Two of this year’s Hugo-nominated novellas are included in one short story collection, (Adventures in Space (Short stories by Chinese and English Science Fiction Writers). Both stories also feature Earth’s attempt to seed life on another planet, but in completely different ways. Neither attempt goes to plan, and it’s left up to the reader to decide if the final result can ever be seen as a “success”.
The writing style of both of these were a little hard for me to get into. Both stories have the same translator, and initially I found the phrasing a little, well, stilted. Someone asks a question, and the responder internally describes their feelings (usually with a very clinical tone), and then silently or out loud dumps a few paragraphs of exposition into the conversation. Or someone would notice a person’s extreme emotional reaction (“Yelena noticed He Xi’s face showed insuppressible agony.”) and then carry on the conversation without acknowledging it. I couldn’t figure out if my issue was with the translation, or the rhythms of the original story that would be completely unfamiliar to me but would feel natural to someone who speaks Chinese and has grown up in that culture.
Regardless, the stories eventually pulled me in with some stunning images, mind-bending technology, and intriguing questions about what humanity’s “place” is in a limitless universe, and in a time frame that can cover centuries or millions of years.
Time Does Not Allow Us to Meet – He Xi (Translated by Alex Woodend)
Life does not allow us to meet, like Shen and Shang we go separate ways.
What a rare night is tonight, together we share the candlelight.
He Xi’s story was particularly difficult to get into. I’m still not sure exactly what was going in in the beginning, what Fan Zhe and Yelena were trying to accomplish with skullduggery, and why the main character (also named He Xi) took it as a matter of course that they were going to go onboard a spaceship with him to another planet.
The situation that eventually comes into focus is that the Earth has been sending colonists to other planets, and genetically modifying those colonists in order to survive. The trio will be traveling to inspect the results of colony on the planet Caspian Sea, which also happens to be the planet that the love of He Xi’s life was en route to before she tragically disappeared/died/we don’t actually know, do we?
Caspian Sea is a waterworld, and by that I mean there’s literally no dry land anywhere on the planet. It’s an intriguing place to set down a civilization, and I wish we’d seen more than the tantalizing glimpses of an underwater base, or the artform-like habitations that the child colonists would build out of seaweed. Through betrayal and heartbreak we see the results of colonization, and how the parent world reacts to those results.
To me this story feels like an indictment of a repressive government that wants to spread the reach of its population, but also maintain total control. You’re trying to survive in an alien environment, but we’ll only give you the scientific information we want you to have. Grow, but don’t grow too much. Adapt, but stick to our rules. And under no circumstances are you to become something that might turn into a competitor.
The ending takes place in snowfall imagery, which doesn’t take away the horror of a nightmarish decision. It’s hard to imagine how anyone moves on from that, but there is a tiny glimmer of hope in how someone can know with absolute certainty what the mandatory, unarguable, legal decision is…and then decide to do something else.
Seeds of Mercury – Wang Jinkang (translated by Alex Woodend)
Real life can’t be bred in pens. In the solar system there happens to be a suitable place for it to breed freely – Mercury.
Wang Jikang’s story is also about Earth colonizing another planet. The new life in this one isn’t human though. It didn’t even start as human. And the project will take millions of years.
Chen Yizhe is a successful businessman, husband, and father. Everything in his life is going smoothly, until a distant relative passes away and leaves him her legacy. And the inheritance is not money. In fact it has the potential to drain all of Chen Yizhe’s fortune on something that he may work on for the rest of his life for no direct benefit, to him or to humanity.
And Chen Yizhe accepts, because the lure of helping to create a brand-new life form is just too much to resist.
This story took much less time to get going, and it’s definitely a fascinating concept. The new life form is a kind of metallic amoeba that is showing signs of adaptation to its environment, but can only survive in temperatures high enough for metal to remain molten. Rather than trying to build a facility that will keep the metal at the correct temperature, which can never drop, for millions of years, Chen Yizhe makes the decision to seed the life onto the surface of Mercury. The intervention of a wealthy, eccentric billionaire smooths the way, and connects the first part of the story with the second, because the billionaire has plans to actually see the results of the experiment.
The progression of the Mercury project in current-day Earth alternates with a future on Mercury that’s so far-flung it’s origins have been turned to myth, and a repressive religious government has branded any kind of science as heresy. It’s intriguing to see the new life that Wang Jikang has created, what they look like biologically, what their civilization has turned into. It’s also very bleak to see how fundamentalism can stomp down on dreamers and thinkers, and in many ways destroy the very things they claim to want to protect. Like He Xi’s story, the ending isn’t exactly what one would call happy, but there’s still that tiny hope that something better will survive, even in an environment that’s practically designed to destroy it.