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Exclusive | Climate change: Chinese sci-fi author’s new short story – The Girl and the Sea

Translated by Shelly Bryant and exclusive to Post Magazine, award-winning Chen Qiufan’s The Girl and the Sea carries a message about our fragile universe

Reading Time:5 minutes

A curious polar bear checks out a ship in icy waters off the coast of Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago between Norway and the North Pole. Photo: Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Published: 4:15pm, 16 Jan 2022

“When can Tara leave this place,” the girl asked, her eyes shining like a newborn galaxy. “You’ll know when the time comes,” Miki said to the girl. What she didn’t say was, Tara, you shouldn’t be here at all.

The double-masted icebreaker Akira was frozen into a piece of Arctic sea ice, drifting along with the other floes. But this was no disaster, the vessel had been deliberately grounded there, and during the span of more than a year in the ice, the crew had been collecting polar ice samples and data on climate change and the shrinking ice caps.

The 36-metre-long, 12-tonne scientific research ship had travelled 400,000km over the previous 13 years. It had docked in more than 60 countries and discovered 150 million new genes and 2,000 new species, recording the fragility and beauty of the planet.

The sponsoring foundation had repeatedly urged the ship to return as soon as possible, but everyone knew the pressure was coming from the investors. Those bigwigs considered the investment worthless.

No one knew how the girl had come to be under the shelf in the storage room. She looked to be no more than five or six years old, and no matter what they asked her, she would say nothing but her name: T-A-R-A.

Cheeks flushed and body shaking, the girl put no small effort into uttering even that.

Chinese sci-fi author Chen Qiufan, aka Stanley Chan. Photo: Xiaomei Chen

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