Something Almost Completely Different: The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories  

            As a reader, I have a comfort zone. It’s sci-fi/fantasy, it’s murder mysteries, it’s books about America, or 20^th century Hollywood or Victorian England. I haven’t read anything in translation since I finished undergrad years ago. Reading The Way Spring Arrives was like jumping in and out of my comfort zone repeatedly. It’s a genre I’m used to, but from a culture I know pathetically little about. 

There’s some top notch, will-recommend-to-my-short-story-book-club-later, sci-fi and fantasy in here (“The Way Spring Arrives” and “Baby, I Love You” come to mind though there were many others). There were also some stories that were just absolutely wild— stories that walk that very sci-fi line of so imaginative you’re enthralled, but then spend the next several minutes going “wtf did I just read?” (“A Saccharophillic Earthworm,” what the heck happened there? Someone please swap theories with me). Others were simply delightful like “Restaurant at the End of the Universe: Tai-Chi Mashed Taro” which is a spin off of the Douglas Adams book and “What Does the Fox Say” a flash piece about linguistics and Ylvis. 

And then there were a group of stories I would categorize as “I am a dumb American white person with no cultural context for this and need to do some further research.” I haven’t read a story in a while that I just fully did not understand, and this anthology had a few. That’s on me, though, not the book. The book tried to help me understand wherever possible. 

There were a bunch of really good essays about translation that helped me understand not only the challenges the translators were facing, but also some of the broader context of Chinese sci-fi. Rebecca F. Kuang (author of The Poppy War) has an excellent essay about it as does Yilin Wang. Yilin Wang’s is particularly interesting as it is an essay about translating two stories that appear in the book after the essay. So, unlike some of the others, you know the translator’s thoughts and have some context going into the two short stories. 

I also found Jing Tsu’s “The Futures of Genders in Chinese Science Fiction” really engaging. It told me a lot about women in Chinese literature historically and about how China first encountered the sci-fi genre (as we know it) as an import in the era of Jules Verne. It’s one of those essays that helps you understand while showing you just how much there is you don’t know. 

Each story and essay is entirely its own thing. There are all types of subgenres, tones, subjects, and styles. If you can pick this up and find nothing you like, I’d be shocked. I learned a ton reading this and enjoyed some quality short stories that I hope I can nominate for awards next year. 

Who this is for: Anyone who likes sci-fi and/or short fiction. Also, anyone who has ever thought about translating something and went “wow, that seems hard, I can’t believe people can do that.”