will truly influence you. Regrettably, however, I often feel that a compliment from a certain leader was most influential in my life.

In the late 1990s, my office was about to send me to Sri Lanka, but because the departmental leader thought "things are too busy now, so we can't let you go," I ended up not going (you see the enormous influence a leader has). This was fairly regrettable. I had even planned out how I would request an interview with Clarke. Later, friends told me that Sri Lanka was oh such a nice place. And it was the place where Clarke predicted a space elevator going out to the universe. The communications satellites that Clarke predicted have become reality. And after humanity ascended to the moon, an American astrophysicist praised Clarke for providing the most important motivation.

Clarke said: "I regard myself primarily as an entertainer and my ideals are Maugham, Kipling, Wells. My chief aim is the old SF cliché, 'The search for wonder.' However, I am almost equally interested in style and rhythm, having been much influenced by Tennyson, Swinburne, Housman, and the Georgian poets." "My main themes are exploration (space, sea, time), the position of Man in the hierarchy of the universe, and the effect of contact with other intelligences."These ideas had an influence on contemporary Chinese science fiction authors. But today there is still not enough of that "search for wonder" (猎奇), and poetry is still lacking.

Let us draw inspiration from these words, just as we draw inspiration from President Hu Jintao's remarks at the legislative sessions, to work cleanly for the country and the people, or as we draw encouragement from the words of Premier Wen Jiabao: we must liberate the minds of every individual -- that is, we must have independent thought, critical thinking, and creativity.

I think that Clarke could be said to have worked cleanly within the science fiction realm (as clean as the ocean and skies of Sri Lanka), and his independent thought, critical thinking, and creativity should serve as a worthy model.

Clarke worked cleanly in science fiction until he was ninety years old. I am quite young compared to him, but already I'm not very clean: I've been polluted, led astray, made mistakes, a body covered in mud. What will the future bring? Will independence, criticism, and creativity -- values intrinsic to science fiction -- be illuminated by the Olympic torch climbing Mt. Everest?

· Just a few months ago, the now-defunct translations magazine World Science Fiction ran a short biographical introduction to Clarke in its December, 2007, issue. The piece was written by Chinese SF author Xing He, who also posted a commemoration to his blog this week.

Image from Wu Yan's blog.

刘慈欣
《环状闪电》
(2005)

A man who witnesses both his parents get turned to ash by ball lightning devotes his entire life to researching the poorly-understood phenomenon. His quest takes him to a national defense research institute where government scientists are seeking to use ball lightning as a new-concept weapon. He becomes disgusted with the thought of his pure scientific research being used for killing, but every time he tries to escape, his obsession draws him back in.

Ball Lightning is well-paced and tightly plotted. Liu handles the science quite well - the current state of lightning and weather research, as well as his speculative explanation, which hangs together just enough to stave off disbelief. Despite Liu's reputation for writing "patriotic" stories, his depiction of military research is not at all boosterish. The believable characters - the narrator, a woman who is enamored with danger and destruction, and a physicist who is out for pure knowledge, damn the consequences - add depth to the story. Highly recommended.

马伯庸
《殷商舰队玛雅征服史》
(2007)

Alternate history as comic novel. Ma Boyong imagines a meeting between exiled forces of the Shang Dynasty and pre-Columbian middle America.

The book originated online and is written in the same arch tone that Ma employs to great effect on his blog. He's also obviously a fan of Stephen Chow.

The book is lightweight and fun, but it'll probably grate on anyone familiar with the actual Mayan history (although it does acquit itself better than the other "China meets Maya" novel I read this year. That book, thankfully, remains unpublished).

拉拉
《掉线》
(2007)

Ace hacker gets kicked out of the Matrix because he forgot to pay his broadband bill. There's no one left in the world but a bunch of robots, and someone wants to extract his spine. He gets saved by a sentient window-washer and then goes on the run from the forces of a communications conglomerate run by a malevolent AI.

Like Lala's Galaxy-award-winning Green Fields, this is a fast-paced adventure built around an interesting concept. It does drag a bit in a talky denoument, and the philosophical musings aren't incredibly novel. But on the whole it's a good read.

Here you'll find news, book reviews, and commentary related to Chinese science fiction, fantasy, and other areas of mainstream and genre literature.

