2009 short collection of science fiction stories. In steampunk
Victorian England a young woman learns to fly; in the distant future
the heir to the Phoenix Empress learns to control her powers.
There's a great deal of interest here, let down at times by
Chng's command of English. It's not just that nobody ever speaks in
contractions; it's oddities of sentence construction like the spurious
conjunction in
It was going to be a great display of Britannia's ingenuity and
talent — and Paul Forrester mused as he scrutinized the blue prints
before him closely — and military prowess as well.
and vocabulary such as when someone takes off her shirt to reveal a
"skin-colored brasserie".
The Basics of Flight follows Katherine Riley as she learns to fly
"lion fish" airships, makes friends, overcomes various challenges,
and… that's it. There's an assassination plot and a hint of a war
coming, but the story ends before it can get very far.
The short story "The Garden of Crystals", not listed in the contents,
expands on some characters and events that happen earlier than The
Basics of Flight, and really ought to be read first, because the
extra detail here would be interesting in advance but is unhelpful in
retrospect.
Phoenix with a Purpose deals with Min Feng, first daughter of the
Phoenix Empress, in what seems at first like a fantasy setting (she
can, after all, turn at will into something hot enough to start fires
and kill people) but turns out to be SF-ish. She learns to control her
powers, makes friends, overcomes various challenges, and takes up her
position as heir. This one feels a bit more solid; there's stuff going
on that isn't just about the viewpoint character, even if she'll have
to be the one to resolve it. (But it's never made quite clear why a
major interstellar trader had taken up a job selling frybread in the
market. Or what the opposition's actual goal was.)
Neither piece is truly great, but even with the linguistic problems
they have a basic sense of fun and enjoyment which I find missing from
all too many modern SF stories.
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