The White Cliff, by Lu Ban

Science Fiction World, May 2022

A man named Yanli awakes from a rather dull dream in which nothing happens. Who has a dream in which nothing happens? It makes no sense to him.

He's living in a small cottage on a seashore, with a view of a white cliff. He lives alone, but he does have visitors, or at least a visitor, who appears along the path from elsewhere. We soon understand that she's a former student, a doctor, and they're discussing a research project, and a patient they both know well.

Resurrection, by Ren Qing

Galaxy Awards I: Chinese Science Fiction Anthology, December 2022

The cover shown is of the anthology that Ren Qing's story, a 2023 Hugo Short Story Finalist, is published. It's available on Amazon.

A woman has just received the corpse of her soldier son's body, and the notification of his death. Except, the corpse isn't really a corpse. It's an animated synthetic body, containing the partial, damaged, memory of her son. There was apparently brain damage when he was killed, so the memory transferred to the chip that now resides inside the "corpse" is incomplete and slow to activate.

But the woman recognizes her son, and tends and cares for him over the next days, as the memory strengthens and he becomes, if not the quite the son she remembers, more functional, and supportive of his mother as she is of him.

Zhurong on Mars, by Regina Kanyu Wang

2022

Zhurong is the AI doing the administrative work on a Chinese colony on Mars. They're manufacturing nanomachines, and as Zhurong's capacity increases, it takes over more and more of the manufacturing, while the humans begin to devote themselves fulltime to design--including designing the ability to upload themselves into really advanced nanomachines.

Eventually, the former humans leave, literally waving goodbye, and Zhurong is alone.

On the Razor's Edge, by Jiang Bo

2022

I've replaced the cover I originally included with  a generic cover, because I've been informed that it was indeed the wrong cover. That anthology apparently contains another story by Jiang Bo, but not this one. My apologies for the error.

Zhong Lixin is a Chinese astronaut, on China's Tiangong Space Station in 2028. He's working on his assigned projects, along with another astronaut, Duan Guozhu, when they hear what they've never heard before on the station--the emergency alarm. Soon they're working on repairs, fixable ones, fortunately, damage caused by micrometeors colliding with the station. They've been fortunate, and can continue their mission.

Then they get new, disturbing information. Some of that same micrometeor cluster hit the International Space Station, and have caused a fire on it.

D.I.Y., by John Wiswell

Tor Books, ISBN 009781250870209, August 2022

The opening of this story does not bring us to a happy world. Climate change has had a major impact, most strongly felt in the heat and the shortage of potable water.

The tech that's involved here, though, includes magic. The companies expected to address the problem are the great magic academies, among them Ozymandias Academy, where once upon a time, a young man named Noah hoped to become a student. When he's finally accepted, though, it's without any financial aid, and his mother, struggling just to support the two of them, has no money. Noah, being a bright young man, puts the blame where it belongs, and in some ways, that sets up later events.

Rabbit Test, by Samantha Mills

Uncanny Magazine, Issue #49, 2022

In this rather dark short story, we follow the troubles of Grace, whom we meet as an 18-year-old girl who has gotten pregnant, in a late 21st century society where technology has been weaponized to make it almost impossible for pregnancy to evade detection. She's not paranoid and careful enough to be able to terminate it before it's detected, and this basically eliminates most of her life choices.

In between parts of the story of Grace and her daughter, Olivia, we get bits about the history of pregnancy tests, including the iconic "rabbit test," as well as earlier tests, dating back to ancient times, many (but not all) of which were surprisingly effective. As society changed to put women more completely in the power of men, many of them became illegal, and termination, when available, also became illegal.