Tik tak tock

What if sci-fi was more about how people – or creatures, or beings and machines – relate and connect and less about them killing each other? What if it was more a disquieting little spike of unlikelihood in the middle of a rather likely, rather ordinary-looking reality? Not that I don’t love a space opera. Sometimes I’d like to listen to a well-played duet.

What, asked Xia Jia, if speculative fiction wasn’t set in the West, in a big city, but right at home? Would it still count? She wrote some. And then some more. And then she started winning awards.

But it took a trip to Warsaw for me to find her in a bricks-and-mortar bookshop. Xia Jia has stories published here and there in English, translated by Emily Jin, Kate Baker, Ken Liu and others. But Joanna Karmasz brought them all together in one fat paperback.

The bookshop was the showcase for Tajfuny, a small press that publishes East Asian literature in Polish. I found it in Warsaw last summer, got myself some Yoko Ogawa stories I hadn’t read, and, and… The editions are things of beauty, but I had to think of my luggage. Tajfuny is where I found Xia Jia, in Joanna Karmasz’s translations. The collection is called Tik-tak, or Tick Tock, after the title story. You can hear that one in English and find links to more on Clarkesworld. But if you’re able to read Polish, you’ll get so much more.

If you’ve read Samanta Schwablin’s Little Eyes and wished it wasn’t quite so 1001% hopeless, try these. If you hugely enjoyed R F Kuang, but found the violent reality of the Poppy War overwhelming, try these. If you were fascinated by Yan Ge’s Strange Beasts of China, Karmasz translated those too, and you’ll find some of those beasts here. But much of the “action” isn’t action at all. It’s going to college, seeing your grandparents, avoiding violin practice… until the unexpected happens. I’ll be looking for more Xia Jia in any language I can find her. Hope you find her in a language you can read, too.

About Kate Sotejeff-Wilson

Translator, editor, writer, reader