The Future is Japanese by Masumi Washington

The sun, the dandelion, the cicada, the Hammer, and all of us: We are all subject to the equations of James Clerk Maxwell and we are all ephemeral patterns destined to eventually fade, whether in a second or an eon.”Ken Liu explores an impressively wide array of ideas in this short story, including concern for others, pride in a culture, the definition of being a hero.

It is a sense of the transience of all things in life. “That feeling in your heart: It’s called mono no aware. When it becomes clear that disaster is inevitable, his father teaches Hiroto about finding joy even in the impermanence of all things: “Everything passes, Hiroto,” Dad said. Most of all, Hiroto remembers his father: his faith in the Japanese people, and the way they are defined by their relationships and their concern for the group above their own individual needs. The story alternates between Hiroto’s current life on board the starship ― teaching children about Japanese culture, pursuing a relationship with another survivor of the disaster, and monitoring the grid of indicator lights that show any problems with the solar sail ― and his experiences as a young boy in Japan, during the last months before our world was destroyed, revealing both the best and worst of humanity. The trip that is expected to take about three hundred years, with the ship using a vast solar sail for propulsion. The ship is traveling to a star called 61 Virginis (an actual star about 27.5 lightyears away from our Earth, with a composition nearly identical to our sun). Hiroto Shimizu is a twenty-five year old man living on a generation spaceship that left Earth when Hiroto was eight years old, just before an asteroid destroyed our planet and the rest of humanity. This story is free online at Lightspeed Magazine: Review first posted on Fantasy Literature. 'Mono no aware' is a Hugo-award winning short story from the amazing Ken Liu. Disclaimer: I've only read the Hugo-winning short story by Ken Liu in this volume, 'Mono no aware.' The GR librarians did that thing again where they lump short story reviews into a collection where they were published, because they have this clearly unreasonable dislike for individual review spaces for shorter works.

The Future is Japanese by Masumi Washington