Description
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.
About the Author
Chi Ta-wei is a renowned writer and scholar from Taiwan. Chi's scholarly work focuses on LGBT studies, disability studies, and Sinophone literary history, while his award-winning creative writing ranges from science fiction to queer short stories. He is an associate professor of Taiwanese literature at the National Chengchi University.
Ari Larissa Heinrich is a professor of Chinese literature and media at the Australian National University. They are the author of Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body (2018) and other books, and the translator of Qiu Miaojin's novel Last Words from Montmartre (2014).
Reviews
Named a Reviewer's Choice Best Book of 2021 * Tor.com *
A Books of the Year 2021 selection * The White Review *
Chosen as a Best Translated Book of 2021 * Words Without Borders *
Books are all time-capsules, of course, but Chi's novel offers an exquisite dual experience-because while The Membranes is a modern classic, it hasn't lost an ounce of its provocative significance. As a gently incisive puzzle-box it works to pry at the readers' own emotions about the nature of stories and how we're made of them; as a novel of queer attachment, it explores how we attempt to connect to one another through endless membranes-and often fail to do so. * Tor.com *
There's something very timely about [The Membranes'] play with gender fluidity and the social construction of identity. There's also something timeless about Chi's future, because of how it bends and defies time itself. The novel is about how identity is a story we tell ourselves through time - or back through time. And that story, for Chi, is queer . . . English readers who finish it now, 25 years after it was first published, may regret finding it so late, and missing out on all the stories and selves we could have been, even as it seems like it's been here the whole time. * Los Angeles Times *
This rather astonishing science fiction novel is a powerful story about consciousness and connection with other people. It cuts right to the heart of our current moment by way of metaphor, but in a manner that is entirely Chi's, and thus a new thing for English-language readers. What a surprising and exciting addition to science fiction and world literature. -- Kim Stanley Robinson, author of Red Mars
What a breath of retro-fresh air! This wicked-smart cyberpunk throwback from the early days of networked digital culture presciently foregrounds issues of gender, embodiment, identity, and technology that have become all the more relevant over the quarter-century since its original publication. -- Susan Stryker, executive editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly
Readers will notice prescient echoes of modern life in Chi's depictions of all-absorbing media consumption and loneliness in the midst of hyper-connection . . . [T]his captivating novel is rich and rewarding. * Publishers Weekly *
A fascinating new book. * MIT Technology Review *
A mind-blowing book . . . I have NEVER read anything like it. * Literary Infatuation *
The Membranes speaks as much to hard-core sci-fi fans seeking an exhilarating read as to regular readers who desire a moment of introspection. -- Stella Jiayue Zhu * Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing Book Review Network *
The Membranes is a welcome addition to the small but growing ranks of international science fiction available in English translation, and is an excellent early example of climate fiction. * Booklist *
A plunging submersible disguised as a novel-filled with incisive, inventive peculiarities. * Du Mois Archival Institute, 2021 Reading List Selection *
It is almost unfathomable that, in 1995, Chi could have imagined a world so full of the terrors that technological rises inevitably bring, but he does and mostly to devastating effect. Chi's project is large, as is his vision . . . it imagines the future like the best of our dystopian meditations. * South China Morning Post Magazine *
Mind-blowing . . . This 1995 Taiwanese sci-fi with casual queer characters is a short read, but it kept me on the edge of my seat throughout. Way after finishing the story, the questions it posed still linger, surely to haunt me for a long time to come. * Hsinju's Lit Log *
Chi is an excellent novelist and Momo's story, with the unanswered questions, her mental state and the climate change issues and consequences, all help make this a first-class novel. * The Modern Novel *
One of the most profound LGBTQ books of our time. * Books & Bao *
An exploration of the contact zones between human and non-human consciousness, corporality, and identity. Reading it feels like peeling off the skin of a fruit, except that when it seems you are getting to the juicy flesh, it turns out to be only another veil-a membrane-and you've got to keep going. * Cha: An Asian Literary Journal *
