"Waste Tide" by Chen Qiufan

In the first scene of Waste Tide, an environmental activist attempts a dangerous boarding of a giant ocean freighter. It's daring, acrobatically gifted, we understand the motivation—and it fails, disastrously. That kind of sets the tone for the novel, which shows a host of conflicting characters and factions being shown their own hubris by factors beyond their control.

I'd heard Chen Qiufan talk at FutureCon, and happened to run across Waste Tide at a bookstore not long after. A cyberpunk tale set in a Chinese town built around e-waste recycling, the novel follows local and foreign characters as they attempt to contain or exploit an unexpected technological mutation.

This was a fairly absorbing read; I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it. The social elements were the most compelling part of the book for me—the "waste people" organizing, and the elites who profit off of their labor. The plot is somewhat diffuse, misdirecting—the first half or more of the book concern a double-edged deal with an green-washing American company that turns out to be a narrative macguffin—and characters exhibit a kind of ineffective agency. They do things, they make choices, but they're rendered largely irrelevant by larger events: more powerful factions, a massive tsunami, a kind of accidental Singularity.

Chi SF- Grace of Kings

For the January meeting of the Chicago Speculative Fiction Community, we discussed “The Grace of Kings” (2015) by Ken Liu. The novel had been popping up on my radar a lot lately—first novel from a writer who's already done some stellar short work and translations, including the Hugo-winning “Three Body Problem” by Cixin Liu (no relation), which Phandemonium (and a few Chi-SF members) discussed back in November at Windycon.

“The Grace of Kings” is an epic fantasy drawing heavily on the late Warring States period in Chinese history (200ish BCE). Despite some supernatural/theological, steampunky, and otherwise fantastic elements, one the whole it reminded us much more of the geopolitical/historical vein of fantasy, as opposed to the magical or mythical. Notes on that distinction, as well as possible spoilers, below: