★★☆☆☆ A confusing novelette

Introduction to 2181 Overture, Second Edition

Gu Shi, Emily Jin (translator)

In this issue of Clarkeworld I read only the story "Introduction to 2181 Overture, Second Edition", by Gu Shi, translated from the Chinese by Emily Jin. It is a finalist for the 2024 Best Novelette Hugo Award. It's a confusing and difficult-to-follow future historical pseudodocumentary, concerned mostly with the consequences of widely available cold sleep. There's also a mother-daughter story tacked on -- it transpires that the author of the first edition, one Xiao Miao, was the daughter of the author of the introduction to the second edition.

It was kind of hard work to read and to believe, and I never enjoyed it.

The translation felt a little awkward to me. I do not read Chinese, so I can't compare the English version to the original. However, we have sentences like these,

The results indicated that Xiao Miao has advanced stage lung cancer. She was only twenty years old.

That intrusion of the present-tense "has" feels quite wrong to me, something a native English speaker would be unlikely to say.

Sad to say, this was a miss for me.

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