Book Review: The Reincarnated Giant - Mingwei Song

This is an anthology of modern Chinese science fiction, loosely grouped into three main themes.

I'm sad to say that some of the stories are a lot of hard work. One is barely sci-fi - more like a spiritual paean to the souls of people caught in a disaster which, bizarrely, has a throwaway line about aliens in it. One is an interminable description of domesticity which, if I've understood correctly ends in a manic sequence where an elderly author travels back in time to fuck someone who may or may not be the wife or mother of his time-travelling child. Yeah, me neither.

One story is almost dream-like in its babble. I'm not sure if that's by design or whether it is genuinely untranslatable.

Another story, which is quite good, starts with a long stream of life in rural China and switches, without warning, into space:

He stood up again and continued on. He had not gone far before he turned into a bookstore. How wonderful the city was with its bookstores still open at night. He spent all his money, save for his return fare, on books to add to the school’s meager library. At midnight, carrying two heavy bundles of books, he boarded the train home. Fifty thousand light-years from Earth, near the center of the Milky Way galaxy, an intergalactic war that had raged for twenty thousand years was near its conclusion.

What?!

One of the stories is actually just a couple of chapters from a much longer novel. It was entertaining enough, but was a strange inclusion for a book of otherwise self-contained stories.

But... Some of the stories are absolute crackers!

Since Yiyi’s lectures on classical literature at the feedlot had a tranquilizing effect, producing a special flavor in his students’ meat, the dinosaurs left him alone

I mean - come on, that's worth the price of admission alone! Some of the stories are riffs on classics you've probably read before - and it's interesting to see a Chinese perspective on them.

Many of the stories flow heavily with beautiful symbolism. I'm sure that some of the symbolism in the stories is incredibly obvious to those with a deeper understanding of Chinese culture than I. There are some helpful footnotes scattered throughout which help orientate the lost reader - but they can't replicate the innate recognition which comes with immersion.

Some of the stories read, at times, like poetry:

the error was like a small tear in the calf of a silk stocking, just a tiny cool spot at first, a premonition lying in the subconscious like a snake.

I've certainly not seen anything that evocative in mainstream Western sci-fi. It's full of these poetic rubies in the rubble.

Amusingly, some of the stories end with very different moral lessons than you'd find in an English compendium. It certainly made me reflect on my baked-in cultural assumptions.

There are enough good stories in here to outweigh the bad, and they are really good. But I'd recommend skipping through a few of the more tedious entries.