psocoptera

Comments and my ballot.

I was not very into either of the remaining novelettes I hadn't already read. I AM AI was ye olde "having to resort to more cyborg parts to try to keep up with the pace of competing with robots (in this case AI) while still slipping further into hopeless debt" type thing (with a jarring aside about being a thousand years in the future, but people still use apps? and Bluetooth? I know science fictional futures are always actually about the present somehow, but I would have bought this a lot more set a hundred years in the future than being asked to believe that cultural/technological stagnation could be so extreme that people will still be using (and capitalizing!) Bluetooth a millennium on). Meanwhile "Introduction to 2181 Overture, Second Edition" was What If (Limited) Cryosleep, which, like, sure, what *if* cryosleep, I imagine that most of the English-language stories I've read on this topic are not accessible to the Chinese-speaking audience, so of course Chinese writers are going to sometimes explore topics and ideas that don't strike me-in-the-Anglosphere as particularly new. That's great, go them. This isn't even two cakes as much as "everyone should get cake". But I don't think there's anything here to particularly recommend to people who have already had access to various English-language takes on the topic.

(Aside: what is everybody's favorite cryosleep story? I recall liking Karl Schroeder's Lockstep quite a bit, although my favorite parts weren't the cryosleep aspect particularly. For sheer extreme forward-time-skipping fantasy you can't beat Vinge's bobbler universe, although that's not strictly speaking cryosleep, but it's definitely an extrapolation of what's interesting about cryosleep.)

Anyways. Here's my recs post about online novelettes, which mentions all four of the other stories. I had a really big and really personal reaction to "The Year Without Sunshine" that I guess I never wrote about that makes it a little harder to rank - "On the Fox Roads" might be a better story, but I'll remember Sunshine in five years and Fox Roads I probably won't. Meanwhile, "One Man's Treasure" was pretty fluffy, but I can recall a lot more about it now than I can about "Ivy". Not the only measure, but one of them. Here's an attempt at my ballot (although I keep switching the first two).

1 - “On the Fox Roads” by Nghi Vo
2 - “The Year Without Sunshine” by Naomi Kritzer
3 - “One Man’s Treasure” by Sarah Pinsker
4 - “Ivy, Angelica, Bay” by C.L. Polk
5 - I AM AI by Ai Jiang
6 - “Introduction to 2181 Overture, Second Edition”, Gu Shi, transl. Emily Jen