One regretful consequence of the shift in editorial approach is that I’m no longer able to include multiple stories from each author to illustrate their range. I also intentionally included a few stories that might be considered less accessible to readers in the West: Zhang Ran’s time-travel tale plays with chuanyue tropes that are uniquely Chinese, and Baoshu’s entry deepens its emotional resonance with the reader the more the reader knows of modern Chinese history.

I picked established writers-the sardonic, biting wit of Han Song is showcased here in two stories-as well as fresh voices-I think more readers should know the works of Gu Shi, Regina Kanyu Wang, and Anna Wu. I included stories here longer than the longest story in Invisible Planets as well as stories shorter than the shortest story there. Seven of the stories have never been published before in translation, and almost every story was first published in Chinese in the 2010s. In total, there are sixteen stories in this anthology from fourteen authors-twice as many as were present in Invisible Planets. Beyond the core genre magazines, I also looked at stories published in literary journals, on the web, and in gaming and fashion magazines. This has been a gratifying result for me and my fellow translators fans of Chinese SF the agents, editors, and publishers who help make publishing translated works possible and above all, the Chinese authors who now have more readers to delight.Ĭompared with the first anthology, I curated Broken Stars with an eye toward expanding the range of voices included as well as the emotional palette and the narrative styles.

Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past series (sometimes known as the “Three-Body” trilogy), praised by President Barack Obama as “wildly imaginative, really interesting,” showed anglophone readers that there is a large body of SF written in Chinese to be discovered, and Invisible Planets only whetted their appetite. Since the publication of Invisible Planets in 2016, many readers have written to me to ask for more Chinese science fiction.

These broken stars series in order