Future Science Fiction Digest Volume 9 is available!
Issue 9 is The East Asia Special Issue, supported by Chinese SFF agent Future Administration Affairs. The team is gorgeous. The chief editor is Alex Shvartsman. And writers are Chinese Wu Guan, Dai Da, Gu shi, Wei Ma, Argentina Gustavo Bondoni, Korean Kim Bo-Young and Me. Great cover illustration is by Monokubo.
My contribution is the solar-punk novelette Just Like Migratory Birds, translated by Emily Balistrieri. This is a story about Chinese New Year traveling back to home habitat develops space travel. Yes, I mean it.
In the center of the zero-gravity lab, in which I was alone, a wind with the salty smell of the air eighty meters above the East China Sea was blowing at 50 kph. Floating with my body parallel to the floor while I was controlling the wind, I placed a hand on the titanium cage surrounding the round, two-meter observation stage in the middle of the room, and pulled myself toward the blue glow inside….
The protagonist is a Japanese animal scientist Tsukasa who waits at the space station for their Chinese partner who went back home to China for new year. Tsukasa thought, Chinese don’t go far from the lower orbit station of the Earth, because…Chinese engineers developed lower orbital transportation convenient, because, sigh…, yes because they should go back home town every year. This is why Chinese don’t go further than the Mars colonial. How I would discuss with him that I got a ticket to go another solar system…
It’s space development story, and our ethics goes, and a romance, enjoy.