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language: Chinese (English tr. various)
country: China
year: 2020
form: short fiction
genre(s): science fiction, fantasy
dates read: 20.2.26-26.2.26
Xia Jia’s A Summer Beyond Your Reach collects fourteen short stories, originally published in Chinese between 2007 and 2019 and translated by Emily Jin, R.F. Kuang, Ken Liu, and Carmen Yiling Yan (plus one story co-translated by Jin and Liu). I said when I was still early in the collection that I didn’t think I really vibed with Xia Jia, though I hoped the rest of it would change my mind and, fortunately, it has.
the big pitfall of the collection is that Xia Jia has a tendency to get bogged down in explaining her science-fictional Concepts. the weakest stories are ones like “The Psychology Game” (tr. Jin and Liu), “Duet of Love” (tr. Kuang), or “All You Need Is Love” (tr. Jin), where the story is basically entirely about explaining its Concept. a few stories, like “On Miluo River” (tr. Jin) start off strong and play to her strengths in other ways but then get stuck on the Concept at the end. I enjoyed the early parts of “On Miluo River” — about an aspiring psychohistorian trying to convince the Warring States poet Qu Yuan not to commit suicide in order to pass his certification exam, framed as a series of letters from an aspiring writer to an older writer whose work she admires — but, while I can appreciate the impulse behind its conclusion (as a memorial for the sci-fi writer Liu Wenyang, who died in 2007), the reveal of its Concept at the end made it fall a bit flat.
however! Xia Jia is at her best when she focuses not on Concepts but on her characters. the collection starts off strong on this front, with “Six Views of a Spring Festival” (tr. Liu), a melancholy mosaic of glimpses into the lives of different characters at what turn out to be six different spring holidays. it’s a little diffuse, but a good starting point.
“Up in the Air” (tr. Jin) suffers from some lapses in translation — Emily Jin’s translations in particular had some tense inconsistencies, I think related to the fact that Chinese is more concerned with aspect than time, making it easier to lose track of the sequence of actions — but it’s nonetheless a compelling story, about a woman in a city drowned by rising sea levels, caught between the water, where she makes her living diving to retrieve things from former residents’ homes, and the neighborhood she grew up in, now a wealthy enclave literally floating in the air above the drowned ruins.
the first real highlight, though, is the long story “A Time Beyond Your Reach” (tr. Yan), which tells a by turns lovely and gripping story about obsession and loss built around a simple premise: one of its characters finds that her personal time/timing is literally slower than the people around her; the other is living (again, literally) so fast that it’s hard for him to slow down long enough to interact with others. in some ways this could have been simply a metaphor for two characters who are divided by circumstances beyond their control, but I think the science-fictional aspect of the story makes its conclusion stronger by making the division so literal. really good.
the next-longest story, “Eternal Summer Dream” (also tr. Yan), is also a standout, following two people — a Traveler who can instinctively jump between distant times and an Immortal whose life is linear but seemingly endless — in journey from the earliest moments of Chinese history to the distant future as the sun expands to devour the earth, exploring the tensions between their disparate sense of time.
“Heat Island” (tr. Liu) didn’t blow me away, but it is — appropriately — atmospheric, following two atmospheric science students preparing for their undergraduate thesis defenses as the weather in Beijing gets a bit weird. it feels appropriately like a fever dream, and I appreciate that while it does spend some time on its Concept it also resists the urge to explain everything about it — the concept is present and explained but not belabored as is the case in some of the other stories.
the other stories that stood out to me were “Light of Their Days” (tr. Jin) — about a woman trying to reconcile her present with her high-tech near-future present abstract knowledge that her 106-year-old grandmother is a veteran of the Second Sino-Japanese War/World War II — and “Night Journey of the Dragon-Horse” (tr. Liu). the latter, about a dragon automaton traveling through a distant-future, post-human cityscape in search of a new purpose, I had actually read previously, as it was published in the Invisible Planets anthology that Liu edited and translated, but it made a much stronger impression on me this time; I think it helped that it was near the end of the collection, so I’d had time to get a feel for Xia Jia’s vibe. the final story, “Tongtong’s Summer” (tr. Liu), about a girl whose grandfather is assisted by a telepresence-directed robot while recovering from an injry, was also enjoyable, though my experience of it was thrown off a bit by a strong sense of déjà vu.
the title of the collection I think is apt: the best stories here feel like a sticky, humid summer night, full of but also fraught with or weighed down by possibility. love is a recurring theme, but it’s typically a love that is thwarted or unrealized; time is another, with stories bothing textually musing on and formally exploring the passage of time. the translations are, notwithstanding the tense issues (most prominent in Jin’s translations) and occasional malapropisms, quite good. I was really impressed with Carmen Yiling Yan’s work, and I’ll be looking forward to reading more of her translations now (Ken Liu’s are also very good but that goes without saying, lol). there are a small handful of explanatory footnotes scattered through the book; I think I would have preferred them as endnotes, but they did mostly provide useful context (explaining who Qu Yuan was in “On Miluo River”, for example), so I think it’s useful that they were there.
I think I would still say that “A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight” (tr. Ken Liu strangely not collected here despite having been published in Clarkesworld, which published A Summer Beyond Your Reach) is probably my favorite Xia Jia story, but “A Time Beyond Your Reach” and “Eternal Summer Dream” now definitely give it a run for its money — it’s definitely worth giving the collection a look for those alone, which make up about a third of its page count.
moods: emotional, hopeful, lighthearted, reflective