A good anthology, no duds, smooth and lyrical translation. The editor did a great job writing afterwords that gave insight into each author’s life and tied it to the story; for instance, Ma Boyong’s amazing “The Great Migration,” about how hordes of Martian immigrants crowd onto the space shuttles to visit Earth every time the planets approached one another, was inspired by his experience with the annual travel crush during Chinese New Year. Other stories look back at traumatic events in Chinese history, like Zhao HaiHong’s “Rendezvous: 1937,” which had time travelers reacting to the Nanjing Holocaust; or reference folklore like Regina Kanyu Wang’s “The Tide of Moon City,” which jumps off the legend of the cowherd and the weaver girl to explore political and personal tensions between binary planets in a shared star system. I think my favorite was “The Last Save” by Gu Shi, which allowed people to go back to previous save points and reload events and try again after they’ve messed things up, and then pivoted to inspect the impact such actions would have on their loved ones.
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