I forgot these sorts of stories ever existed, ever could exist.
Ken Liu needs no introduction – here is the man who translated and advocated for The Three-Body Problem, who showed us paper tigers and dandelion kings, the man who I jokingly referred to as the eight-foot tall invisible giant of Chinese-American science fiction. But the story, the story could use introducing. “Timekeepers’ Symphony” just debuted this September 1, in the pages and electrons of Clarkesworld. It takes just enough time (ha) to make its point, and leaves you to contemplate it for days after. It is the riveting story of…
No one.
There is no protagonist here, no character development that Dostoevsky would recognize. It is a description of approaches to time, on various of humanity’s colony worlds and back on Earth in Hawai’i. How some people live an entire lifetime in an afternoon, others over centuries with a deliberateness and gravity far beyond kings. The troubles of trying to import time from one locale to another. J. Robert Oppenheimer’s contributions to divisions of time. The elaborate timepieces, fast and slow, each world prizes as part of its identity, Earth included. And the harmonious whole of this cacophony, the cosmos underlying the chaos, Earth’s precisely-kept atomic second, the fundamental block of all human timekeeping, wherever in the cosmos it is.
That’s it. That’s the whole story.
And you’ll walk away from it wondering at your watch, and wondering how to import time from your home to your workplace, since they so clearly operate on different clocks.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go write a tour of various planets’ tea cultures…
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