It is the late twenty-first century, and Momo is the most celebrated dermal care technician in all of T City. Humanity has migrated to domes at the bottom of the sea to escape devastating climate change. The world is dominated by powerful media conglomerates and runs on exploited cyborg labor. Momo prefers to keep to herself, and anyway she's too busy for other relationships: her clients include some of the city's best-known media personalities. But after meeting her estranged mother, she begins to explore her true identity, a journey that leads to questioning the bounds of gender, memory, self, and reality. First published in Taiwan in 1995, The Membranes is a classic of queer speculative fiction in Chinese. Chi Ta-wei weaves dystopian tropes--heirloom animals, radiation-proof combat drones, sinister surveillance technologies--into a sensitive portrait of one young woman's quest for self-understanding. Predicting everything from fitness tracking to social media saturation, this visionary and sublime novel stands out for its queer and trans themes. The Membranes reveals the diversity and originality of contemporary speculative fiction in Chinese, exploring gender and sexuality, technological domination, and regimes of capital, all while applying an unflinching self-reflexivity to the reader's own role. Ari Larissa Heinrich's translation brings Chi's hybrid punk sensibility to all readers interested in books that test the limits of where speculative fiction can go.
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This book feels important, but in an abstract way. I feel like it would be a good one to dissect
3.5
0This book was a roller coaster for me, with quite an uphill battle. I'm a fan of fantasy and to a lesser extent also sci-fi, but the first few chapters acclimating to the world were still somewhat challenging for me to get into given the swaps between snapshots of Momo's life and then context laden with external references that I admittedly rarely understood. Also while I love to see queer representation, there were quite a few elements of how sexuality was portrayed that made me deeply uncomfortable, particularly one or two scenes when Momo was a child. But I stuck through and after the midpoint I have to admit it got really interesting really quick. Questions and suspicions started being addressed in both expected and unexpected ways, and there were a few satisfying plot twists too. All in all I thought a lot of it was really clever and also fascinating considering the view of the future from the perspective of the past, but it also just ultimately wasn't my personal cup of tea. I think if you're very into the sci-fi genre and enjoy something that pushes the envelope, this could be a great read, but anyone preferring lighter content should probably steer clear.
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