Back in 2004, after taking a course on science fiction theory from Wu Yan at Beijing Normal University, I started up a LiveJournal blog where I posted bits and pieces about Chinese SF. That effort (known as 'zhwj') lasted for about a year, and then died when I found other outlets for my writing. Two years later, there's still not much else out there in English about Chinese genre fiction, so I've decided to revive my old project.

Although it would be nice to accomodate all kinds of Chinese genre fiction here at THL, that goal's probably a bit too ambitious. It's likely that the majority of the posts will be about Chinese science fiction and fantasy (though I've got to confess to liking the occasional romance novel). There'll probably be short capsule reviews of lots of other stuff, too. Guest contributions are always welcome.

About the name: "twelve hours later" was inspired by "Chinese-Style Youth," Jin Hezai's tale of a Chinese Clark Kent who grows up during the late fifties, through the Great Leap Forward and the subsequent Cultural Revolution, but who fails to fit in with the collectivism of the time. Here's the prologue to that short story:

No one would have imagined that the fate of the globe would be transformed because of twelve hours.

As the planet Krypton was facing annihilation, he placed his son into a spaceship and sent him into the heavens.

That small craft floated through space, crossing nebula after nebula, where the storms of light and matter that had drifted through the universe for tens of thousands of years propelled the child to his ultimate destination, the town of Smallville, Kansas, USA, North America, the Earth, the Solar System.

If everything had proceeded without deviation, if the stars' gravity had acted precisely as planned, then he would have become an American hero, a legendary Superman.

But the calculations did not account for a piece of inter-stellar dust, less than one-thirty-thousandth of a cubic centimeter in volume, that scratched across the surface of the spaceship, slowing it by one-six-millionth of a percent.

As a result, he arrived on Earth twelve hours late.

There are a lot of fun and exciting things going on with fiction here in China, where clocks are twelve hours off those in New York and Washington, DC (in the summer, at least). I look forward to sharing them with you.

"Chinese-Style Youth" 《中国式青春》 by Jin Hezai (今何在) was first published in the October 2006 issue of Novoland Fantasy and is available online here.

Where's the SF?

I bring up this question because yesterday, when I went to the Beijing Book Building to buy a science fiction book for a guest who was visiting from far away, I found a sign reading "Chinese Fantasy" in an area that had once sold domestic SF; the whole bookshelf was like this, and it was identical to what I had seen at the Wangfujing Bookstore - they'd all been changed. So in Xinhua Bookstores today, there are only "Chinese Fantasy" and "Western Science Fiction" sections that seem to mock each other. This in and of itself makes an excellent SF topic; I couldn't help but recall that back when Liu Cixin described the SF-Fantasy Wars, he had complete confidence in SF being victorious.

At this point, I searched carefully through the "Chinese Fantasy" section of the bookstore, and finally came up with three or five SF books - Science Fiction World's Nebula IV and V, an annual SF anthology edited by Wu Yan, and two volumes of a four-volume collection of Pan Jiazheng's works - nothing else. So I asked the salesgirl, "Where's the domestic science fiction?"

She said, "Here, it's basically all fantasy. There's no pure science fiction. Tell me the title you want."

I said, "Ball Lightning?"

She said, "Nope. That's an old one."

I asked, "Why are there so few domestic SF books?"

She said, "They don't publish them, so we don't have them." I didn't know whether she was joking or telling the truth.

The International SF-Fantasy Conference hosted by Yao Haijun et al. will open in Chengdu at the end of the month. From what I hear, it might be a Zunyi Conference. Fortunately at this point I found Lala's chilling "Projection of the Multiverse" and I let out a bitter sigh.

I've wondered about the strange lack of SF at the major bookstores in downtown Beijing; the bookstores in Zhongguancun seem to have a better selection. Why this is I don't know - is it their proximity to the university district, or does SF sell better to the tech crowds in so-called "Beijing's Silicon Valley"? Or it could just be a random coincidence; shelving systems in most Chinese bookstores make it fairly difficult to find a title without knowing the publisher.

Might as well just order online, as people have suggested in the comments to Han's post.

