TBSFotY vo1 - Chen Quifan "The Smog Society"

 Chen Quifan's "The Smog Society" was published in Lightspeed in their August 2015 issue. It was translated into English by Ken Liu and Carmen Yiling Yang. The text of the story can be found at the Lightspeed website.

This, again, is the kind of story I love. In it a very human, very personal drama plays out against a SFF background - the same kind of thing as we saw with Miller's Calved.


The story is a slice of life of a man who spends his, rather lonely, retirement gathering data for a group known as the "Municipal Smog Research and Prevention Society" also known as the "smog society".

The "Smog Society's" concern is an ever present fog that hangs over the city that seems to be implicated in a range of maladies.

Though his travels through his city -- beautifully represented, I must say -- we learn a few things.

We learn that he -- and practically everyone else in the city -- is depressed, in some way or another. We also learn that he has many regrets, chiefly the way things panned out with his wife -- how he let their relationship sink into a mire of indifference and silence (at least on his part). Finally, through the researches of the "Smog Society" we learn (and this is the science fiction, I suppose) that there is a deep connection between the smog and human feeling -- the smog and human unhappiness are in a mutually reinforcing relationship, the more people feel down, the more smog gathers, the more smog gathers, the more it affects them.

Anyone who has any experience of depression itself will recognize the smog's effects:

[T]he most immediate consequence of smog was the sense of removal from the world. Whether you were dealing with people or things, you felt as though you were separated by a layer of frosted glass. No matter how hard you tried, you couldn't really see or touch.

 

This notion of distance, of being unable to touch and feel and see is repeated on practically every level in the story. It's in the story of Lao Sun and his disintegrat(ing/ed) marriage, it's in the way that people cannot see or speak to one another, in the way that the smog makes the rest of the (still beautiful) world invisible.

I genuinely loved the way that this kind of metaphor played out at different levels.

There is also clearly a political aspect to this -- which I'm not qualified to speak to, but it's there.

I found the sections of reminiscing on his marriage to be powerful and beautifully done.


What's interesting, finally, is that the first time I read the story a few years ago, I found the ending interesting, somewhat charming, but a little meh. Thinking about it a second time, though, I feel a lot better about the ending - Lao Sun's taking up the role of the clown is, in fact, a radical and rational act in a lot of ways. In bringing happiness to people, he's explicitly taking up the fight against the smog, he's acknowledging hope, and engaging directly with people. Bridging that gap.


Great story.

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