This is a collection of Chinese short science fiction stories, translated to English by Ken Liu. It's not a intended to be a "best of" but more of a representative look at contemporary SF. As a western reader I found some of the stories a little hard to identify with, as I think I lacked some of the cultural background to understand the full contexts of some of them. But they were nonetheless an interesting read. Overall the tone of almost all of them is quite dark and often rather Orwellian; there's a strong recurring feeling of anxiety and distrust of technology and the future (one of the essays at the end actually discusses this directly). I also felt there was quite a lot of subtle (and sometimes overt) misogyny; really no representations at all of a future where women are equal, and generally the women are either described as beautiful objects of desire or unattractive harpies, little in between (even though some of the stories are written by women). Still, a lot of the stories are very thought-provoking.

My two favourites were probably at the very end, and both by Liu Cixin: Taking Care of God describes what happens on Earth when our ancient ancestors (who have spent the last millions of years roaming the universe in their starships) return to Earth, which they had seeded with our ancestors in our far past, and ask if they can retire for their final days on our planet. After being able to irrefutably convince Earth's governments that they are, in fact, our ancestral "gods" and exchanging masses of valuable information and advanced technology, the gods migrate down to our planet where each household adopts a "god" to take care of. With initially fairly predictable results, and depressing commentary on humanity, but a few interesting twists.

My second favourite was actually the essay by Liu Cixin that follows this story, in which he talks about how his Three Body trilogy revolutionalized Chinese science fiction and how it's looked at. While I've read and enjoyed that trilogy, I hadn't realized how earth-shaking it had been in China and what an almost cult-like following it has developed. The essay includes an entertaining story about how CCTV, China's largest state television broadcaster, tried to hold an interview series about science fiction and had the audience (clearly full of Three Body fans) erupt into chants of "Eliminate human tyranny! The world belongs to Trisolaris!" (a quote from the Three Body novel), completely baffling the hosts.

Anyway, if you're a science fiction fan but have been primarily limited to reading English SF, then this is an interesting collection to read that will broaden your experience and illustrate both how similar and how different SF from other background and languages can be.