Effectively a modern fable, The Membranes creates a punk, dystopian novella set in the near future. It is ideal for anyone who wishes to immerse themselves in a queer future which interrogates the very nature of authentic humanism. * Saoirse Edits *
The Membranes is a fascinating and beautifully conceived novel, deceptively simple and alluringly deep, smoothly mediated by the membrane of Heinrich's excellent translation. -- Astrid Moller-Olsen * Xiaoshuo Blog *
[The Membranes] lives up to its reputation as a classic of the genre . . . Compact enough to be read in an afternoon, the novella contains a plot so expansive that it will preoccupy the mind far longer. * Asian Review of Books *
A slim, intelligent novella that ambitiously projects a militarised and corporate new world order in the rubble of environmental collapse, Chi's brand of world-building is equally invested in envisioning new global formations as it is in attesting to emerging sexual subjectivities. It bristles with the emancipatory energy that characterises the novels coming out of post-martial-law Taiwan . . . Beneath its troubling view of a world plunged into crisis, there is still a hint of humanism in the novel's belief that if selfhood is not an eternal truth but a queer fiction, then we must keep reading, writing, translating, pirating, photocopying, citing, and sharing ourselves into existence. * Asymptote *
Whether as time capsule or prophecy, this novel holds up. -- Adam Wescott * Politics & Prose Staff Picks *
Originally published in Chinese in 1995, this sci-fi novel is still able to sweep you off your feet . . . Boundaries are softened in this narrative in more than one sense and even 25 years after its debut in Taiwan, this classic of queer speculative fiction still gives us plenty of food for thought. * 24stories *
The Membranes is an exceptionally well-conceived and turned science fiction story. Deceptively simple-looking on the surface, it is a truly impressive piece of work. * Complete Review *
[This book] is so deliciously weird . . . The plot twist at the end is one of the best I've read. * Biblio Obscura *
The Membranes rewards repeated reading, growing increasingly poignant as it builds toward its startling - and haunting - conclusion. * ABC News (Australia) *
It's the astonishing intimacy of Chi's Wachowski-worthy plot twist (and for those who go on to read the book, note that The Membranes predates any Keanu Reeves-helmed cyberpunk by at least three years) that has me still mulling over this book. It's not a twist that relies on shock and bombast. Chi's modus here relies on gentleness, on familial love against all odds. Ari Larissa Heinrich does an excellent job translating these complicated plot elements into English, obscuring the truth while making us think we have everything plainly. -- Spencer Ruchti * Du Mois Monthly Newsletter *
[I]t's only when you see later on how all these ideas, old and new, gender-concerned and not, merge together, that the sheer power of this piece comes to the fore. The rug-pulling has been so subtle no seismometer would ever have sensed it, but by the end we're upended by it all in quite dramatic fashion. * NB Magazine *
In Ari Larissa Heinrich's adept translation, the prose of this Taiwanese 1995 novella arrives direct and declarative, like the semi-confessional writing that internet users committed to sites like LiveJournal around that time. It's short, propulsive, and deceptively approachable . . . The queer liberation we can read in The Membranes is that we each contain the freedom to define ourselves, using scraps of experience, story, and fantasy in and around us. Recognizing how malleable we are, we can reimagine ourselves as needed. It can be terrifying and vulnerable to let one's certainties crumble, but in a world that limits or rejects you, it's the only way to survive. * The World of Chinese *
The world of The Membranes is one where consequential new freedoms cohabitate with climate destruction, hyper-corporatization, and militarization, encouraging the reader to dream big while staying vigilant. * Necessary Fiction *
A classic that appeared far ahead of the current new wave science fiction in the Sinophone world, The Membranes remains a unique alterity in terms of genre-crossing and gender reflexivity. Chi's beautiful, mesmerizing, provocative narrative creates a splendid labyrinth of metaphors and significances that leads to a revelation about the (post)human changeability in a matrix of monotonous inhumanity. -- Mingwei Song, coeditor of The Reincarnated Giant: An Anthology of Twenty-First-Century Chinese Science Fiction
An extraordinary novella . . . at last available in English in a brilliant translation by Ari Larissa Heinrich. At just 134 pages, its scope is dazzling. Now, from the vantage point of the future, its playful and unsettling insights into digital saturation, the traps of consciousness and labor, and the fugitive fabulations of identity and the self, have only grown more profound. -- Chris Littlewood * The Paris Review Daily *
