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various translators<\/p>\nvarious translators<\/p>\n
Apex Publications<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n September 27, 2018<\/p>\n 304 pages<\/p>\n grab a copy<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n (read my review<\/a><\/span> of <\/em>The Apex Book of World SF 4)<\/em><\/p>\n It’s a very<\/em> good day when we get another volume in the Apex Book of World<\/em> SF series, begun by Lavie Tidhar (series editor) and Apex nearly a decade ago. All five volumes feature some of the greatest speculative fiction you’ll ever read from around the world, including stories that have been translated into English from other languages. In Volume 5, editor Cristina Jurado focused not just on finding great stories but also on representing parts of the world that hadn’t received as much attention in previous volumes. The result is a collection that takes you from Singapore to Venezuela, Germany to Egypt, and many places in between. Here ghosts rub shoulders with untamed code, androids that are indistinguishable from humans cross paths with 3D-printed food, and space and time suddenly seem much more complex and beautiful.\u00a0 Here’s the list of stories:<\/p>\n Vina Jie-Min Prasad (Singapore) \u2014 “A Series of Steaks”<\/strong> I had already read many of these before getting my hands on this collection, and some I had read a few years ago. WSF5<\/em> was an opportunity for me to reread those stories (which I rarely do these days because my TBR stack is always yelling at me). In many cases, I loved the story even more the second time. Fujii’s “Violation of the TrueNet Security Act” is always a fun, gripping piece, but now that I’ve also read Gene Mapper<\/em> and Orbital<\/em> Cloud<\/em>, I can better appreciate Fujii’s ability to seamlessly weave in discussions about code into his larger story of a post-Internet world. His hard-sf stories are such a joy to read. Colanzi’s “Our Dead World,” too, was even better the second time. I had first read it in her collection of the same name, but reading it in relation to other writers’ stories offered an interesting new perspective on her tale of Mars and the stress of living on another planet.<\/p>\n I first encountered Chi Hui’s “Calculations of Artificials” and Karla Schmidt’s “Alone, On the Wind” in audio versions, and reading the text allowed me to notice details that I had missed before. Chi Hui’s chilling and sorrowful story about “artificials” trying to keep humans apart (so they wouldn’t kill each other in yet another nuclear war) goes to the heart of what it means to be human and come into conflict with other humans. Does the elimination of violence and acts of rage mean that the species has changed beyond recognition? Can such elements ever be purged from humanity and should they? Like Chi Hui’s story, Schmidt’s is a long, complex tale about conflict and aggression, but this time the war is between humans living on a desolate earth and a different species of human living on the shattered rocks hanging above the earth. We so rarely get German SFT these days, and “Alone, On the Wind” is a lovely example.<\/p>\n Other favorites include “A Series of Steaks” (which I read here for the first time and absolutely love<\/em>), “Ghostalker,” “You Will See the Moon Rise,” “Ambiguity Machines: An Examination,” and “Ugo.”<\/p>\n
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\nDa\u00edna Chaviano (Cuba, translated by Matthew D. Goodwin) \u2014 “Accursed Lineage”<\/strong>
\nDarcie Little Badger (USA\/Lipan Apache) \u2014 “Nk\u00e1sht \u00ed\u00ed”<\/strong>
\nT.L. Huchu (Zimbabwe) \u2014 “Ghostalker”<\/strong>
\nTaiyo Fujii (Japan, translated by Jim Hubbert) \u2014 “Violation of the TrueNet Security Act”<\/strong>
\nVandana Singh (India) \u2014 “Ambiguity Machines: An Examination”<\/strong>
\nBasma Abdel Aziz (Egypt, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette) \u2014 “Scenes from the Life of an Autocrat”<\/strong>
\nLiliana Colanzi (Bolivia, translated by Jessica Sequeira) \u2014 “Our Dead World”<\/strong>
\nBo-young Kim (South Korea, translated by Jihyun Park & Gord Sellar) \u2014 “An Evolutionary Myth”<\/strong>
\nIsrael Alonso (Spain, translated by Steve Redwood) \u2014 “You Will See the Moon Rise”<\/strong>
\nSara Saab (Lebanon) \u2014 “The Barrette Girls”<\/strong>
\nChi Hui (China, translated by John Chu) \u2014 “The Calculations of Artificials”<\/strong>
\nAna Hurtado (Venezuela) \u2014 “El C\u00f3ndor del Mach\u00e1ngara”<\/strong>
\nKarla Schmidt (Germany, translated by Lara M. Harmon) \u2014 “Alone, on the Wind”<\/strong>
\nEliza Victoria (Philippines) \u2014 “The Seventh”<\/strong>
\nTochi Onyebuchi (Nigeria\/USA) \u2014 “Screamers”<\/strong>
\nR.S.A. Garcia (Trinidad and Tobago) \u2014 “The Bois”<\/strong>
\nGiovanni De Feo (Italy) \u2014 “Ugo”<\/strong><\/p>\n