Most of these essays are collected in The Best Earth in the Worst Universe: A Collection of Liu Cixin’s Science Fiction Comments and Essays (最糟的宇宙，最好的地球: 刘慈欣科幻随笔集), published in 2015, just after Liu Cixin became internationally acclaimed. A few others were from his blog.
He pulls no punches, and I suspect they will never be translated for an English audience. To see why, consider just the debate, where he claimed to be a “fanatic of Technologism”, or the essay where he claims space exploration is more important than the dubious effort of climate change control. Such political incorrectness appears here and there as well, but he is honest and consistent in his viewpoint, and many in China, especially the Industrial Party, believe in his vision.
I translated with the help of DeepL. Those cover about 1/4 of the book. The rest of the book seems hardly of general interest.
Notes on translation:
- The “race” and “racial” are correct translations of 种族, but Liu Cixin uses it exclusively to refer to human-race, Trisolarian-race, etc. Nowhere in the book did he use “race” to refer to subspecies of Homo Sapiens.
- He has a strong tendency to verbosity and using the semicolon, which makes it hard to read. I removed some redundant phrasing, and broke up most semicolon-connected sentences into separate ones.
Note about the persistent questions of the Cultural Revolution chapter. When The Three-Body Problem was serialized on Science Fiction World over the course of 2006, it was close to the author’s ideal. It seemed like censorship was not as tight for serialized publication compared to single-volume books. For example:
- In the serialized version, the Cultural Revolution chapter was published as the first installment. It got moved to the 7th chapter, since apparently the censors were less strict about the middle than the start and finish.
- The gory description “And then half of her young head was blown away, and only a single, beautiful eye remained to stare at the blue sky of 1967. There was no pain in that gaze, only solidified devotion and yearning.” was right there in the chapter as a factual-style description. In the single-volume version, that description got moved into Ye Wenjie’s memories, since apparently the censors were less strict about memories than about factual-style descriptions.
- “Lao She, Wu Han, Jian Bozan, Fu Lei, Zhao Jiuzhang, Yi Qun, Wen Jie, Hai Mo, and other once-respected intellectuals had all chosen to end their lives.” was right there as well. It was deleted in the single-volume book. It seems like the names were too sensitive for some reason?
See this Zhihu answer for photos and descriptions of the serialized version. Basically, the English translation is a direct translation of the serialized version, without the sacrifices made for getting past the censors.
As he said in a blog post, 2006 was a sensitive time (40-th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution), and he wasn’t even sure that it would ever be published as a single-volume. Nevertheless he went ahead and serialized it. Fortunately, it was published as a single-volume in 2008.
Electronic poet (2001)
电子诗人, posted on 2001-01-07 at the Tsinghua University BBS, Sci-Fi section.
The program is available for download here. Liu Cixin later explained in 2012-09-10 that it was written in 1989.
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Work No. 75509
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I face the black artist and the thorny waves
I see the dazzling mind taking a nap, the program code slamming the playground
In this olive green playground, there are no trucks, only butterflies
I want to take drugs, I want to turn yellow weakly
I face the bright winter snow and the hyperbolic glow
I see the blue breasts floating, the soap listening to the walrus
In this weak spring rain, there is no Beethoven, only mother
I want to rise, I want to sing with breathing
I face the wide boat and the transparent microwave beam
I see the dead fishing boat calling, the distilled water shoveling the sheep
In this porous moss, there is no Eve, only the teacher
I want to hibernate, I want to shine hatefully
I face the bloody epic and the distant fire
I saw the vibrant battleships in silence, the transparent skirts caressing the playground
In this curvilinear struggler, there is no moonlight dance, only wind and sand
I want to swing, I want to panic roughlyWhat did you see? No, no, don’t get me wrong, this is not what I wrote.
Dear sci-fi friends, the new century is coming, so you must wish to bring with you some local specialties from this century. After thinking about it, I thought of the same thing: poets. Poets are certainly not born of the 21st century, but they are certainly to go extinct in this century. The poetic century has disappeared forever. In the new century, even if there are poets, they must be as rare as dinosaur eggs.