The Membranes presents a future where possibility is not defined only by technologies and economics, where gender is fluid, families are chosen, and the narratives we construct for ourselves are part of what makes us human. -- Ruth Joffre * The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide *
Trust me on this - if you have even the tiniest interest in storytelling, you want to read The Membranes. -- Deepanjana Pal * Dear Reader *
A pitch-perfect meditation on medical advances, transplantation, advanced technology, loneliness, memory, and love. -- Rachel Cordasco * Strange Horizons *
Chi's rendering of certain surveillance and communications technologies is strikingly accurate. The novel offers a fin de siecle vision of a bleak future, while distilling kaleidoscopic influences into the textured intimacy of a mother-daughter tale that alternately reads as a quest for one's origins. -- Mike Fu * Public Books *
The Membranes ( ) is more than original. It's extraordinary. -- Bradley Winterton * Taipei Times *
The Membranes is not the novel that will teach readers how to deal with climate change. But it does, in its intimate way, show readers how we might live with it . . . [The book] is a climate novel not because it contends with catastrophe, but because it shows that everydayness has a way of proceeding alongside disaster. -- Ariel Chu * The Rumpus *
An amazing, wild experience . . . It completely made me rethink the human experience and my grasp on reality. -- Chloe Gong * Viva Magazine NZ *
It offers an original, entertaining, and fast-paced vision, translated from Chinese with perfect pitch, and can be pleasantly devoured in a single sitting. -- Josh Stenberg * Australian Book Review *
The Membranes is a treasure in that it offers readers something new in each subsequent reading, and it is certain to increase in relevance as we move into our own future. -- Eleanor Keisman * Litro Magazine *
The reading experience is like peeling back thin layers of truth, as each chapter reveals the darker and twisted realities that Momo inhabits. Like nesting dolls, or a dream inside a dream, each layer takes hold onto a sublimated anxiety of our collective consciousness. This book is a diamond, it's a double edged sword, and it's a bubble ripe to pop. -- Iris Tobin of A Room of One's Own Bookstore * Literary Hub *
An excellent, moving novel. -- Scott Manley Hadley * Triumph of the Now *
Awards
Short-listed for NSW Premier's Translation Prize, State Library of New South Wales 2023.
Book Information
ISBN 9780231195713
Author Ari Larissa Heinrich
Format Paperback
Page Count 168
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press
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.
About the Author
Chi Ta-wei is a renowned writer and scholar from Taiwan. Chi's scholarly work focuses on LGBT studies, disability studies, and Sinophone literary history, while his award-winning creative writing ranges from science fiction to queer short stories. He is an associate professor of Taiwanese literature at the National Chengchi University.
Ari Larissa Heinrich is a professor of Chinese literature and media at the Australian National University. They are the author of Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body (2018) and other books, and the translator of Qiu Miaojin's novel Last Words from Montmartre (2014).
Reviews
Named a Reviewer's Choice Best Book of 2021 * Tor.com *
A Books of the Year 2021 selection * The White Review *
Chosen as a Best Translated Book of 2021 * Words Without Borders *
Books are all time-capsules, of course, but Chi's novel offers an exquisite dual experience-because while The Membranes is a modern classic, it hasn't lost an ounce of its provocative significance. As a gently incisive puzzle-box it works to pry at the readers' own emotions about the nature of stories and how we're made of them; as a novel of queer attachment, it explores how we attempt to connect to one another through endless membranes-and often fail to do so. * Tor.com *
There's something very timely about [The Membranes'] play with gender fluidity and the social construction of identity. There's also something timeless about Chi's future, because of how it bends and defies time itself. The novel is about how identity is a story we tell ourselves through time - or back through time. And that story, for Chi, is queer . . . English readers who finish it now, 25 years after it was first published, may regret finding it so late, and missing out on all the stories and selves we could have been, even as it seems like it's been here the whole time. * Los Angeles Times *
This rather astonishing science fiction novel is a powerful story about consciousness and connection with other people. It cuts right to the heart of our current moment by way of metaphor, but in a manner that is entirely Chi's, and thus a new thing for English-language readers. What a surprising and exciting addition to science fiction and world literature. -- Kim Stanley Robinson, author of Red Mars