The establishment of the Qin dynasty is a popular subject of historical dramas, and for good reason--aside from the oft-mentioned propagandistic uses of the unification story, the end of the Warring States era offers the intrigue surrounding Ying Zheng's rumored illegitimacy, his rise to become king of Qin, the annihilation and subsequent unification of the six kingdoms, various assassination attempts, and the emperor's infamous ruthlessness as ample fodder for the screen. Television serials and large-scale epics, such as Chen Kaige's The Emperor and the Assassin (荆轲刺秦王), Jiang Wen and Ge You's The Emperor's Shadow (秦颂), and Zhang Yimou's Hero (英雄), offer interpretations with varying degrees of historical and psychological fidelity. More fantastic renditions stray further from the historical record; Zhang Yimou himself had previously acted alongside paramour Gong Li in A Terracotta Warrior (古今大战秦俑情), a romantic fantasy about a Qin general who, sentenced to death for his affair with the emperor's concubine, reawakens in the twentieth century to fall in love with a movie star who resembles his lost love. Chinese science fiction, as expected, contributes its own perspective on this time period.

Huang Yi reverses the time-traveler concept in A Step into the Past (also translated as The Search for Qin), a science fiction flavored historical adventure. This sprawling novel of nearly two million characters tells of the experience of the special-forces officer Xiang Shaolong, who accepts a mission to test out an experimental time machine. He is sent back to record the coronation of the king of Qin on video, but an error drops him five years earlier than his intended arrival date, leaving him to fend for himself in an unfamiliar culture. With his modern outlook, he fits uneasily in the social framework of the state of Zhao, where he lands, but he quickly captures the interest of the elite by displaying his tactical knowledge (from his special forces training) and inside knowledge of major court affairs (from half-remembered historical novels and texts he studied back in school).

Future Qin king Ying Zheng is still being held captive in the state of Zhao at the time Shaolong lands, so his mission is to return him to Qin and protect him until the coronation, after which he can pick up the time signal and return to his own time. Huang Yi brings a twist to the illegitimacy story--because Ying Zheng's mother feared that growing up in the Zhao court would lead him to turn against his homeland, she secretly sent him to live in among peasants in a small village, taking another child to be kept under house arrest with her. When Shaolong eventually finds him, the real Ying Zheng has been killed fighting in one of Zhao's wars. To preserve his chances of getting home, he makes the choice to have his orphaned student Zhao Pan act the part of Ying Zheng and return to Qin. This decision to live a lie leads to the Qin emperor's later ruthelessness.

Although A Step into the Past became quite popular, Huang Yi was criticized for the historical errors and anachronisms that were littered throughout the novel. The term "emperor", for example, is used in an era when it didn't exist, and characters are called with names they only received after their deaths. There is also a question as to whether the novel can be accurately characterized by the label "science fiction." Although Xiang Shaolong makes use of modern technology in an ancient setting, it plays a fairly minor role. His use of modern slang and foreign terms, confusing the other characters, is played to comic effect, but the whole issue of the radical differences between Qin-era Chinese and modern dialects is dismissed in the second chapter. Shaolong meets a woman beside a river, and finds that after a short time of conversation he can understand her fairly well, although her accent is a little strange. And the story drops him in the past and leaves him there; no reconnection is made with the present; when he is finally given the chance to travel back to his own time, he refuses. Since there is no confirmation in the present of his experiences in the past, the time machine could just as easily be explained by death, or a dream from which he does not wake up.

In fact, it is Huang Yi's view of time travel that constrains the science fiction content in the novel. He has commented that western science fiction places too much emphasis on technology and the scientific method; Chinese SF ought to explore humanity's interaction with the unknowable mysteries of the universe. In the concept of history in A Step into the Past, fate is pre-determined, and history cannot be changed since it already happened. What convinces a scholar, for example, that Shaolong is actually from the future is not any of his technical knowledge, but the fact that his historical "predictions" concord with the scholar's astrological readings. The popular television adaptation, starring Louis Koo, expresses this idea explicitly in its theme song, with lyrics starting off "The ages only listen to the command of the universe / Destiny--who can change its track?"]]> The wildly popular TV series--for a time, you could walk into any web café and find someone watching an episode--makes major modifications to the novel: it eliminates a great number of love interests, makes Shaolong's success in the past more believable by having him undergo training before his mission, and consolidates some characters[2], but ultimately it follows Huang Yi's general conception of the restrictions of time-travel. A "Back to the Future"-inspired device has Shaolong's reflection disappear whenever Ying Zheng is in danger of failing to become king and consequently erasing Shaolong's timeline. As a result of this, Xiaolong does only as much as he deems necessary to keep history on its correct track, which, as Ying Zheng becomes more and more ruthless, puts him in the difficult position of being unable to interfere in unjust situations. Were Shaolong not to exist, however, Zhao Pan would never have become a fake Ying Zheng. This paradox is not fully explored, but the fact that his fate is linked with Shaolong drives the Qin king to erase all mention of him in the historical records rather than killing him, setting off the infamous "burning of the classics." A final irony sees him living out a happy life in the countryside with his two wives (having gotten over the modern aversion to polygamy), when his son chooses the name Xiang Yu, a character famous in history for destroying the remnants of the Qin state and burning the capital.

