2023 Canon Promo Post

[keita52]

Use the comments of this post to promote your favorite canon(s). Please use one comment per canon. You can use the template provided here or whatever format you wish.

If it is freely available online, consider adding it to the Freely Available Canons spreadsheet.



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[primeideal]

Name: What Has Passed Shall In Kinder Light Appear
Author: Baoshu
Category: Novella (Goodreads says about 80 pages in length)
Sub-genre: SF, "alternate history" expansively defined
Where can you find it: "Broken Stars" anthology (edited by Ken Liu), Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine March/April 2015.
Summary: The narrator, Xie Baosheng, recounts his life and that of his star-crossed lover Qiqi as they weave in and out of each others' lives, against the backdrop of 20th and 21st-century Chinese history. Pretty soon after you start reading, you'll realize the difference between Xie Baosheng's world on our own, but it's a fun "a-ha!" moment when it hits. I found some of the later parts of the story tended to drag on as the characters got more explicit and sat down talking about "yes, such philosophy, very Sartre, wow," but the overall conceit was very well done.
What I'd be interested in requesting for it: Fix-it fic for Xie Baosheng/Qiqi where they get to be happy, either in the canon world, or a more mundane one like ours, or some kind of afterlife reunion. Alternatively, I would be interested in seeing how the SF concepts explored here would play out in a different part of the world.