Book Review: China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh

China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh

Paperback, 313 pages

Published April 15th 1997 by Orb Books (first published March 1992)

Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel (1993)

Nebula Award Nominee for Best Novel (1992)

Locus Award for Best First Novel (1993)

James Tiptree Jr. Award (1992)

Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men's Science Fiction/Fantasy (1993)

China Mountain Zhang is a debut novel? Really? This forward-thinking and groundbreaking work was released in 1992? Wow. I admit this is my first time reading Maureen F. McHugh, I had it in my TBR forever, I don't even remember where I bought, but I assumed I just saw it on the shelf at a used book store and thought it sounded good. I was pushed over the edge to read it when Luke Barrage on the Science Fiction Book Review Podcast gave it high marks.

In the time when this novel was written, the USSR had recently collapsed. In hindsight, the possibility of that country falling apart doesn't seem that weird but in 1984 no science fiction writers were imagining a future without the Soviet Union. One of the things that makes this novel so impressive in the early 90s McHugh saw a future where the United States had the same thing happen to it. This became eerie as I read this turning the coronavirus shut down and the country is on the verge of an economic collapse that this novel predicts. (p.290) Not to forget that the 21st century is often labeled "The Chinese Century" as only two superpowers remain, and Chinese influence is growing all the time. In the world of this novel shows a totally Chinese century. The job of science fiction is not to predict, any of the greats in the field will tell you that but when you read about mass shootings in John Brunner's books from the sixties or the Chinese century in this novel from 1992 it is still impressive.

On paper, this might not seem like the kinda book I would enjoy. First of all as a storyteller I am very plot-driven, and while character and setting are important to me a book that relies almost entirely on just being a slice of life normally wouldn't be my jam. That said the world-building is some of the best I have ever read, and I really enjoy that. It is subtle and naturally done with very fine touches to make this world feel well lived in. The only thing that pulled me a little out of the story was the chapters set on Mars, but that is just the science being inaccurate. On that tangent, I am fine with a surreal Bradbury-ian or Burrough-ish surreal sci-fi Mars when the novel is consistent. The problem here is that the rest of the novel felt realistic to me. This is one minor nitpick I have.

China Mountain Zhang is a well formated for a slice of life novel that really doesn't use twists. It starts with Zhang our title character and spins out to a few different characters from there. The characters do have arcs but they are very subtle. Through the various point of view characters, we get different windows into post-revolution communist Chinese influenced America, An Arctic research station, a Chinese Mars farm colony, and a Chinese university. There are short elements of cyberpunk that is peppered through-out, people in this future be engineered to network and share data.

The Stereotype of Sci-fi is that the settings overshadow the characters, but this is not the case. Zhang, Alexi, and San-Xiang are products of this would but they are fully developed characters.To a certain degree, each of them are total subjects to the forces of their world. That is something that we who currently in quarantine thanks to a virus all relate too. San-Xiang has to get surgery to not appear what this culture deems as ugly, Zhang who is half Latino gets gene therapy to look more Chinese, both things that seem hard to understand in our largely politically sensitive 21st century, but the century in this novel is so very different. They want desperately to matter in this culture and be able to assimilate into the Chinese motherland. The main character is gay and the book was given an award for gay men's Sci-fi, but honestly, I didn't notice he was until late in the book.

The political theory of the novel is laid out very clearly in two info-dumps that happened to work for me but might come off as heavy-handed to some. This book is not pro-capitalism but it is very far from promoting communism. In that sense, I don't know if I can call this a traditional dystopia. I mean the problems with communism are best illustrated When Zhang is assigned a new apartment building that has no water above the fifth floor. This is a great critique of Mao and Soviet Style communism but In reality, the 21st-century version has enough capitalism to look more privileged than anything dystopic. Again McHugh's job was not to predict.

This novel simply explores the idea of a Chinese century dialed to 11. The second civil war of this novel might seem like outlandish a few years ago but the one thing this novel missed was how the partisan divide would drive this fight. Told through a Mosaic a style That John Brunner brought to genre in the late Sixties with Stand on Zanzibar is more common today, and maybe best used in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Unlike the those two books, the characters are more closely tied together and this novel is not bloated. It is a short and effective read, perfect length of around three hundred pages.

I enjoyed this book, but I think it is more of an important book than a fun one. I think it has a lot to teach about world-building and it holds a very revealing mirror to China in the late 20th century. Worthy of all the awards and as this second great depression looms I hope McHugh is not right about the collapse of this economy and how that will go down in a Chinese century.