Translated into English from the original Chinese by Blake Stone-Banks, Chen Qiufan’s short story Debtless explores bleak but powerful questions of wealth inequality, corporate control and memory manipulation in a sci-fi tale of asteroid mining and the impossibility of debt repayment. In a world where memories, debts and earnings are genetically encoded into people’s DNA, working brutal shifts in deep space mining facilities is a particularly dangerous way of attempting to repay a debt. Square Head stays relatively safe as his specialty is data analysis rather than hands-on work, but as he starts experiencing unusual dreams and his fellow miners begin to die around him at an increased rate, he finds the realities of his life changing around him.
With a strange but engaging mix of hard sci-fi and beautiful, imagery-laden prose, this isn’t what you would call an easy read…but it’s worth the effort. For much of the story it’s hard to be sure of exactly what’s going on, as you’re thrown into a new world of unreliable memories, ambiguous dreams and an odd sort of debt-based religion, set against the (wonderfully evocative) backdrop of the vast, deadly beauty of space. Everything feels real and well thought-out, but there’s (deliberately) little attempt to explain anything until much later on, so while the characters – with their quirky nicknames for each other and close, companionable relationships – are well drawn and interesting, it’s a touch tricky to follow what’s happening. Thankfully though, for all the uncertainty and the strangeness of characters and events, there’s a sense of mystery that remains compelling throughout and the writing itself is very readable.
This is quite a long short story, but there’s enough smart, thoughtful world building here that it’s hard not to feel like it would have made an even better novella, with room to dig deeper into the story’s themes and ideas. That being said, while it might not be for everyone I certainly found it engaging right from the start and darkly satisfying by its conclusion, and it’s more than enough to pique my interest in Chen Qiufan’s wider body of work. If you’re interested in smart, well written science fiction, and especially stories which look at interesting ideas from non-Western perspectives, this is definitely worth a look.
Debtless was first published in its original Chinese in the 2019 anthology The Promising Land, but I read it as part of The Best of World SF Volume 1, edited by Lavie Tidhar and published by Head of Zeus in 2021.
Many thanks to Head of Zeus for sending me a review copy of The Best of World SF Volume 1, in exchange for my honest reviews – keep an eye out for more short reviews of some of the other stories featured in this anthology.
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