The Opposite and the Adjacent, by Liu Yang

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(Math Fantasy) Explorers find a wrecked alien spaceship, a dead alien, and a logbook that suggests he came from a world with different laws of physics. (2,015 words; Time: 06m)

Rating: ★★★☆☆, Average

Recommended By: SFRevu:4

Against the Stream, by A Que

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(Time Travel) An "illness" causes a man to wake each morning in the previous day, and as he lives his life backwards, he sees the mistakes he made. (3,036 words; Time: 10m)

Rating: ★★★★☆ Recommended

The Hunger Tower, by Pan Haitian (translated by Nick Stember)

Clarkesworld Magazine, July 2015; 8,374 words
Rating: 1, Needs improvement  Recommended By:   SFRevu:4

An aircraft crashes in the desert on an unpopulated planet, and the passengers struggle to survive.

Mini-Review (click to view--possible spoilers)

The basic outline of the story is fine: a group of stranded people start eating each other. One of them discovers how to escape, but ends up being killed and eaten before he can tell them.

This is the ultimate tell-don't show story. Nearly all of it is narration, with random POV changes. It's heavily larded with fantasy science. e.g. "A laser is just a kind of vibration." They can't eat the local food because the DNA has a different helix, but the local animals can eat them with no problems.

Is it the translator's fault?

Apparently not. Shao Ping actually looked at the original Chinese story:

I just compared the beginning of both–and tbh my modern Chinese is rusty so take my opinion with a lot of salt–but while in a few places the translator is perhaps overwrought and the Chinese dialogue is smoother, he’s faithful.

File770, December 8, 2015