Harare Review of Books

Thank you to #NetGalley and to Columbia University Press for this eARC.

168 pages.

First published in Taiwan in 1995. This English translation 2021.

Finished reading on 23 March 2021.

Genre: Science/Literary Fiction (LGBTQIA themes)

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.

Unexpected! It took me a little effort to get into this, because the writing felt a little stilted (due to the fact that it’s a translation, perhaps? I don’t know), but once I grasped the story, I was amazed over and over that it was written 25 years ago, with some concepts feeling very modern. There’s a touch of cli-fi about it, as most humans now live under the ocean. There are also a lot of interesting medical/biological and transhumanist/posthumanist concepts, as well as some thoughts about identity. The central theme is the relationship between a mother and a daughter, with a touching (I felt) twist.

Read for: The other-worldliness of it all, an exploration of queerness, and some questions about what it means to be human. Also definitely read because it is something that is not out of the Western canon (thank God), although there are numerous Western cultural references.

Rated: 8/10