This spring, I read The First Sally (A) or Trurl’s Electronic Bard by Stanisław Lem (a masterpiece, I hope everyone will read it). Then I buried my head in front of the computer and worked hard for a week, turning Lem’s fantasy into reality at least in part: I created an electronic poet, or as Gibson said in Neuromancer, a poet’s “construct”.
Both I and the “construct” are self-aware, and I don’t want to compare with Li Bai and Percy Bysshe Shelley, but I can definitely compare with modern poets. It is said that modern poetry emphasizes obscurity and freedom, so let them compare with my CPU to see who is more obscure and free!
Maybe when reading these poems, some people feel that the poet’s senses are deranged, but isn’t a “systematic derangement of the senses” what modern poetry pursues? More importantly, this is computer-style poetry, which humans cannot imitate! If you don’t believe me, try, and you will have a heart failure in a short time.
But the biggest advantage of the electronic poet is speed. According to the latest measurement, the poetry output is 200 lines/second (non-rhyming) or 150 lines/second (rhyming). This is the test result on my old Pentium 166 MMX machine. If it is on Pentium III 500, haha. The poetry production method is absolutely automatic. Except for inputting the number of lines, no human intervention is required.
The day before yesterday, I had a party with friends and asked him to write a 300,000-line1 long poem to liven up the party. He was really good. He wrote it before he finished half a bottle of Erguotou liquor. Unfortunately, I didn’t even finish appreciating one thousandth of it. But the poet swears on its matho-personality and the RAND() function that there would be not a single repeated line in 300,000 lines! The electronic poet is programmed with Visual FoxPro, which contains 5 program modules, 6 word libraries, and a grammar library. I just slimmed it down and removed all GUI stuff. Although it is not beautiful, it looks like DOS, but it is very slim, only 125KB. I would like to give this as a new century gift to all my sci-fi comrades. If anyone is willing to send me a nice new century greeting card (ndjsjl@public.yq.sx.cn) by email, I will send you the poet.exe. (The original code is not compiled, and runs under VF3.0 and above, with the main control module code page)
1 The speed of light is \(300,000 \mathrm{~km/s}\), so Liu Cixin likes that number.
Imagine when you are old, you and your few great-grandchildren stand under the eco-dome, and 20 artificial suns cast bright light from space. At this time, you talk to your few great-grandchildren about our romantic and passionate era, and you lower your voice to tell them that there once was such a thing as night, such a thing as the moon, such a thing as trees, and such a thing as grass… When they stare at each other in disbelief, you would then tell them that there was also such a thing as a poet! Before you know it, tons of new poems torrent out of the Pentium-300000 wrist-computer!! Think about the expressions of your few great-grandchildren, haha.
Please enjoy a few more poems below. I am afraid of being too superficial, so I dare not post too many, let alone long poems.
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Work No. 28611
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Asteroids are called
Around the solid, there are only gelatinous rice fields
No, I don't want to fly!!
I miss
Trigonometric functions are watched!
Around Andromeda, there are only living giant rivers
No, I don't want to devour myself!!
I precipitate
Dragonflies are pinched!
Around the Orient Express, there are only wagging bows and arrows
No, I don't want to smoke!!
I talk
The confinement room is warned!
Around the sword, there is only the squeak of time
No, I don't want to sleepwalk!!
I rot[Other poems are omitted, as they are in the same nonsense style.]
Scifism – on the image of the cosmos in sci-fi (2001)
Sf教——论科幻小说对宇宙的描写, posted on 2001-02-22 at the Tsinghua University BBS, Sci-Fi section.
At present, Chinese sci-fi lacks a lot of things, one of which has never been noticed or mentioned, but is extremely important:
Chinese sci-fi lacks religious feelings.
First of all, I am a firm atheist. At the same time, we know that science and religion are incompatible, and sci-fi and religion are also incompatible. However, some scholars believe that the reason why modern natural science was born in the West has something to do with the strong religious feelings in Western culture. This is a topic that can’t be explained even with a huge book that presses people to death, so I’m not going to delve into it here, and I’ll just talk about religious feelings in sci-fi. Note that it’s not religion that’s being talked about here, it’s religious feeling, and it’s not the kind of feeling you have for God, it’s atheistic, and it’s not as sophisticated as Spinoza or whatever.
The religious feeling of sci-fi is a deep sense of awe at the grand mystery of the universe.
