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momijizukamori) wrote2022-03-01 06:44 pm
momijizukamori) wrote2022-03-01 06:44 pm
'Little Mushroom: Judgement Day' review
(partially adapted from stuff I've said on Twitter and Discord, so apologies for the repetition if you saw it there!)
I picked up the epub of Little Mushroom: Judgement Day from Peach Flower House, which is the first of two volumes (no word yet on a release date for the second volume). I was familiar with the TLer from some of their fan TL work, which was decent enough, a number of people I know from other danmei fandoms liked the novel, and I wanted to support a smaller publisher (particularly given various ongoing messes with Seven Seas...) - and $16 for a book was an acceptable gamble (versus $36 for the cheapest of the Seven Seas offerings).
And I am happy to say I was pleasantly surprised!
Translation/formatting review (no spoilers)
So this is one of the nicer novel epubs I've seen, even compared to some of the large, established NA publishers. There's stylings on the chapter heads, with an embedded font, but it's been properly done so it doesn't bloat out the file size (less than 300kB total for fonts), and they size cleanly and reasonably both in Calibre's ebook reader on my laptop, and on my much smaller Kobo screen. The book splits (as this contains the first book of the web version, and half of the second one) are similarly nicely done, and it's just a nice bit of polish that makes me feel like they thought about the epub instead of just slapping the text file into it. Styling crucially also doesn't override my choice for body text font, font size, margins, etc. I have one and only one complaint about the epub, which is both very minor and deeply nitpicky - they used straight quotes instead of typographic quotes. Which like 90% of readers will not notice or care about (and which I don't, like, deeply care about, it's more of a 'this would be nice' thing).
As for the translation itself - there's a small handful of phrases that I would have probably picked different phrasing for, not because they didn't make sense but because they had some unwanted connotations in American English. At one point fairly early on, the passenger cabin in a large vehicle is referred to as a 'rest area', and I had to re-read the passage twice because I saw 'rest area' and immediately thought of US highway rest areas and then was confused as to when they had stopped and gotten out. Aside from those three or four phrases, though, the translation flows remarkably well. There are no footnotes - of the two spots that might have warranted a footnote, one (an explanation of An Zhe's name) was worked into the text in a good spot, and the other (a quotation from Dylan Thomas's poetry) was left for the reader to pursue on their own. As a post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel, there's less of the cultural-specific refs that warrant footnotes, I think - and an English reader is probably going to have better knowledge of Dylan Thomas than a Chinese reader, I suspect. A lot of attention was paid to fitting the dialogue into English prose conventions, and it flows quite seamlessly - it actually took me until halfway through the novel to realize I hadn't seen a single "......." or any script-style (where it's just 'Character Name: "A line of dialogue."' over and over) dialogue at all. Skimming through the free chapters of Little Mushroom on on JJWXC, it seems like the author is less fond of those conventions than priest and MXTX are, but they're not entirely absent there.
And then the real mark of excellence, friends who've read the CN version and some or all of the English version have said that the English captures the vibe of the original quite well - particularly notable given that that's been one of the largest criticisms they've had about Suika's translations other than like, the straight-up mistakes and grammar fails.
Apparently the mainland print edition had really nice illustrations, which it appears we don't get with the English, but I get that that's a different set of licensing agreements and probably out of scope for what I suspect is like, five people working out of someone's home office or something.
Novel review (minor spoilers)
Okay real talk, fandom osmosis did not adequately prepare me for how dark this novel is. "He's just a little mushroom!" Yeah, he's just a little mushroom living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape. Life is short and brutal in this setting - there is a LOT of character death. Thankfully I'm totally game for some dark body-horror dystopian fiction, so this was a plus rather than a minus, and some of the horror is tempered by An Zhe's detachement from it - he's not human, so humanity's concerns are not his own. It's actually an interesting point of view to get, which is reinforced early on by things we would normally leave unmarked and assume human-as-default being marked - 'human hands' instead of just 'hands', for example. And An Zhe is naive about some things in the intricacies of human society, without being stupid or sheltered.
Lu Feng is a more conventional character type - to steal a phrase from Can Ci Pin (which was done by the same TLer and which I read right before this), the 'ice cold bastard' commander. I'm okay with this because 'prickly stoic with secret hidden softness' is absolutely my jam, even if it does take a solid chunk of the novel for him to start to show that softness at all. It's definitely a slow-burn kind of relationship - the half that's been published doesn't really have any romance per se, or frankly even true friendship between the two leads - too many secrets for that still. But there's the first overtures happening, and for two loners, that's a lot. They're clearly being driven initially by less positive forces - Lu Feng by his suspicion of An Zhe, An Zhe by his desire to get any info he could to help him get his spore back - but it does slowly start to morph into something else.ehyde remarked that it was kind of 'enemies to lovers' except the vibe wasn't quite right, and I think it's because they're not so much directly enemies as much as that they have goals that are in conflict with each other.
The novel is split at the same point the mainland Chinese print edition was split into volumes, and honestly it's a really solid choice of split point - there's resolution of some plot elements, so it's not a total cliffhanger moment even if some stuff is left hanging. I contemplated reading the old fan TL (done by a different person) via archive.org for about as long as it took me to dig it up and discover that it's.... not good. The novel and I both deserve better than that, so I'll just eagerly await volume 2.
tl;dr: A solid translation of a really engaging dystopian post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel, which I enjoyed immensely!
