A review by fishky
Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation by Ken Liu

4.0

Its so hard to write a review for a compilation! I had to read a few of these several times before I started to understand them, because it's a wild ride to go from one imaginative world to the next. Year of the Rat reminded me (in a good way) of Duty After School by Ilkwon Ha. The Cixin Liu stories were almost formulaic, and I sort of wish we hadn't ended the anthology there. The essays were my favorite part: ken and the authors talk about the context of the stories vs the western analysis they received that reduces them to critiques of the Chinese government despite the clearly universal theme of human greed vs resilience (and where they intersect) in a variety of situations.