In the Watchful City
Books | Fiction / Science Fiction / Cyberpunk
3.1
S. Qiouyi Lu
"This masterful work positions Lu among the vanguard of contemporary futurism and speculative fiction."—Publishers Weekly, starred reviewIn the tradition of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, debut author S. Qiouyi Lu has written a multifaceted story of borders, power, diaspora, and transformation with In the Watchful City.The city of Ora is watching.Anima is an extrasensory human tasked with surveilling and protecting Ora’s citizens via a complex living network called the Gleaming. Although ær world is restricted to what æ can see and experience through the Gleaming, Anima takes pride and comfort in keeping Ora safe from harm.When a mysterious outsider enters the city carrying a cabinet of curiosities from around with the world with a story attached to each item, Anima’s world expands beyond the borders of Ora to places—and possibilities—æ never before imagined to exist. But such knowledge leaves Anima with a question that throws into doubt ær entire purpose: What good is a city if it can’t protect its people?At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
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Author
S. Qiouyi Lu
Pages
192
Publisher
Tor Publishing Group
Published Date
2021-08-31
ISBN
1250792991 9781250792990
Community ReviewsSee all
"So many of the concepts were cool in theory, but I found this short story collection overall insufferable. The plot structure is very similar to The Empress of Salt and Fortune, in terms of telling an overarching story of international political intrigue through intimate details of seemingly insignificant objects. Unfortunately the reason the characters have for doing this is not well realized or interesting (a character we barely get to know makes a cop character Feel Bad about aer role in a repressive police state - incidentally the one character the author mentions deliberately designing as a Black character in the afterword is just a vessel for reforming a cop lol - with a bunch of didactic stories about individuals who feel like characters in a fable rather than real people who could have ever existed). There is one story told through letters and official documents that I thought was good but all the other ones had at least one huge glaring issue that annoyed me (eg. the foot binding story does that 'everyone suffers this but me' thing I hate in historical narratives, and the absolutely unbelievable character decision that drives the plot in the mermaid story). This could have been so good, but to me it wasn't."
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