In my collection, the letter Q is represented by 12 authors and 28 stories, ranging from Qitongren’s “The Spring of Dongke Temple,” which I discussed last week and ending with zm quỳnh’s “The South China Sea,” which appeared in the anthology Genius Loci, edited by Jaym Gates in 2016. I should note that my story “Well of Tranquility” also appears in Genius Loci.  The only letter represented by fewer authors is X (two authors and four stories).

The title provides the setting for quỳnh’s story, which looks at the plight of refugees fleeing from war in Việt Nam. The narrator’s family owns a boat and uses it to attempt to ferry the refugees from their homeland to a safer place. Unfortunately, the sea is as dangerous and implacable enemy as the militaries fighting over their home countries. The threats of storms and pirates are pervasive and as the story opens, it is clear that over several attempts to ferry people to safety, the family has failed, resulting in the deaths of many refugees and family members, and the ultimate return to Việt Nam.

The only family members remaining at the beginning of the story are the mother, who runs the boat, and one of the daughters, whose job it is to help out. The story is a combination of despair, duty, and hope. Most of the characters are driven by the hope of achieving a better life away from their native country. The mother is driven by a sense of duty. She has agreed to ferry her passengers to that better life and she will do whatever it takes to make it through the dangerous gantlet she must run. The daughter, having seen the deaths of her siblings, father, and so many passengers, has given in to despair. She sees a watery death for everyone, including herself, and has a hard time performing her duties.

Despite the dark nature of the boat’s journey, quỳnh manages to avoid offering a nihilistic image of the world. Despite the narrator’s despair, she is surrounded by hope and determination, continuing to move through the crisis until quỳnh provides an intriguing solution to the constant cycle of attempts to escape and the constant threat of death. Her resolution offers a satisfactory ending, even if it also contains a certain feeling of deus ex machina and wish fulfillment.

quỳnh takes a relatively recent historical event and uses it to not only remind people of the plight of the refugees of the 1970s, but also uses it to provide parallels to the various refugees who are currently trying to move from war, poverty, and famines stricken areas of the world to regions which offer the promise of a better and safer life. It is clear that the refugees, then and now, would rather face the unknown dangers on their way to a better world than the known dangers of their traditional homes.

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Steven H Silver is a twenty-time Hugo Award nominee and was the publisher of the Hugo-nominated fanzine Argentus as well as the editor and publisher of ISFiC Press for eight years. He has also edited books for DAW, NESFA Press, and ZNB. His most recent anthology is Alternate Peace and his novel After Hastings was published in 2020. Steven has chaired the first Midwest Construction, Windycon three times, and the SFWA Nebula Conference six times. He was programming chair for Chicon 2000 and Vice Chair of Chicon 7.