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任晓雯
岛上
2008
A mental patient who may or may not have killed her professor, with whom she may or may not have been having an affair, is shipped off to a strange island colony whose handful of inmates divide their time between long shifts of manual labor and sessions of vicious gossip about each other. Following instructions from the "ship's captain," the island's shadowy master, a bored cadre conducts criticism sessions in which he encourages the inmates to confess to elaborate crimes.
There's not much of a plot beyond a slow reveal of the island's purpose, but the narrator's desire to recover her lost memory and understand how she arrived on the island keep the book moving until the inmates' fragile society collapses and the dead bodies start piling up.
This is the author's first novel, written in 2002 but only published this year following a collection of short stories and a second novel, The Women (她们).
刘慈欣
《环状闪电》
(2005)
A man who witnesses both his parents get turned to ash by ball lightning devotes his entire life to researching the poorly-understood phenomenon. His quest takes him to a national defense research institute where government scientists are seeking to use ball lightning as a new-concept weapon. He becomes disgusted with the thought of his pure scientific research being used for killing, but every time he tries to escape, his obsession draws him back in.
Ball Lightning is well-paced and tightly plotted. Liu handles the science quite well - the current state of lightning and weather research, as well as his speculative explanation, which hangs together just enough to stave off disbelief. Despite Liu's reputation for writing "patriotic" stories, his depiction of military research is not at all boosterish. The believable characters - the narrator, a woman who is enamored with danger and destruction, and a physicist who is out for pure knowledge, damn the consequences - add depth to the story. Highly recommended.
马伯庸
《殷商舰队玛雅征服史》
(2007)
Alternate history as comic novel. Ma Boyong imagines a meeting between exiled forces of the Shang Dynasty and pre-Columbian middle America.
The book originated online and is written in the same arch tone that Ma employs to great effect on his blog. He's also obviously a fan of Stephen Chow.
The book is lightweight and fun, but it'll probably grate on anyone familiar with the actual Mayan history (although it does acquit itself better than the other "China meets Maya" novel I read this year. That book, thankfully, remains unpublished).
拉拉
《掉线》
(2007)
Ace hacker gets kicked out of the Matrix because he forgot to pay his broadband bill. There's no one left in the world but a bunch of robots, and someone wants to extract his spine. He gets saved by a sentient window-washer and then goes on the run from the forces of a communications conglomerate run by a malevolent AI.
Like Lala's Galaxy-award-winning Green Fields, this is a fast-paced adventure built around an interesting concept. It does drag a bit in a talky denoument, and the philosophical musings aren't incredibly novel. But on the whole it's a good read.
