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A Collection of Tang Fei's SF by S. Quiouyi, John Chu, Xueting Christine Ni, Ken Liu, Tang Fei
kittyg's review
4.0
So, this is a translated collection which was originally written in Chinese by the author and has since been translated by various translators into English. It's an SF collection with lots of interesting themes in the various stories, and although it's not been edited particularly well on the grammar (e.g. some sentences have no space between the full stop and the capitol of the next line and some speech just runs on even when it's a new person speaking rather than being on a new line) I believe this is due to the fact that it's been translated from a language which reads vastly differently to English. Grammar issues aside this book is full of great stories, some of which you can find and read for free online.
I'm going to leave my updates as I went through the book below as they were all fairly short stories and I don't have too much to say about each.
Story 1 & 2: This collection is definitely weird. It's hard to tell if it's a cultural difference, or the translation, or just the aim of the author, but it's not 'bad-weird' it's more 'good-weird'.
I've read two of the stories.
Call Girl was less to my tastes as it was fairly simple as an idea and shorter so I would give it 3*s. It focuses on a kind of prostitute who instead of selling sex sells experiences and stories at high, high prices.
The Person Who Saw Cetus had more of a story and flow to it and felt a bit more SF & imaginative 4* This one felt more like it was well considered and had some moments of real power. It followed a young girl who had a performance artist as a father and as time went on his performances became ever more wacky and dangerous through to the bitter end. A definite interesting story.
3rd story: The Path To Freedom, this was excellent. I really liked the concept and the translation was really strong too. It felt like a fresh take on an older idea, read fluently and was generally intriguing SF. Aliens, disease, monsters and evolution all in one. 4.5*s I feel like this one was kind of similar at times to tropes of vampires and the story of The Girl with All The Gifts, but it also felt like a fresh idea and felt like it had some real good moments worth pondering.
Story 4: A Universal Elergy - A weird and creepy story told in letter form from the POV of a sister to her brother as she travels across the universe with a strange alien being whose culture is vastly different to humanity - 4*s. I definitely found this one to be disconcerting and bizarre but also fairly fascinating too.
Finally, story 5: Broken Star. This one is also one of my favourites from the collection as it follows a slightly more gothic sf theme and it had some cool twists I didn't see coming. It has a young girl at the centre of the story and each night she sees a pale woman who can read the stars, but she doesn't quite know at first if this woman is crazy or who she is and where she comes from. It's a bizarre one again, but I really enjoyed this one :) 4.5*s
Overall this was actually a surprisingly strong collection of SF and I really liked many of the translators too. I would certainly say it's worth looking these up to see if you can find them online, and I will be on the look out for more of Tang Fei's work in future too. 4*s overall from me :)
I'm going to leave my updates as I went through the book below as they were all fairly short stories and I don't have too much to say about each.
Story 1 & 2: This collection is definitely weird. It's hard to tell if it's a cultural difference, or the translation, or just the aim of the author, but it's not 'bad-weird' it's more 'good-weird'.
I've read two of the stories.
Call Girl was less to my tastes as it was fairly simple as an idea and shorter so I would give it 3*s. It focuses on a kind of prostitute who instead of selling sex sells experiences and stories at high, high prices.
The Person Who Saw Cetus had more of a story and flow to it and felt a bit more SF & imaginative 4* This one felt more like it was well considered and had some moments of real power. It followed a young girl who had a performance artist as a father and as time went on his performances became ever more wacky and dangerous through to the bitter end. A definite interesting story.
3rd story: The Path To Freedom, this was excellent. I really liked the concept and the translation was really strong too. It felt like a fresh take on an older idea, read fluently and was generally intriguing SF. Aliens, disease, monsters and evolution all in one. 4.5*s I feel like this one was kind of similar at times to tropes of vampires and the story of The Girl with All The Gifts, but it also felt like a fresh idea and felt like it had some real good moments worth pondering.
Story 4: A Universal Elergy - A weird and creepy story told in letter form from the POV of a sister to her brother as she travels across the universe with a strange alien being whose culture is vastly different to humanity - 4*s. I definitely found this one to be disconcerting and bizarre but also fairly fascinating too.
Finally, story 5: Broken Star. This one is also one of my favourites from the collection as it follows a slightly more gothic sf theme and it had some cool twists I didn't see coming. It has a young girl at the centre of the story and each night she sees a pale woman who can read the stars, but she doesn't quite know at first if this woman is crazy or who she is and where she comes from. It's a bizarre one again, but I really enjoyed this one :) 4.5*s
Overall this was actually a surprisingly strong collection of SF and I really liked many of the translators too. I would certainly say it's worth looking these up to see if you can find them online, and I will be on the look out for more of Tang Fei's work in future too. 4*s overall from me :)
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