What a breath of retro-fresh air! This wicked-smart cyberpunk throwback from the early days of networked digital culture presciently foregrounds issues of gender, embodiment, identity, and technology that have become all the more relevant over the quarter-century since its original publication. -- Susan Stryker, executive editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly
Readers will notice prescient echoes of modern life in Chi's depictions of all-absorbing media consumption and loneliness in the midst of hyper-connection . . . [T]his captivating novel is rich and rewarding. * Publishers Weekly *
A fascinating new book. * MIT Technology Review *
A mind-blowing book . . . I have NEVER read anything like it. * Literary Infatuation *
The Membranes speaks as much to hard-core sci-fi fans seeking an exhilarating read as to regular readers who desire a moment of introspection. -- Stella Jiayue Zhu * Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing Book Review Network *
The Membranes is a welcome addition to the small but growing ranks of international science fiction available in English translation, and is an excellent early example of climate fiction. * Booklist *
A plunging submersible disguised as a novel-filled with incisive, inventive peculiarities. * Du Mois Archival Institute, 2021 Reading List Selection *
It is almost unfathomable that, in 1995, Chi could have imagined a world so full of the terrors that technological rises inevitably bring, but he does and mostly to devastating effect. Chi's project is large, as is his vision . . . it imagines the future like the best of our dystopian meditations. * South China Morning Post Magazine *
Mind-blowing . . . This 1995 Taiwanese sci-fi with casual queer characters is a short read, but it kept me on the edge of my seat throughout. Way after finishing the story, the questions it posed still linger, surely to haunt me for a long time to come. * Hsinju's Lit Log *
Chi is an excellent novelist and Momo's story, with the unanswered questions, her mental state and the climate change issues and consequences, all help make this a first-class novel. * The Modern Novel *
One of the most profound LGBTQ books of our time. * Books & Bao *
An exploration of the contact zones between human and non-human consciousness, corporality, and identity. Reading it feels like peeling off the skin of a fruit, except that when it seems you are getting to the juicy flesh, it turns out to be only another veil-a membrane-and you've got to keep going. * Cha: An Asian Literary Journal *
Effectively a modern fable, The Membranes creates a punk, dystopian novella set in the near future. It is ideal for anyone who wishes to immerse themselves in a queer future which interrogates the very nature of authentic humanism. * Saoirse Edits *
The Membranes is a fascinating and beautifully conceived novel, deceptively simple and alluringly deep, smoothly mediated by the membrane of Heinrich's excellent translation. -- Astrid Moller-Olsen * Xiaoshuo Blog *
[The Membranes] lives up to its reputation as a classic of the genre . . . Compact enough to be read in an afternoon, the novella contains a plot so expansive that it will preoccupy the mind far longer. * Asian Review of Books *
A slim, intelligent novella that ambitiously projects a militarised and corporate new world order in the rubble of environmental collapse, Chi's brand of world-building is equally invested in envisioning new global formations as it is in attesting to emerging sexual subjectivities. It bristles with the emancipatory energy that characterises the novels coming out of post-martial-law Taiwan . . . Beneath its troubling view of a world plunged into crisis, there is still a hint of humanism in the novel's belief that if selfhood is not an eternal truth but a queer fiction, then we must keep reading, writing, translating, pirating, photocopying, citing, and sharing ourselves into existence. * Asymptote *
Whether as time capsule or prophecy, this novel holds up. -- Adam Wescott * Politics & Prose Staff Picks *
Originally published in Chinese in 1995, this sci-fi novel is still able to sweep you off your feet . . . Boundaries are softened in this narrative in more than one sense and even 25 years after its debut in Taiwan, this classic of queer speculative fiction still gives us plenty of food for thought. * 24stories *
The Membranes is an exceptionally well-conceived and turned science fiction story. Deceptively simple-looking on the surface, it is a truly impressive piece of work. * Complete Review *
[This book] is so deliciously weird . . . The plot twist at the end is one of the best I've read. * Biblio Obscura *
The Membranes rewards repeated reading, growing increasingly poignant as it builds toward its startling - and haunting - conclusion. * ABC News (Australia) *
It's the astonishing intimacy of Chi's Wachowski-worthy plot twist (and for those who go on to read the book, note that The Membranes predates any Keanu Reeves-helmed cyberpunk by at least three years) that has me still mulling over this book. It's not a twist that relies on shock and bombast. Chi's modus here relies on gentleness, on familial love against all odds. Ari Larissa Heinrich does an excellent job translating these complicated plot elements into English, obscuring the truth while making us think we have everything plainly. -- Spencer Ruchti * Du Mois Monthly Newsletter *
