"The Man Who Ended History" by Ken Liu
I'm rather conflicted about this story. On the one hand it's very informative about an atrocity that I had not heard about. On the other hand, I don't find it to be a very good work of fiction.
So, the story is that there's a magic way to view the past - kind of like Slow Glass, only with physics mumbo jumbo laid on top. (Liu makes a misstep here and tries to explain rather too much and not very convincingly - I think it would have been better to invoke handwavium as I found it distracting.)
This was discovered by Akemi Kirino, wife of historian Evan Wei, who becomes obsessed by the atrocities committed by Unit 731. Wei uses her time travel machine to allow relatives of the victims to become witnesses of the atrocities.
It is very terrible stuff.
Unfortunately the format of the story makes for very dry reading - less readable than a well-done history book:
Moreover, behind both the Japanese and the Chinese positions is the unquestioned assumption that if we can resolve whether China or Japan has sovereignty over World War Two-era Harbin, then either the People's Republic or the present Japanese government would be the right authority to exercise that sovereignty. But this is far from clear. Both sides have problems making the legal case.
and
The issue of Unit 731 presents its unique challenges. Here, the United States is not an uninterested third party. As an ally and close friend of Japan, it is the duty of the United States to point out where our friend has erred. But more than that, the United States played an active role in helping the perpetrators of the crimes of Unit 731 escape justice. General MacArthur granted the men of Unit 731 immunity to get their experimental data. We are in part responsible for the denials and the cover-ups because we valued the tainted fruits of those atrocities more than we valued our own integrity. We have sinned as well.
The story is told as a documentary of Evan Wei after his suicide (something I saw coming from about the middle of the story). Which makes for lots of granstanding (like when Wei confronts the Japanese Ambassador on a television show) and a lot of boring speechifying like the above excerpts.
I know that Liu modeled this story on a lot of historical documents, such as congressional hearings on a resolution condemning Japan's wartime enslavement of women as forced prostitutes. But verisimilitude does not necessarily make good fiction. (Or at least written word fiction - I imagine it would be more effective in a different medium.)
The other problem I have is the Liu likes to stack the deck. Not only is the woman who invents the time travel technology Japanese, but her grandfather was one of the research heads at Unit 731. This sort of thing might work if it had been embedded in the story the whole time, but it's revealed at the end as a cheap twist.
I get why he did it - the story needed a through line to make it punch at the end, but the one Liu chose is very contrived. I admire his ambition - this is a difficult topic to incorporate into a work of fiction, but on a storytelling level it doesn't work for me. It's a messy interesting failure, but still a failure.
I'm glad to have read this for the education and that's enough for me to not "no award" it.
So, the story is that there's a magic way to view the past - kind of like Slow Glass, only with physics mumbo jumbo laid on top. (Liu makes a misstep here and tries to explain rather too much and not very convincingly - I think it would have been better to invoke handwavium as I found it distracting.)
This was discovered by Akemi Kirino, wife of historian Evan Wei, who becomes obsessed by the atrocities committed by Unit 731. Wei uses her time travel machine to allow relatives of the victims to become witnesses of the atrocities.
It is very terrible stuff.
Unfortunately the format of the story makes for very dry reading - less readable than a well-done history book:
Moreover, behind both the Japanese and the Chinese positions is the unquestioned assumption that if we can resolve whether China or Japan has sovereignty over World War Two-era Harbin, then either the People's Republic or the present Japanese government would be the right authority to exercise that sovereignty. But this is far from clear. Both sides have problems making the legal case.
and
The issue of Unit 731 presents its unique challenges. Here, the United States is not an uninterested third party. As an ally and close friend of Japan, it is the duty of the United States to point out where our friend has erred. But more than that, the United States played an active role in helping the perpetrators of the crimes of Unit 731 escape justice. General MacArthur granted the men of Unit 731 immunity to get their experimental data. We are in part responsible for the denials and the cover-ups because we valued the tainted fruits of those atrocities more than we valued our own integrity. We have sinned as well.
The story is told as a documentary of Evan Wei after his suicide (something I saw coming from about the middle of the story). Which makes for lots of granstanding (like when Wei confronts the Japanese Ambassador on a television show) and a lot of boring speechifying like the above excerpts.
I know that Liu modeled this story on a lot of historical documents, such as congressional hearings on a resolution condemning Japan's wartime enslavement of women as forced prostitutes. But verisimilitude does not necessarily make good fiction. (Or at least written word fiction - I imagine it would be more effective in a different medium.)
The other problem I have is the Liu likes to stack the deck. Not only is the woman who invents the time travel technology Japanese, but her grandfather was one of the research heads at Unit 731. This sort of thing might work if it had been embedded in the story the whole time, but it's revealed at the end as a cheap twist.
I get why he did it - the story needed a through line to make it punch at the end, but the one Liu chose is very contrived. I admire his ambition - this is a difficult topic to incorporate into a work of fiction, but on a storytelling level it doesn't work for me. It's a messy interesting failure, but still a failure.
I'm glad to have read this for the education and that's enough for me to not "no award" it.