In a short poem called “Waiting for Icarus,” Muriel Rukeyser writes of a young woman, the lover of the titular doomed Athenian, who has staked her camp on a long, tragic landscape of patience, wanting someone who will never return. As she waits out those empty, sorry hours of febrile promise and “islands going dark on the sea,” she remembers a lesson her mother had attempted to teach her: inventors are a horrible breed, and those who love them are even worse—because they believe the lies they are told.

There have always been some who have thought so: that there is a great moral failure in those who try to impose their imaginations, their egos, over the world. After all, we had believed that we lived in the company of gods, and to dream greater than them—to guide the world and the future with our own scope of vision—was an unforgivable display. But as the woman sits alone on the beach, thinking of her sky-bound partner and her own grounded helplessness, she admits:

I would’ve liked to try those wings myself.
It would’ve been better than this. 

We live surrounded by the consequences of inventions—a muddled universe of passions, fantasies, and ideals. Along the trajectory of other people’s thinking, housed in a world of other people’s making, we gather our own fragments; we piece together an existence. The world has been warped recklessly, irresponsibly, by individuals who had no conception of the future when they unleashed a rampant, delirious dream out into the open arena of time. Some of them have faced this fact with seemingly heartless impassivity; some celebrate without guilt their irrevocable contributions; and some come, in their later years, to drown in regret. The stringent warning against ego’s malevolence is still there—but it has been quieted; we are no longer at the mercy of any superior kind. We have won ourselves a world. We sit now with our victory, and, in many ways, it’s a devastating one.

I’m not cynical about the future, but I don’t think it’s the inventors of objects and technologies who change it for the better. Instead, I entrust that task to people who have no desire to conquer the future, who seek dominion over nothing, who put their imagination at the service of imagining itself. 

It must be obvious, from what you’re reading now, that I’m speaking here of the writers—whose inventions work to pronounce being, to pursue complexity, and to constellate always into further ideas, further truths. It is in the products of their labour that we find a necessary balance: between uncovering the hidden and keeping mystery alive; between memory and the endless moment; between speaking and listening; between meaning and all the other meanings. I find tremendous hope in such inventions, because stories and poems don’t claim that they will change the world—yet they do.

In the pages that follow, you’ll find no shortage of inventions. There will be wondrous machines and shapeshifting beings, alternative myths and infinite architectures, from poems that study the time-stopping potentialities of conversation to the last chapters from a town that overlooks Death. Alongside the neoteric worlds of renowned contemporary science fiction writers, there are texts from no-longer living luminaries of Chinese literature—whose work is no less original and striking now than at the time of its writing. These inventions are meant to move us, to help us think. And the wonderful thing is: they will not fade into obsolescence. We’ll be able to use them forever. It is as our featured artist Guo Jing says: there is an eternal power in these old artforms. 

There are few things more destructive than ego, but ego does not always aim towards its own desires—at least, not blindly. In literature, one comes to meet minds that are generous, that give everything and asks little, and this encounter unfurls pathways for us to explore our own experience, to move forward with the gift of another’s knowledge. That is what can be found here, in the words of these masterful inventors. 

It is nothing less than the equivalent of being handed wings and being told to fly as close as you want to the sun. Travel as far and as long as you like on the forms and completions of language. They won’t melt. 

—XIAO YUE SHAN