[I]t's only when you see later on how all these ideas, old and new, gender-concerned and not, merge together, that the sheer power of this piece comes to the fore. The rug-pulling has been so subtle no seismometer would ever have sensed it, but by the end we're upended by it all in quite dramatic fashion. * NB Magazine *
In Ari Larissa Heinrich's adept translation, the prose of this Taiwanese 1995 novella arrives direct and declarative, like the semi-confessional writing that internet users committed to sites like LiveJournal around that time. It's short, propulsive, and deceptively approachable . . . The queer liberation we can read in The Membranes is that we each contain the freedom to define ourselves, using scraps of experience, story, and fantasy in and around us. Recognizing how malleable we are, we can reimagine ourselves as needed. It can be terrifying and vulnerable to let one's certainties crumble, but in a world that limits or rejects you, it's the only way to survive. * The World of Chinese *
The world of The Membranes is one where consequential new freedoms cohabitate with climate destruction, hyper-corporatization, and militarization, encouraging the reader to dream big while staying vigilant. * Necessary Fiction *
A classic that appeared far ahead of the current new wave science fiction in the Sinophone world, The Membranes remains a unique alterity in terms of genre-crossing and gender reflexivity. Chi's beautiful, mesmerizing, provocative narrative creates a splendid labyrinth of metaphors and significances that leads to a revelation about the (post)human changeability in a matrix of monotonous inhumanity. -- Mingwei Song, coeditor of The Reincarnated Giant: An Anthology of Twenty-First-Century Chinese Science Fiction
An extraordinary novella . . . at last available in English in a brilliant translation by Ari Larissa Heinrich. At just 134 pages, its scope is dazzling. Now, from the vantage point of the future, its playful and unsettling insights into digital saturation, the traps of consciousness and labor, and the fugitive fabulations of identity and the self, have only grown more profound. -- Chris Littlewood * The Paris Review Daily *
The Membranes presents a future where possibility is not defined only by technologies and economics, where gender is fluid, families are chosen, and the narratives we construct for ourselves are part of what makes us human. -- Ruth Joffre * The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide *
Trust me on this - if you have even the tiniest interest in storytelling, you want to read The Membranes. -- Deepanjana Pal * Dear Reader *
A pitch-perfect meditation on medical advances, transplantation, advanced technology, loneliness, memory, and love. -- Rachel Cordasco * Strange Horizons *
Chi's rendering of certain surveillance and communications technologies is strikingly accurate. The novel offers a fin de siecle vision of a bleak future, while distilling kaleidoscopic influences into the textured intimacy of a mother-daughter tale that alternately reads as a quest for one's origins. -- Mike Fu * Public Books *
The Membranes ( ) is more than original. It's extraordinary. -- Bradley Winterton * Taipei Times *
The Membranes is not the novel that will teach readers how to deal with climate change. But it does, in its intimate way, show readers how we might live with it . . . [The book] is a climate novel not because it contends with catastrophe, but because it shows that everydayness has a way of proceeding alongside disaster. -- Ariel Chu * The Rumpus *
An amazing, wild experience . . . It completely made me rethink the human experience and my grasp on reality. -- Chloe Gong * Viva Magazine NZ *
It offers an original, entertaining, and fast-paced vision, translated from Chinese with perfect pitch, and can be pleasantly devoured in a single sitting. -- Josh Stenberg * Australian Book Review *
The Membranes is a treasure in that it offers readers something new in each subsequent reading, and it is certain to increase in relevance as we move into our own future. -- Eleanor Keisman * Litro Magazine *
The reading experience is like peeling back thin layers of truth, as each chapter reveals the darker and twisted realities that Momo inhabits. Like nesting dolls, or a dream inside a dream, each layer takes hold onto a sublimated anxiety of our collective consciousness. This book is a diamond, it's a double edged sword, and it's a bubble ripe to pop. -- Iris Tobin of A Room of One's Own Bookstore * Literary Hub *
An excellent, moving novel. -- Scott Manley Hadley * Triumph of the Now *
Awards
Short-listed for NSW Premier's Translation Prize, State Library of New South Wales 2023.
Book Information
ISBN 9780231195713
Author Ari Larissa Heinrich
Format Paperback
Page Count 168
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press