Consider the following two depictions, one of which depicts police chasing criminals across the stars:
The police ship clung to the smuggling ship, skimming planet after planet. Every planet, the smuggling ship captain carefully observed the planet’s terrain, he was eager to find a planet with suitable terrain to land, with the pursuers of the duel, but has not been able to find, had to turn back to look at the police spaceship closer and closer, gritted his teeth and continued to fly forward…
The second depicts a head-on encounter between two giant starships traveling at a fraction of the speed of light:
“They just missed with us!”, shouted the navigator on board ship XX, and at the sound of his voice, the ship’s pilot jerked the control lever back, and the XX turned over in a somersault, turned 180 degrees, and chased after the ship…
Both are paraphrased from domestic sci-fi. The former gives the reader the impression that the universe is not much bigger than a small town in a cop movie, and that the planets in space are just like storefronts on the side of the thoroughfare. The latter makes the reader feel that an interstellar spacecraft flying at relativistic speeds behaves much like a taxicab on the street. In such a depiction, the author is blind to the cosmic grandeur. It is not that such a depiction is totally unacceptable; such episodes are often found in many of the world’s most famous novels, such as Interstellar Detective2 and so on. For these allegorical novels, the universe is just a tool to develop the plot. But the main attraction of sci-fi is not that.
2 No idea what this work is.
A huge spaceship, flying in the dark silence of space to a distant goal. It will take 2000 years to accelerate, maintain cruising speed for 3000 years, and then 2000 years to decelerate. Generations of people have been born and died. The Earth has become an ancient vague dream. The spaceship archaeologists can no longer unearth evidence, out of the vast strata of the spaceship, that the Earth once existed. That distant destination has become a myth passed down for millennia, a religious phantasy. Generation after generation, people don’t know where they came from; generation after generation, people don’t know where they are going. Most people believe that the spaceship is an eternal world that has existed and will exist forever, and only a small number of wise men, convinced of the existence of the destination, look day and night into the infinitely deep cosmic abyss in front of the spaceship… This is the theme of several Western sci-fi novels. What do you feel in such a depiction? Is it the far-reaching vastness of the universe, or the shortness of life. Perhaps, you thus look down on the whole history of humanity from the perspective of the universe, or the eyes of God, and you find with emotion that our civilization is only a tiny grain of sand in the cosmic desert of space and time.
One might think that FTL technology and spacetime leapfrogging depicted in sci-fi would inevitably make the universe perceptually smaller, just as airplanes and modern communication networks have made the earth smaller. This is true. If FTL technology is really possible, perhaps the universe will one day be just a village in human senses, just as the global village is today. But we’re talking about novels. Think about it, given two novels which one do you want to read – one depicting Columbus in the vast Atlantic Ocean, searching with great fear and little hope for the new land of his dreams, the other depicting a company clerk traveling by plane from Paris to New York City on a business trip. Meanwhile, the Earth hasn’t actually been shrunk; vast expanses of earth and ocean still exist, and modern man is still experiencing the romantic thrill of ancient man’s trek across the surface of this planet through hiking and the America’s Cup race. There’s no reason for sci-fi to shrink the universe into villages when most people can’t even fly out of the atmosphere. What’s more, even in the FTL era, the universe as a whole is still full of great mystery and shock value.
Frederick Pohl’s Father of the Stars describes a billionaire who has spent his life building dozens of gigantic spaceships, all with conventional rocket engines, which carry tens of thousands of people into the vastness of space to open up a new living space for humanity. A few decades after the departure of these spaceships, science on Earth made FTL spaceships a reality, and such spaceships, carrying the hero in his twilight years, took only a day or two to catch up with those traditional spaceships that had departed a few decades earlier, making the feat that the hero and tens of thousands of pioneers had carried out with all their lives a meaningless tragedy. In this novel, Pohl uses the contrast between the two technologies to create a simultaneous feeling of the vastness of outer space, the tragedy of the pioneers, and the relentlessness of fate.
