Took me forever to finish this, which isn't really a reflection on any one of the participating authors (well, maybe one or two) but more that it doesn't really gel as a collection. Liu rightly warns against reading the stories here as comments on today's China - any author tries to comment on the world at large, not just what foreigners want to learn about their country. That the best of these stories still seem to share a lack of surprise at what very quickly imposed modernity will do to people doesn't make them any less relevant.

Not everything here clicks with me, some of it is much to derivative and didactic (Ma Boyong's Orwell rewrite "City of Silence" especially feels like a missed opportunity), but the best ones - Xia Jia's ensouling of technology as if it slotted right into an ongoing mythologizing of the world, Hao Jingfang's beautifully lower-deck "Folding Beijing", Liu Cixin's hilarious "Taking Care of God" - ring true no matter what the background.

Chinese science fiction writers can no longer treat "Where are we going?" as an answered question. - Xia Jia