It is from Xiang Yu's conquest of Qin that Qian Lifang's Providence begins. The Qin Empire has crumbled after the death of the emperor, and once again the kings of the various tributary states are fighting amongst themselves for supremacy. An incredibly skilled tactician from the state of Chu named Han Xin attempts to advise the king Xiang Yu on the most expedient way to conquer his rivals. He does not listen, however, because of a rumor that Han Xin had once crawled through someone's legs rather than fight, which in Xiang Yu's eyes is a mark of a lack of courage. Han Xin is recruited away to the commoner Liu Bang's growing army under the Han banner, but languishes in a series of dead-end jobs until he finally decides to run away.

Before laying all this out, however, Providence starts off with a prologue in which a young man, later revealed to be Han Xin, is visited by a mysterious stranger dressed in black. The stranger, giving his name as Sea Traveler, claims to be the representative of a god, and proposes to conduct an exchange: Han Xin will one day reach an impasse that he cannot conquer by himself. The god offers to assist him, and in exchange, Han Xin must complete some task to be revealed later. The young hero, fully aware of his talent, does not want help from anyone: "The future is my own; I don't want to sell it out to anyone, even if he is a god." The stranger promises him that he will reconsider in twenty years, and leaves Han Xin musing about free will and destiny.

Twenty years later, Han Xin has had his dreams of achieving great things dashed by short-sighted leaders, and his pride prevents him from going to his closest friends for help. He deserts the Han camp, but before he can get very far, the stranger in black meets him to discuss the god's offer. The Han army has retreated to a remote position, blocking pursuit by Xiang Yu but at the same time trapping itself in a besieged position. There is an old road through the mountains, but it has not been maintained and is impassable for a large army. The god offers to clear the road, and in exchange requests Han Xin to construct a giant causeway out to a particular point in the ocean after he gains power. Han Xin considers this offer, and finally decides to accept it for the time being, curious as to how fate will lead.

Sure enough, after Han Xin returns to lead the Han army around the blockade, he finds a smooth path taking them to the rear of an unsuspecting enemy. In fact, in every succeeding battle he is victorious, and eventually the Han king grants him the kingship of the conquered Qi state. In the course of sacking the palaces of the various kings he defeats, Han Xin discovers some disturbing facts about the Qin emperor and the general course of Chinese history up until that point. According to ancient legend, an empire's hold on power was dependent on possession of a collection of nine bronze ding cauldrons. Han Xin learns from an old minister of the former emperor that the fabled nine ding were in fact a single cauldron that the Qin emperor kept in a special chamber; the number nine came from the old division of the empire into nine states. Xiang Yu, however, had failed to find it when he annihilated the capital. The emperor had also developed a desire for immortality, and had sent courtiers on missions far and wide to search for an elixir or pill, or the ingredients to make one. Many of his ministers felt that he had fallen under the evil influence of a mysterious stranger in black.

The first half of the novel is narrated from the point of view of Han Xin himself. His self-confidence is always apparent, even while the reader can sense his confusion at the strange things he witnesses. His past is revealed gradually; we learn that as a young man he had one of Qin's former prime ministers as a master, learning from him an Yijing-based chess game and Sunzi's military strategy. In the second half of the novel, the point of view switches to that of the maid who combs Han Xin's hair. She too is highly intelligent, but as Han Xin does not often reveal the depth of his knowledge about Sea Traveler and the god, the reader is presented with strange events for which no explanation is immediately given. For example, objects start appearing and disappearing without notice, and the call of a wild chicken can be heard at night, but Han Xin does not seem concerned. It is only later that we learn he is learning to use a kind of time machine he found in one of his conquered cities.

While Han Xin is king of Qi, he is again visited by the Sea Traveler, who it turns out is the same man who had the emperor's ear, and who has been advisor to kings and emperors throughout the ages. Han Xin refuses to spend an immense amount of his country's resources on a building project of which he does not know the purpose, and he persuades Sea Traveler to take him to visit the god out in the ocean. Upon his return, he drives a hard bargain, convincing the god to give him three powerful guns with which to assassinate his last remaining rival, the Han king, so as to ensure peace and unity during the several decades the construction will take. This he does not do; rather, he returns to the seashore and fires the weapons at the volcanic island the god inhabits, triggering an eruption that destroys the palace and all the advanced technology inside.