The pinnacle of depictions of vast spacetime belongs to Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001, The fear, loneliness and awe of human beings in front of the mysterious universe expressed in the novel, which carves into the readers’ heart and soul, is unforgettable for the rest of their lives. I remember 20 years ago that winter night, after reading that book, I went out to look up at the night sky, and suddenly felt that everything around me had disappeared, and the earth under my feet became a pure geometric plane with infinite extension of snow-white and smooth, and on this infinite two-dimensional plane, under the magnificent starry night sky, there stood I alone, facing this vast mystery that the human mind could not grasp… Since then, the starry sky looked different in my eyes. The feeling is like leaving a pond to see the sea. This made me deeply appreciate the power of sci-fi.
In the busy and practically-minded modern society, people’s eyes are mostly confined in boxes, and they seldom look at space. I once asked ten people whether the moon would come out in the daytime, and except for one person who was a bit hesitant, the others were very sure that it would not. Modern society has also made people numb to astronomical numbers. No one seriously tries to visualize a light years in the world, and 15 billion lightyears is not much different from 15 billion kilometers in most minds. Numbness to the universe pervades society. The mission of sci-fi is to broaden and deepen people’s minds, and if readers stop on their way home from work and look up at the starry sky for a while, the novel is a great success. Unfortunately, our sci-fi is currently in this same numbness to a considerable degree. This is probably due to two reasons.
The first reason is in philosophy. It is presumed that sci-fi, like mainstream literature, depicts the relationship between people. Under this concept, the universe is only a prop, a background and an accompaniment in the works. Undeniably, many excellent works have been produced under this concept, but the greatest advantage and charm of sci-fi is the depiction of the relationship between human beings and the universe. The universe should be as important a protagonist in sci-fi as man. The reason why 2010 and 2061 – the two sequels of 2001 – are not as successful as 2001, is that the author have shifted his focus to depicting the relationships of human society and destroyed the mystery and ethereal nature of the universe that was established in 2001.
Truly gut-feeling the universe is hard. Standing on the roof of a tall building, we have the feeling of being high above the ground; sitting on a hot steam balloon rising to 1000 meters, this feeling is even more strong and dizzying; but if we look down from an airliner flying at 20,000 meters, this sense of altitude is rather diminished; looking down from a space shuttle operating in an orbit several hundred kilometers high, we need imagination to get a sense of altitude; and looking at Earth from the moon, which is more than 300,000 kilometers away, we can’t get a sense of altitude in any case – it just looks like a lovely blue toy. It is very difficult for humans to perceive the mega scale. The grandeur of the universe is also manifested in the opposite microscopic direction, which is even more difficult for human perception. At the same time, modern science has reached a very deep level of understanding about the macroscopic and microscopic aspects of the universe, and the description of the universe by science is not only beyond our imagination, but even beyond what we could have imagined. To truly appreciate the grandeur of the universe and to show this grandeur in novels requires imagination beyond ordinary people, high literary-technical skills, and a deep understanding of the forefront of modern science. It is the perpetual grand challenge and goal for sci-fi.
But all of this presupposes the kind of religious feeling that sci-fi authors have for the universe.
A philosophy professor once said that the first introductory lesson for philosophy freshmen should be to look up at the stars for long time late at night. I think this should be, even more so, the first lesson for sci-fi authors, as it will enable them to really find the feeling of sci-fi deep inside.
The grand and mysterious universe is the God of sci-fi, and the Gospel of Scifism is:
Feel the Lord’s greatness. Feel the Lord’s depth. Describe this feeling. Show it to those busy people, so that they feel the Lord’s greatness and depth as you do. Then blessed shall be you, those busy people, and Chinese sci-fi.
Acceptance speech at the 2000 Galaxy Awards (2000)
Based on the translation by Forestaller: https://www.reddit.com/r/threebodyproblem/comments/as70eu/ot_translation_liu_cixins_acceptance_speech_at/. Copied and fixed.
I am very glad that The Wandering Earth (2000) has gained the love of readers at large. This short story is part of a series I planned call “The Apocalyptic Series”: based on the premise of a solar catastrophe, it describes the process of humanity’s attempts at escape by various means; in descending order of the success rate of escape:
The 1st is Mend the Heavens, describing how humans enter the sun to fix and delay the solar catastrophe from the inside;
The 2nd is Micro-Age (1998);
The 3rd is The Wandering Earth (2000);
The 4th is Starship Eras, describing how humans left the solar system on spaceships, lost their targets and came to regard the spaceships as home;
The 5th is Wandering Souls, describing how humans broadcast their thoughts and memories to the universe before the solar catastrophe;
And the last is very dark – named On Pluto we sat down and wept, after Byron’s poem By the river of Babylon we sat down and wept – it describes how all hope was lost and a monument to humanity was built on Pluto, in what is more of a grim essay.3
