China + 100 edited by Xueting C Ni

China + 100 is part of the Futures Past series from Comma Press. This series of science fiction anthologies set their stories exactly a century after a specific event in a country’s recent past, in this case stories from a China 100 years after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. This concept really appeals to me, so I was delighted to be asked to review this book. I was interested to find out from the book's introduction that China has a strong tradition of science fiction, stretching back over 100 years, a brand of science fiction that uses lessons from history and mythology to inform possible futures. Editor, Xueting C. Ni, writes about how difficult it was to overcome some writers' political and cultural misgivings about writing about the pandemic, which makes it amazing that this anthology exists at all. 

These stories vividly imagine futures that include a wide range of novel elements including: thermal imaging to reveal the past movements of people; quantum consciousness; eternal youth; smart clothing; payment in shops using traces of DNA; the expansion of human settlements across the universe;  and the recurring tropes of nutrition using food capsules or similar replacing real food; people having AI chips implanted in their brains; and of course lots of helper robots. 

All the stories refer back to the COVID-19 pandemic in some way and several of them include future pathogens.  Zhao Haihong's The Moon Returns (translated by Andrew Rule) sees a resident of the moon struggle to cope with the pathogens when he travels to take up a job on earth. In Ling Chen's Miracle Grass (translated by Xueting C. Ni), a pandemic has broken out among the residents of a space craft exploring the distant Kuiper Belt, while Anna Wu's Archaic Dust (translated by Christopher MacDonald) features a coronavirus that can be passed from computers to humans, which can be made visible using the Archaic Dust of the title. Cryogenic freezing means that characters in this story meet again well into the future. Meanwhile, the characters in Zhou Dedong's I Want a Different World (translated by Jack Hargreaves) actually time travel in this entertaining missing person case. It's a twisting, turning mystery and ultimately a beautifully tragic love story. 

Many of these imagined futures are, unsurprisingly, depressing to contemplate. Tang Fei's This is a Good Path (translated by Judith Huang) explores the downsides of immortality. A film-maker and his acquaintance find out that they're too selfish to take on looking after a house plant in this future where no-one wants to care for anything other than themselves. The main character in Yimei Tangguo's Dust Rose (translated by Mel ‘Etvolare’ Lee) is threatened with eviction for not being a productive member of society. I found it heartening though, that, in this horribly believable dystopian future overseen by AI police officers and state control of everyone's personal finances, the main character is an author, giving us hope that perhaps the arts will survive the AI takeover. Qiufan Chen's Glaze (translated by Xueting C. Ni) is a compulsively readable but highly disturbing story, which I'm tempted to describe as body horror (though I'm not really familiar with that genre). A stage performer who remodels part of her body during shows, is haunted by nightmares of being taken over by a monster and eventually finds that the nanobot system that she relied on to repair her body after every show is no longer working and her body starts to disintegrate. 

He Xi & He Zun's  The Wasteland Courier (translated by Gigi Chang) didn't really work for me, with it's overwrought descriptions. When I started reading Dan Shi's Fire (translated by Yahia Zhengtang Ma) I thought this was going to be another story that wouldn't work for me. However, I ended up loving its thought provoking approach to exploring history, censorship, gender identity and equality. I also was fascinated by the idea of  historical hubs attached to historical buildings and locations so you can explore the history of the site through a virtual reality set up. 

Lu Hang's The Concrete Farm (translated by Xueting C. Ni) follows a young woman, who teams up with a former student of her late horticulturalist grandfather to convert a failing housing development into a horticultural hub. This is a fine example of a thrutopian tale, a genre we need more of. There are problems all the way along to hold the reader's attention (alien fungi!), but it's a story with a satisfying, optimistic ending that gives us hope for the future.  

Overall this is a fascinating look into possible futures for China 100 years beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. 

 China + 100 edited by Xueting C Ni, to be published 8 October 2026 by Comma Press. 

Disclaimer: I was sent a free pdf of this book in return for an honest review.