I picked up the epub of Little Mushroom: Judgement Day from Peach Flower House, which is the first of two volumes (no word yet on a release date for the second volume). I was familiar with the TLer from some of their fan TL work, which was decent enough, a number of people I know from other danmei fandoms liked the novel, and I wanted to support a smaller publisher (particularly given various ongoing messes with Seven Seas...) - and $16 for a book was an acceptable gamble (versus $36 for the cheapest of the Seven Seas offerings).
And I am happy to say I was pleasantly surprised!
Translation/formatting review (no spoilers)
So this is one of the nicer novel epubs I've seen, even compared to some of the large, established NA publishers. There's stylings on the chapter heads, with an embedded font, but it's been properly done so it doesn't bloat out the file size (less than 300kB total for fonts), and they size cleanly and reasonably both in Calibre's ebook reader on my laptop, and on my much smaller Kobo screen. The book splits (as this contains the first book of the web version, and half of the second one) are similarly nicely done, and it's just a nice bit of polish that makes me feel like they thought about the epub instead of just slapping the text file into it. Styling crucially also doesn't override my choice for body text font, font size, margins, etc. I have one and only one complaint about the epub, which is both very minor and deeply nitpicky - they used straight quotes instead of typographic quotes. Which like 90% of readers will not notice or care about (and which I don't, like, deeply care about, it's more of a 'this would be nice' thing).
As for the translation itself - there's a small handful of phrases that I would have probably picked different phrasing for, not because they didn't make sense but because they had some unwanted connotations in American English. At one point fairly early on, the passenger cabin in a large vehicle is referred to as a 'rest area', and I had to re-read the passage twice because I saw 'rest area' and immediately thought of US highway rest areas and then was confused as to when they had stopped and gotten out. Aside from those three or four phrases, though, the translation flows remarkably well. There are no footnotes - of the two spots that might have warranted a footnote, one (an explanation of An Zhe's name) was worked into the text in a good spot, and the other (a quotation from Dylan Thomas's poetry) was left for the reader to pursue on their own. As a post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel, there's less of the cultural-specific refs that warrant footnotes, I think - and an English reader is probably going to have better knowledge of Dylan Thomas than a Chinese reader, I suspect. A lot of attention was paid to fitting the dialogue into English prose conventions, and it flows quite seamlessly - it actually took me until halfway through the novel to realize I hadn't seen a single "......." or any script-style (where it's just 'Character Name: "A line of dialogue."' over and over) dialogue at all. Skimming through the free chapters of Little Mushroom on on JJWXC, it seems like the author is less fond of those conventions than priest and MXTX are, but they're not entirely absent there.
And then the real mark of excellence, friends who've read the CN version and some or all of the English version have said that the English captures the vibe of the original quite well - particularly notable given that that's been one of the largest criticisms they've had about Suika's translations other than like, the straight-up mistakes and grammar fails.
Apparently the mainland print edition had really nice illustrations, which it appears we don't get with the English, but I get that that's a different set of licensing agreements and probably out of scope for what I suspect is like, five people working out of someone's home office or something.
Novel review (minor spoilers)
Okay real talk, fandom osmosis did not adequately prepare me for how dark this novel is. "He's just a little mushroom!" Yeah, he's just a little mushroom living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape. Life is short and brutal in this setting - there is a LOT of character death. Thankfully I'm totally game for some dark body-horror dystopian fiction, so this was a plus rather than a minus, and some of the horror is tempered by An Zhe's detachement from it - he's not human, so humanity's concerns are not his own. It's actually an interesting point of view to get, which is reinforced early on by things we would normally leave unmarked and assume human-as-default being marked - 'human hands' instead of just 'hands', for example. And An Zhe is naive about some things in the intricacies of human society, without being stupid or sheltered.
Lu Feng is a more conventional character type - to steal a phrase from Can Ci Pin (which was done by the same TLer and which I read right before this), the 'ice cold bastard' commander. I'm okay with this because 'prickly stoic with secret hidden softness' is absolutely my jam, even if it does take a solid chunk of the novel for him to start to show that softness at all. It's definitely a slow-burn kind of relationship - the half that's been published doesn't really have any romance per se, or frankly even true friendship between the two leads - too many secrets for that still. But there's the first overtures happening, and for two loners, that's a lot. They're clearly being driven initially by less positive forces - Lu Feng by his suspicion of An Zhe, An Zhe by his desire to get any info he could to help him get his spore back - but it does slowly start to morph into something else.
ehyde remarked that it was kind of 'enemies to lovers' except the vibe wasn't quite right, and I think it's because they're not so much directly enemies as much as that they have goals that are in conflict with each other.The novel is split at the same point the mainland Chinese print edition was split into volumes, and honestly it's a really solid choice of split point - there's resolution of some plot elements, so it's not a total cliffhanger moment even if some stuff is left hanging. I contemplated reading the old fan TL (done by a different person) via archive.org for about as long as it took me to dig it up and discover that it's.... not good. The novel and I both deserve better than that, so I'll just eagerly await volume 2.
tl;dr: A solid translation of a really engaging dystopian post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel, which I enjoyed immensely!