The god turns out to have been an alien who crash landed on Earth, mistaking the ocean for stable land. Without a ship, and with the planet lacking the necessary materials to create one, the alien's only hope was to develop human civilization to the point where a giant causeway could be built into the ocean. Using its time-travel device, the alien would then be able to cause its ship to land on solid ground. Han Xin realizes that were the alien to land safely, all of the technological guidance and training given to Chinese civilization would no longer be necessary; their timeline would cease to exist.

The author weaves the alien into traditional Chinese history: the legends of a dragon-like ancient emperor Fuxi stem from the alien's snake-like appearance; the ancients' mad quests for elixirs of immortality were actually missions ordered by the alien to collect the necessary materials to make its machines; the Yijing is a means of accelerating humanity's intellectual development; even the united empire is shown to be merely a way to preserve a peaceful environment for the most rapid technological advancement. The patriotic view of China's famed five-thousand years of history and its superiority at the time of the Qin dynasty to any other world civilization is in evidence here, but the novel subverts it by suggesting that the advancements were the result of an outside influence rather than a native development.

While the alien's high-tech gadgetry plays a key role in the novel, the ancient characters relate to it in terms of their own worldview. An X-ray like device that displays internal organs, for example, is perverted by the Qin emperor into a lie-detector to test whether his concubines are harboring malicious intentions toward him. The ding is treated as possessing magic power, when in fact it is merely a container for a controlling microchip that Han Xin eventually destroys. Even the Yijing, originally intended as a mental exercise, becomes merely a manual for fortune-telling among most of the people.

According to Han Xin, creating the Yijing was the mistake that led to the alien's downfall--it hadn't counted on developing a rival with the cunning and desire of Han Xin. The alien confesses that even before losing the time-travel device, it could not use it to divine his future actions. The destiny referred to in the prologue, however--the providence of the title--still exists; the alien does not die in the explosion but returns to advise the Han king against Han Xin--it made him what he is, and can return him to what he was. Han Xin accepts the outcome of the bargain he made, and is ultimately satisfied with his sacrifice, especially since his only true desire in life was to meet someone against whom he could test his wits.

Unlike Xiang Shaolong in Huang Yi's novel, the characters in Providence, with the exception of the stranger and the alien, can all be found in the standard histories. Minor characters are not given a full identification--the non-Chinese reader might not recognize the name Li Si, for example--but knowing the history only adds more depth to what is already an engaging novel. And many of the more obscure legends are Han Xin himself is unfamiliar with; he is a tactician, not a historian, so he must rely on his combing-maid who has studied the ancient histories to describe the stories to him, and thus to the reader. Qian Lifang writes that she was intrigued by Han Xin's interesting life and tragic end--he is forced to leave Qi for Chu, and ultimately is killed and his entire clan wiped out by the Han king[3]--and decided to take advantage of time she had in a typing class to type something of her own rather than copying from a book.

Providence has been published in two versions; the first edition, paired with Lala's "The Opposite Horizon" as part of the Nebula series, sold quite well, so a second, independent edition was published soon after. According to an editorial note in the July issue of Science Fiction World, the second edition has been significantly revised from the first. Not only have the typos been removed and anachronistic phrases rectified, but the author has responded to comments made in online forums and has retooled the ending. It is possible to consider Nebula a magazine, which would make revisions before book-publication a standard affair, but the advertisements for early orders seem to indicate that it is the first in a series of books. Given the speed at which the revised edition was issued, the first edition has the feel of a commercial beta-test, penalizing in a way the early adopters. Liu Cixin's Ball Lightning, the second entry in the Nebula series, was finally published on 30 June; it will be interesting to see if this becomes a trend.

1. I have found it very difficult to find accurate publishing information for Huang Yi's novels.
2. Xiang Shaolong's early rival Lian Jin is killed during a duel in the book version, while in the TV series, he only has the tendons in his right hand severed. This allows him to assume the identity of the left-handed assassin Lao Ai, a historical personage whose name is famous enough, as the seducer of the emperor's mother, to merit a gloss in the Shuowen, a Han dynasty lexicon.
3. 3: The historical record states that the family name "Han" was wiped out; there is another record, however, that tells of a branch of the family removing the right side of the character, changing their name to "Wei" to avoid slaughter.

