This story was originally published in Day One, a weekly literary journal dedicated to short fiction and poetry from emerging writers.
In a factory on the outskirts of Shanghai, six employees work day in and day out on the assembly line. Each morning they return to the metal-dusted building to fabricate strange metal objects, wholly unaware of the purpose of their labor. They're even downright uncurious about their mysterious contribution, until the day that one of the machines goes awry, and the factory - and the surrounding reality - devolves into a chaos that only the workers can right.
A magical realist story in which a bleak industrial town is transformed into a dreamlike world where anything can happen, Dream Machine invokes an intriguing question: Do the workers even want to know their purpose?
Genre: Science Fiction
In a factory on the outskirts of Shanghai, six employees work day in and day out on the assembly line. Each morning they return to the metal-dusted building to fabricate strange metal objects, wholly unaware of the purpose of their labor. They're even downright uncurious about their mysterious contribution, until the day that one of the machines goes awry, and the factory - and the surrounding reality - devolves into a chaos that only the workers can right.
A magical realist story in which a bleak industrial town is transformed into a dreamlike world where anything can happen, Dream Machine invokes an intriguing question: Do the workers even want to know their purpose?
Genre: Science Fiction
Used availability for Su-Yee Lin's Dream Machine