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Reading: China Mountain Zhang
Sep. 30th, 2017 12:45 pmMaureen F McHugh's China Mountain Zhang is probably the least science fictiony science fiction novel I've ever read; in terms of plot, it's much closer to most literary fiction, being solely concerned with ordinary people living their ordinary lives and what this says about the world they live in. The title character, Zhang, is a young gay Chinese-American man, and the novel consists of five vignettes of episodes from his life as he goes through the process of growing up and working out who he is and what he wants to do with his life, interspersed with vignettes of the lives of people who interact with him. However, Zhang lives in a twenty-second century America which has undergone a proletarian revolution following a global depression and which is now a satellite of the only remaining global superpower, China. Direct neural interfacing with technology is normal, and there are colonies on Mars, but climate change has left a swathe of the continental US uninhabitable.
Zhang's journey of self-discovery takes him from a precarious life aas a construction technician in his native New York to an Arctic research station (the description of the frozen darkness of the Arctic night is stunning) to a prestigious university in China and back to New York as a qualified engineer with a bright future ahead of him. Interwoven with his story are the stories of Angel, one of the fliers in the popular sport of kite-racing; Martine and Alexi, colonists on Mars; and San-Xiang, a young woman Zhang takes on a couple of dates in the first story. Between them, they build up a picture of a future society that 25 years after the book was first published still seems plausible (apart from the fact that in this future, people still use fax machines - a sure sign of early 90s sf), including some of the historical background that led to it. It's not a dystopian future, although it's very far from utopian either: life for Zhang as a gay man in the US is difficult, while in China homosexual acts are illegal; women are still judged by their looks and vulnerable to assault by men, but there's no active repression, political discussion is allowed, and most people seem to have an adequate standard of living. It feels very real.
China Mountain Zhang is a quiet book, but I thought it was brilliant; it feels like a purely character-driven novel, but actually the world-building is fantastic as well, and the writing is just beautiful.
Zhang's journey of self-discovery takes him from a precarious life aas a construction technician in his native New York to an Arctic research station (the description of the frozen darkness of the Arctic night is stunning) to a prestigious university in China and back to New York as a qualified engineer with a bright future ahead of him. Interwoven with his story are the stories of Angel, one of the fliers in the popular sport of kite-racing; Martine and Alexi, colonists on Mars; and San-Xiang, a young woman Zhang takes on a couple of dates in the first story. Between them, they build up a picture of a future society that 25 years after the book was first published still seems plausible (apart from the fact that in this future, people still use fax machines - a sure sign of early 90s sf), including some of the historical background that led to it. It's not a dystopian future, although it's very far from utopian either: life for Zhang as a gay man in the US is difficult, while in China homosexual acts are illegal; women are still judged by their looks and vulnerable to assault by men, but there's no active repression, political discussion is allowed, and most people seem to have an adequate standard of living. It feels very real.
China Mountain Zhang is a quiet book, but I thought it was brilliant; it feels like a purely character-driven novel, but actually the world-building is fantastic as well, and the writing is just beautiful.
