What if Chinese Marxism, not Western capitalism, came to dominate the globe? In this dazzling and insightful novel, Maureen F. McHugh explores that fascinating possibility -through the adventures and misadventures of a unique anti-hero.
China Mountain Zhang is your everyday, hardworking New Yorker, except he looks Chinese, which in a Sinocentric world gives him an edge. He works as a construction tech in this broken-down back- water, but he dreams of visiting China, the opulent pinnacle of the Revolution. Still, he hangs out in downtown bars, jacking into the …
What if Chinese Marxism, not Western capitalism, came to dominate the globe? In this dazzling and insightful novel, Maureen F. McHugh explores that fascinating possibility -through the adventures and misadventures of a unique anti-hero.
China Mountain Zhang is your everyday, hardworking New Yorker, except he looks Chinese, which in a Sinocentric world gives him an edge. He works as a construction tech in this broken-down back- water, but he dreams of visiting China, the opulent pinnacle of the Revolution. Still, he hangs out in downtown bars, jacking into the deadly jet-powered flyer races over Greenwich Village-until his Chinese boss tries to fix him up with his strange, sheltered daughter, launching Zhang on a flight into the unknown.
Now Zhang is the center of an unforgettable saga that stretches from impoverished, flashy New York to the stark beauty of the Arctic, from the sparkling fire beneath cool Beijing to the tender perils of a struggling farm commune on Mars. In his travels he'll meet daredevil flyers who risk their lives for an instant of stardom, wealthy urbanites who tempt death with decadent double lives, engineers who link with silicon networks to create buildings in a trance-like dream state, and young students who dare to entertain the lethal possibility that Marx was wrong.
Someday Zhang may return home. But first he's slicing through diamond-hard ice floes and watching seals frolic in frigid waters, playing illegal neural games in Beijing speakeasies and tackling the demanding discipline of jacked-in Organic Engineering.
He'll learn that within a bureaucracy where the individual bows to the will of the many, freedom can only be found by slipping through the cracks…
China Mountain Zhang is humanistic speculative fiction at its best, a pageturner powered by its vividly realized characters. It is full of quiet wisdom about social and personal boundaries. Yet its lavishly gritty 22nd Century setting, its touches of Gibsonesque savvy, its flourishes of technological wizardry are pure SF
