Sinopticon is a collection of short stories chosen and translated by Xueting Christine Ni. The selected texts introduce many young authors, mostly women, to give English-speaking readers a chance to go beyond the Chinese classics of the genre, such as Liu Cixin or Ken Liu (you can read their texts in Invisible Planets.) Each of the texts is accompanied by a concise note by the translator, in which she introduces the context and details that may be unclear, which really helps with a deeper understanding.
In the opening story, The Last Save by Gu Shi, the characters live in a world where you can infinitely return to a moment in the past in order to make a different life decisions. The subject of time travel also appears in Zhao Haihong’s Rendezvous 1937, in which a woman travels from the 21st century to Nanjing to document the massacre for future generations. In Tombs of the Universe by Han Song we meet a man who is obsessed with visiting old graveyards scattered across different galaxies; in Cat’s Chance in Hell by Nian Yu – a cyborg who believes he is human…
It is worth paying attention to interesting texts with a more philosophical approach. In The Heart of the Museum by Tang Fei, an unspecified alien who is the narrator takes care of a four-year-old child and has the ability to see into the ward’s past, present, and future simultaneously. In the note to that story, Ni explains the relationship between the perception of time and the Chinese language – and the difficulty of capturing this subtle game in translation. An the final story, Starship: Library by Jiang Bo, is a metaphorical tale of how a library (or rather: a fleet of libraries on spaceships) can save the world.
Many topics that may be considered overdone and repetitive in the West are only being discovered in China and appear in a completely new light. Among the stories you will find both motifs taken from classical Chinese literature, as well as reflections on immortality or a story of separated lovers, referring to the legend of The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl.
Sinopticon will be an excellent read for all fans of science fiction, but also for all fans of Chinese culture.
