Broken Stars is a collection of contemporary science fiction stories, selected and edited by Ken Liu, who's translated many science fiction authors including "The Three Body Problem." I picked it up because it's far faster for me to read English than for me to read Chinese, and obviously I'm not very in touch with Chinese science fiction (or any other contemporary Chinese fiction for that matter)
A lot of the stories in this volume aren't basically science fiction. They're effectively fantasy exercises (including one where a time traveler travels back in time and reinvents the internet), without the rigor of science fiction that I normally expect from my preferred science fiction authors like Alastair Reynolds. Even someone like Iain M Banks (whose Culture novels are set at such a high tech level as to seem magical) do pay attention to the plausibility of many details.
What you do get out of many of these stories is an appreciation of Chinese history. Lots of events in contemporary and past Chinese history is placed in context and you can see how the authors felt about those events. There's just not any "hard" science fiction or even cyberpunk in this collection.
On reflection maybe I shouldn't be surprised. China's demand for tech talent and work environment that probably a heavy STEM engineer or scientist wouldn't have time to write, so the folks writing science fiction in China come from the literary sector and won't be deeply immersed in the science.
At the back of the book is a couple of essays about the state of science fiction in China. This would be informative, but obviously the book was edited prior to the major scandal about WorldCon in China in 2024, where the voting was rigged. It seems like science fiction in China cannot be separated from the governing environment the country is in.
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