Here is the promised novella, thematically quite similar to the previous one.

The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary by Ken Liu (a Chinese-American man)

from Panverse Three (free reprint above!)

 This story was inspired by Ted Chiang’s Liking What You See: A Documentary, which is also well worth the read (but it’s unfortunately not available for free, at least AFAIK). The format is similar – a documentary (well duh!) – but the contents are radically different.

The Man Who Ended History is about the activities of the real-life Japanese Unit 731 in the 1935-1945 time period. The Japanese military set up a secret biowarfare research unit in occupied Manchuria and performed experiments on unwilling Chinese prisoners. If you’re unfamiliar with this (I wasn’t), then before reading the story or clicking on the links, do note that you will read about activities that were as atrocious as Nazi German human experiments in Europe. In graphic detail.

 Since the target audience is unfortunately not familiar with this massacre (or at least not as familiar as with the Holocaust), Ken Liu spends a lot of time on exposition, so the documentary format is well-chosen. The SF part involves time travel – not in any conventional sense, though; it’s definitely not one of those “travel back in time to kill Hitler”-type stories, don’t worry.

It’s a very thoughtful and well-sourced (!) story, with detailed endnotes. My only problem was that the more scholarly talking-heads  occasionally spoke in such dry and convoluted sentences I was tempted to skim.  People don’t talk like that in video interviews, not even historians; at least IMO. By contrast, the locals had very believable voices – the author states they were based on forum posts etc., a great touch.

I loved it how lots of characters did everything to simplify the issue, but since they were all presented together, the issue stubbornly refused to become simplified.

Something that should be IMO more emphasized – the movie the protagonists watch, Philosophy of a Knife (yes, it’s a real movie), while based on real events, is marketed as gorefest horror. I think that’s absolutely horrifying – having to come across a real-life historical atrocity connected to your people’s history the first time in your life in an exploitation movie…

Something else I wished to be explored in more detail (spoilers)!: Kirino mentions her children, and presumably Wei is the father, but there was nothing further about their offspring. Children who grow up with the legacy of being the descendants of both the murderers and the victims, that is something I can especially relate to as a Hungarian Jew, I wish there was more along those lines. Maybe in a different story…

I think there might be a technological solution to the SFnal conundrum, though (more spoilers): reconstructing mental imagery from fMRI activity is a problem I’d call almost-solved; since the story is set in the near future, the historical scenes people experience in the fictional scanner could be recorded at the same time – at least the visuals. But of course the claim could be made that fMRI recording interferes with the fictional Kirino Process. But this does not detract from the story itself.

Go read it; while I don’t think it’s perfect, it does things I wish more SF authors tried. I’m quite pleased that both this and the previous novella I reviewed tackle very serious issues related to real-life events, and do so admirably well.