China Mountain Zhang

I picked this up after Prof. Eric Rabkin (from the Fantasy and Science Fiction Coursera course) read an excerpt on the protagonist's experiences with mind-bending “daoist engineering”. Overall, I'm glad I did - even if much in this book left me wanting more.

Basically, an impressionistic overview of a near future Earth (and Mars), now dominated by the People's Republic of China. I'm all about future histories that chart a post-white socio-political hegemony (indeed, I write much the same thing - only I assume both India and China will be the competing superpowers, rather than just China). I like having my own prejudices jarred when, for example, the USA is treated as a developing country, with “brain drain” flowing from the US to China. Just the fact that that jarred me bespeaks much, I think, about my implicit worldview and current geopolitics/economics. I also enjoyed, as Prof. Rabkin did, Zhang's exciting and interesting dips into daoist engineering - that was one of the few times the book hinted at more mind-bending SF potential: what will our creativity and our spirituality look like when we can augment our thoughts with an almost infinite Internet?

That said, this book fell short for me. It was a plotless, meandering look at this (admittedly very cool) future world, but - since it had no story to sink your teeth into - I often felt frustrated. (Especially when chapters strayed to characters I had little interest in, such as the flyers.) It was basically like Love Actually in terms of its “six degrees of separation”/”people doing stuff” look at humanity. And it was a bit like Michael Chabon in its exploration of sexuality and sexual politics. Though I found that the story's “the love that dare not speak its name” theme of homophobia and hidden love was a bit outdated. At least, it strained my credulity: 200 years from now, and people are still shocked to hear that someone's gay?! Oh, come on. I can understand (and appreciate) the meta of having a LGBT protagonist in something published from the 1990s, but I would have preferred if Zhang's sexuality was seen as supremely normal, instead of something that's a liability, something to hide. I mean, for the love of God, 1990s Riker regularly macks on aliens of indeterminate gender! Maybe that just goes to show that, once again, the Law of Star Trek is proved: whatever SF idea you've had, Star Trek has already done it - and probably better than you did.

Solid, but not mind-blowing. B.