Reviewed in this article: Cold Ice, Hot Blood
《寒冰热血》
Zheng Jun (郑军)
350 pages / 275,000 words
2003

Obtaining fresh water has become a pressing problem in many parts of the world, including China. Agriculture, industry, and larger society all compete for a dwindling supply of water. There have even been predictions that wars in the next century will be fought not over oil or mineral rights, but over access to fresh water. In Cold Ice, Hot Blood, author Zheng Jun spins the fact that 70% of the Earth's fresh water is trapped in the Antarctic ice into a techno-thriller set on an iceberg floating in the Indian Ocean.

The Berg Express company (it has a Chinese name but is called "BE" throughout the novel) is in its fifth year in the iceberg transport business. The founder, Qin Yu, is a self-made billionaire from a large, poor family in China's northeast, who originally had scrapped his way up to become the owner of a small shipping company. He came across some articles by a university lecturer, Sun Yiran, who had developed a way of propelling icebergs using hydrogen fuels. Qin Yu financed his research, and in 2005 they shipped their first iceberg to the Arabian Peninsula.

In the four years since, the company continued to expand, shipping icebergs to parched areas, and landing Qin Yu on the cover of Time as Man of the Year. Iceberg water turns out to be cheaper and better tasting than desalinized seawater, and the sheer volume of fresh water now available to regions like the Middle East holds forth the promise of an end to territorial conflict. BE ships eight icebergs a year, with plans to expand to a maximum of about twenty-six.

The immense scale of the operations, as well as the scientific and technological heroism involved in transporting such massive objects, might recall the scientism of early American SF (and recent Chinese SF). Zheng Jun dispenses with that early on, however, when he mentions the motives of BE's founders:

Although all of the technological wonders were built alongside a wariness of nature's greatness, the two great heads of the BE company did nothing to refute the charge of attempting to "conquer nature." Qin Yu craved greatness and reveled in this wording. He knew that in the eyes of westerners, nature was God's creation, so to conquer nature was to wrestle with God. "I don't believe in God--so what if I want to wrestle with him a bit?" Qin Yu once boasted at a company party.

Sun Yiran talked of his own attitude in a smaller setting: a person needs to conquer something; putting more attention on "conquering nature" means less attention on subjugating other people.

-- Cold Ice, Hot Blood, page 84

As the book opens in 2009, the BE company is making a deal with representatives of the Somali government to deliver an iceberg whose fresh water volume is equivalent to three-fifths of Somalia's yearly usage. Zheng Jun details the entire process, from the contractual negotiations, team selection, and drive equipment installation to daily life on the iceberg 5-G (seventh iceberg in the fifth year of BE's operation). The team is an international one; led by Su Yunxia (from whose point of view most of the novel is narrated), most of the members are Chinese, although it also includes a Ugandan, a Korean, and a Netherlander, along with the Somali representative. The foreigners all speak in precise Mandarin, while the Chinese team-members often lapse into their regional dialects, echoing a theme that carries throughout the book: initial judgments are often flawed, and people are often not what they seem. Inventor Sun Yiran is a case in point; by publishing his papers online and even considering running them as ads in magazines, he is more the image of a crackpot scientist than a successful one.

Partway through the voyage, the company receives word of a terrorist threat and orders security forces to all icebergs in transit. The exact nature of the threat is unknown; according to some it is radical religious fundamentalists upset at BE for changing the balance of power in the Middle East, while others finger the Somali opposition. At any rate, terrorism against an iceberg the size of Pitcairn Island is vastly different from an attack against a ship. Bombs would do little; the stresses might shatter the iceberg, but then again they might not. On the other hand, the mere suggestion that the water might not be pure would be enough to turn buyers against the company -- no one is thrilled by a delivery of yellow snow.

The security force that is sent to 5-G turns out to be Qin Yu's nephew Qin Haitao and his group of hoodlums, hiding out for three months on the territorial ambiguity of the iceberg. Su Yunxia immediately dismisses his team and their laughable security measures, especially since they harass a Greenpeace-like inspection group that arrives to check out their environmental protection precautions. Qin Haitao, for his part, dismisses her as nothing more than an intellectual, unable to solve practical problems. In keeping with the theme, they both have a chance to reappraise their initial impressions.

