Making Space
R.F. Kuang
A dark little time-travel story
R.F. Kuang‘s Making Space is nominally the second story in the Amazon Originals The Traveler’s Passport series. I’m working my way through the series in order (for no particular reason; as far as I know each story is standalone and they can be read in any order). The first, John Scalzi‘s 3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years, surprised me with a plot twist at the end that I didn’t see coming.
That didn’t happen with Making Space. Even though Kuang has run fewer miles of track than Scalzi, her sneakers have enough wear on them that I felt I would recognize her tracks. And I did! This is definitely a Kuang story. It’s dark in a sneaky way that you won’t immediately recognize. There’s also a Kuangian concern with historical injustice.
It felt to me like a kind of stripped-down version of her shtick1. In a good way. It’s short -- I read it in 30 min -- and in it she does well those things she’s good at and she did not do those tiresome things she is sometimes guilty of.
Kuang might point out the interesting origin of that word -- it came into English from German Stück via Yiddish comedians. But that part of her shtick was notably absent. Making Space is devoid of linguistic reflections. It also lacks the off-putting scholarly posturing she can sometimes be guilty of.