Science Fiction World for July, 2007, is a special issue devoted to Beijing-based writers — Xing He (星河), Ling Chen (凌晨), Xia Jia (夏笳), Stanley Chen Qiufan (陈楸帆), and Yang Ping (杨平).

Xing He is probably the most well-known; he contributes “Your Many-Colored Life” (你形形色色的生活), a fable of two people from two different societies, one pampered by robots and one enslaved by them, each of whom believes people are better off elsewhere.

Yang Ping is known as a cyberpunk writer, and here he contributes “Freezing Point” (冰点), a soft cyberpunkish story of a man who’s chosen as the subject of a chip-implantation experiment after a near-fatal accident.

Ling Chen’s is the best of the bunch. She tells the story of a family who’s expecting a child while working on a top-secret search for life on Jupiter’s moons in “A Titan Story” (泰坦故事).

The translated stories in this issue are Dick’s “Rautavaara’s Case” and Robert Reed’s “Pills Forever”.