Su makes the decision to rescue a group of refugees, including a pregnant woman, who are found floundering in a primitive boat and who claim to be researches testing whether ancient Indonesians could have reached Madagascar. When the iceberg is approached by another boat, the refugees take some of the 5-G team as hostages and allow the head of the Somali opposition militia to board. This sets the stage for a showdown with the security team. Qin Haitao and his right-hand, an internationally-wanted felon, turn the tables on the terrorists who had expected a leader like Su Yunxia who would back down easily. During the resulting stalemate, it becomes evident that the terrorists know a good deal about BE technology -- rather than destroy the iceberg outright, they try to change directions and run it aground on the continental shelf off Madagascar. Su gets her chance to impress Qin when she decides to brave the danger and make a run to disconnect the power source, letting the iceberg drift the rest of the way to Somalia.

During this whole time the iceberg has been in constant communication with the company headquarters by satellite and the rest of the world by live news feed (5-G was to be the subject of a documentary). Zheng Jun conveys the near-panic of the team as they feel isolated in their base; while everyone can hear them, no one can do anything to help. Eventually the cavalry arrives under UN command. The attack is revealed as the plot of a desalinization company trying to sabotage the competition. The entire episode is over in a matter of days, and the iceberg eventually reaches Somalia.

In the characters of Su Yunxia and Qin Haitao, and in a more general sense, the educated engineers and the self-made Qin family, Zheng Jun highlights the problem of "culture" and "civilization" that exists in contemporary Chinese society. Though they are from the same town in the northeast (Qin recognizes Su as an old middle-school classmate toward whom he has nursed a grudge for twenty years), Su and Qin exist in different worlds. Not only do they have different attitudes toward the company, but their very ways of life are completely different. Su continually gets upset at the bad habits the security team has, and Qin is always making sarcastic apologies for his "lack of culture." It is difficult to imagine Qin discussing with his gangster friends whether it was Mozi or Zhuangzi who told the anecdote about the man who finds a coffin after a flood and sells it back to the dead man's son; it seems perfectly natural for the scientists to do so (though the punch line here is that it falls to the European to give the correct answer). During the months on the iceberg, however, living in close proximity to each other cuts away the distinctions of class and education level. Qin's "girlfriend," actually an escort, is assigned to room with Su, who is surprised to find that she is not really a bad person. The two are soon conversing together in an earthy northeastern idiom. On the other hand, the initial connection Su makes with the "professor" they pick up from the primitive boat turns out to be completely manipulated.

Another large element in the human side of the story is Su Yunxia's family background. It is gradually revealed as the novel progresses that Su's father beat both her mother and her older sister; she was spared while young because she had a fragile body and her father did not want the trouble associated with actually killing her. To avoid the violence later on, she took to staying at school. Studying became a means of escape. She stayed single, a fact she attributes to her father's example -- it becomes something of a running joke through the novel that everyone is trying to set her up with a husband.

The novel has the feel of a techno-thriller -- set in the near future, the technology is believable yet advanced enough to be a bit of a mystery, and the political situation is handled realistically. Though it starts off a bit slow, the plot quickly picks up once the terrorist threat is announced. The main characters are well-drawn, and the minor characters are distinct. The foreign members of the team have all selected Chinese names (except for the Somali representative), so their individual personalities are forced to be independent of nationality. For an international audience, the particular relationship that exists between former classmates in Chinese society may fail to resonate, and some of the more colorful northeastern expressions may not translate well. The plot and the characters, however, ought to hold up well.

Science Fiction World for July, 2007, is a special issue devoted to Beijing-based writers - Xing He (星河), Ling Chen (淩晨), Xia Jia (夏笳), Chen Qiufan (陈楸帆), and Yang Ping (杨平).

Xing He is probably the most well-known; he contributes "Your Many-Colored Life" (你形形色色的生活), a fable of two people from two different societies - one pampered by robots and one enslaved by them - each of whom believes people are better off elsewhere.

Yang Ping is known as a cyberpunk writer, and here he contributes "Freezing Point" (冰点), a soft cyberpunkish story of a man who's chosen as the subject of a chip-implantation experiment after a near-fatal accident.

Ling Chen's is the best of the bunch. She tells the story of a family who's expecting a child while working on a top-secret search for life on Jupiter's moons in "A Titan Story" (泰坦故事).

The translated stories in this issue are Dick's "Rautavaara's Case" and Robert Reed's "Pills Forever".