A stone cold classic of future lives which holds up more than 30 years after it was written.
We are small, governments are large, we survive in the cracks. Cold comfort.McHugh is one of the consistently best science fiction writers of my lifetime, and it's a scandal that most of her work is not reliably in print in the 2020s. On this positive side, China Mountain Zhang probably is her best work (though both her short story collections and the very out of print Mission Child are also truly excellent), and it is available to us. China Mountain Zhang is a modern classic of Science Fiction. It was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula and won the Otherwise and Lambda awards in 1993. It is currently in print both in North America (in a Tor Essentials edition) and outside it (in a Gateway SF Masterworks edition). Despite this, it isn’t really part of the conversation on the history of the genre in the way books from the fifties through seventies still do. There is probably a broader conversation to be had about how static and old the canon of SF is and how we could do with looping in some books from the 90s and 2000s which are now 25-35 years old (China Mountain Zhang is as old now as Starship Troopers was when CMZ was released). For the purposes of this review, however, I’ll focus on why this early 90s classic deserves a place in the pantheon.
This is a mosaic novel, a collection of nine vignettes ranging from short story to novelette length which tell the story of a China-dominated 22nd century. Five of these focus on our main character, Zhong Shan/Rafael Luis Zhang, a gay, biracial (Chinese/Latin) construction tech living – at least at the start of the novel – in New York. These are interleaved with four stories of people whose lives intersect with his, to a greater or lesser degree. Zhang is very much the focus, but the vignettes work well in adding depth and breadth to the society in which he lives, giving perspective on people, events, and places he has no access to (or is not in a position to understand). This is a very difficult structure to pull off; too much overlap and it’s just a poorly edited novel, too little and it’s simply a collection of disconnected shorts in a shared setting. But McHugh gets the balance right, and the result is a fascinating collage of a man and his world, vividly drawn.
Unlike much decades-old science fiction, it really is remarkable how much of McHugh’s 22nd seems plausible today. In the first half of the 21st century, the US economy goes down, bringing most of the world with it due to wide exposure to the US bond market. In the wake of this depression, the US government collapses, unable to provide basic services. China, less exposed than some of the other big players, is better placed to bounce back and becomes the leading technological, economic, and political power in the world. This leads to a proletariat revolution supported by China in the US, a civil war, and the eventual establishment of a socialist state. Living standards as between the two countries are inverted from what prevailed in the early 90s when McHugh was writing; a generally prosperous, advanced economy in China while the US in a backwater; not a terrible place to live but definitely a place Chinese citizens in good standing would look down their noses at. When the novel opens, the US has just come out of the ‘Great Cleansing Winds’ cultural revolution-style reactionary purge; things are only completely back to something approaching the pre-campaign normal about a year beforehand. Looking at the changes in geopolitics over the past 30 years, with the notable exception of a genuine proletariat revolution in the US, this medium term future is if anything a more likely path for the next century to follow than it was when the book was published.
In addition to the political speculation, it’s got a number of pieces of scientific speculation pretty nailed down as well (actually reasonably uncommon for books in a genre with “science” in the name). Climate change of ~4 degrees C has ravaged the planet, extreme drought making large swathes of territory –a wide corridor of the US just east of the Rockies, both sides of the Mediterranean, Northern China – close to uninhabitable. Mitigation efforts and decarbonisation are underway in the novel’s present, but after decades of work the climate curve is only just starting to even out, and bending it down further decades away. It also has widespread medical treatment based on RNA (which was just at the start of its development in the late 80s, certainly not in the deployable mRNA vaccine form we saw during Covid). And if the Martian colony two of the vignettes are set in is implausible on current scientific understanding, the fact that it’s marginally viable and exists only for ideological reasons (‘brave socialist workers conquer the frontier on another planet!’) is pretty consistent with the Mars-based fantasies of current tech bro oligarchs.
All of this well-judged speculation, impressive as it is, is not why you should read China Mountain Zhang in the year 2026, though. McHugh is writing a novel here, not prophecy (and she’d be somewhat lacking as a prophet; she missed the fall of the USSR by a year or two & it remains incongruously present in her worldbuilding). And the novel she wrote is a spectacularly good piece of fiction, written in a realist mode, that just happens to be set a couple of hundred years in the future. The epigraph of the book is a quote from Camus’ The Plague: “a simple way to get to know about a town is to see how the people work, how they love and how they die.” This is exactly what McHugh sets out to do in the vignettes which follow.
Zhang loses his job, goes on assignment to the arctic, studies in China, loves and loses, and returns home. Two Martian settlers meet & carve out a precarious life. A ‘kite’ (biomechanical hang glider) pilot races. A young woman finds her dreams aren’t quite what she thought. None of these people have any agency whatsoever to change the world the low-key crappy world they live in. Early in the novel, Zhang bitterly observes “I don’t believe in socialism but I don’t believe in capitalism either. We are small, governments are large, we survive in the cracks. Cold comfort.” To the extent that change is achieved in the novel it is in our characters learning how to take sincere comfort in this observation. Pushing the cracks a little wider, realising that the “we” rather than an “I” can make that a bit easier. Each of the characters we follow succeed and fail at this to varying degrees, but even the most successful remains someone who is unable to meaningfully influencethe world outside the cracks. They just work in it, and not as starship captains or space cops or politicians. They have blue collar and office jobs, and McHugh does great work in showing the lived in reality of their working lives. As Jo Walton has noted, this serious focus on labour is an unusual thing in SFF writing. I would also add that a lot of attention – particularly in the sections focusing on Zhang and his gay friends – is paid to fashion, again in a way that most science fiction doesn’t. Not all of this is completely convincing (apparently the future will have a lot of stylish sweaters with mirrors or capes or various other bits stuck on) but it still serves as another rich source of pointillist world-building, building up a convincing picture of this future society via specks of authentic detail.
This sort of low stakes storytelling in a speculative fiction space that typically expects power fantasies – or at least agency – is high risk. The failure state of this sort of writing, particularly for the audience it is marketed to, is dull and claustrophobic. And, look, go into this expecting high action or even drastic change you will be disappointed. But taken on its own terms China Mountain Zhang is a spectacular success. That is down to McHugh’s precise and unfussily excellent writing. She is not a flashy prose stylist, but the voices of each point of view character – the whole novel is first person narration – are brilliantly realised.
To focus on the main character first, Zhang is a remarkably well drawn gay man, again as Walton notes sketched remarkably unromantically. He's been cruising for sex since he was fifteen, he has a wide but shallow circle of friends, for most of the novel having only one person he truly feels comfortable relying on. His ironic sense of humour and self-deprecation are a thread throughout each of his sections (sample internal monologue, drooling over cute blond guys in a bar: “Chinese always think westerners’ eyes are set too deep in their heads, that they look a bit Neanderthal. This is not a prejudice I share.”), but within his relative lack of agency he has there is also growth. He’s an immature 26 at the start and a grown up almost 31 at the end. And McHugh makes it clear to the reader why his life up to the start of the novel made him immature and emotionally unavailable – it really isn’t uncommon amongst gay men in homophobic societies – and what it is about his experiences during it that helped him grow up. Other characters are similarly well-observed. Martine, a divorced retired soldier now homesteading on Mars, wryly observes of herself “I thought I’d start a new life on Jerusalem Ridge, but I hadn’t counted on the fact that wherever I went I’d still be there.” A page’s worth of character conveyed effortlessly in a sentence.
The effect of all of this – the plausible social and scientific speculation, the well-chosen background details, the superb character work, the overlapping vignettes of a world yet to exist – is to me incredibly moving in quite a specific way. The skill and humanity with which McHugh draws a line from her sitting at her desk in the early 90s, through to today to the vividly realised 22nd century of the novel is striking. The superpower of literature has always been to connect people separated by time and distance. Making it clear that while they’re not the same – and the differences do matter – people are people. Their hopes, their failures, their successes. The messy stuff of building a life. Feeling that continued struggle, sitting in the kinda shit present looking at Zhang’s life in his differently kinda shit future, is in many ways a feat of worldbuilding more impressive than the flashiest space opera or most lore-drenched secondary world fantasy could ever hope to be.
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Highlights:
- A masterwork of mosaic storytelling.
- Compellingly mundane picture of people living their lives in the future.
- A surprisingly good hit rate of speculation for a novel from the 90s.
Reference: Maureen F. McHugh, China Mountain Zhang, [Tor, 1992]. In print in both Tor Essentials and Gateway SF Masterworks editions.
POSTED BY: Eddie Clark. Professional nerd by day, amateur nerd by night. @dreddieclark.bsky.social