3 This Plutonian “monument to humanity” appears in Death’s End. Also, the 1st, 4th, 5th stories are unwritten.
4 Before writing Ball Lightning, Liu thought he had liver cancer, so he wrote it to be his final work.
When you are diagnosed with cancer, the world changes in your eyes: the sky is red and the sun is blue; but when you are finally informed that it was a mis-diagnosis, when the sky turns blue and the sun turns red again, they are not the same sky and sun as before – the world and living becomes more beautiful in your eyes, and maybe even more meaningful;4 this is not a feeling you can ever get from a decade’s worth of books. The apocalyptic experience of an individual is a very valuable one; so what about the apocalyptic experience of all humanity? If the world suffers such a “mis-diagnosis”; then all humanity will look at our sky and sun with new eyes, treasure more greatly all things they regard as normal, and the human world will move along a more reasonable track. Only sci-fi novels can bring about this apocalyptic experience, and this is my initial purpose in planning this apocalyptic series.
Sci-fi novels can create a whole new world, where writers and readers can experience what is impossible in reality – this is why I love sci-fi. I started writing as a sci-fi fan, without any systematic consideration of sci-fi theories. I like sci-fi with less literary elements and more sci-fi elements, and have always thought that penetrating reality and dissecting human nature is neither the mission of sci-fi novels nor its comparative advantage – the advantage of sci-fi lies in creating an imaginary world. I used to hold a view that even I find extremist now: to tear sci-fi out from the confines of literature itself (the Sci-Fi section of the Tsinghua University BBS once tried to create an encyclopedia for virtual worlds, without much success). Of course, this proposal was attacked on all fronts.
I very much agree with what A-Lai [an earlier speaker] said: every writer should persist in their extremist views, while editors should hold an all-encompassing attitude towards all kinds of view; this is the only healthy environment for the development of sci-fi. But on the other hand, when sci-fi changed from a hobby into a career, I’ve found the need to manage many balancing acts – this includes balancing the works for their scientific vs literary nature, profundity vs readability, sci-fi as literature vs commodities – so my current works are a result of these ; which are more or less a betrayal of my own ideals for sci-fi. For a writer like me who has spent years trekking on the roads of sci-fi, this is also a sign of maturity.
Speaking of maturity, this happened: I took 2 day’s leave to attend these Awards, but applied for it under a different reason. 2 years ago when I published my first sci-fi story, a friend advised me to keep my writing activities “underground” in the unit (I worked at); he said, “In such a basic engineering department, mistakes and errors at work are tolerable, but not immaturity – you must never let others feel that you are immature, or else your prospects are gone.”.
This friend might be thought of as having misunderstood sci-fi, just as the society at large has; but in a way this reflects how immature our sci-fi is. For example: till now, our sci-fi stories have not created a milieu of their own – we are just writing our own stories in the many milieu created by others.
But to look at it in another way, sci-fi literature is by its very nature immature – because it shows humanity in its childhood, filled with curiosity and fear for the vast and profound universe, as well as the urge to explore it. In the face of such a universe, human science and philosophy are very immature, and sci-fi is the only literary form available to express our scientific and philosophical immaturities; so it’s no surprise that sci-fi is filled with immaturity. When human science is developed to the furthest extent and everything in the universe is discovered down to its smallest hair, that will be the day sci-fi dies.
Presently – faced with the immaturity of Chinese sci-fi – everyone in our sci-fi community is envious of the adult sci-fi readership in the US, and see it as a sign of maturity in sci-fi literature. But one must know that senility comes after maturity, and death comes after senility. The prosperity of US sci-fi is largely a result of the prosperity of its movie and TV industries, and these sci-fi movies and TV shows are but a stylistic extension of the Golden Age of sci-fi. Contemporary sci-fi literature itself in US is already deep in twilight – full of works applying complex techniques to express dense metaphors, completely devoid of the youthful energy of the Golden Age. Many magnum opuses in recent years already have a smell of decay about them. Americans under 25 these days basically don’t read sci-fi; I don’t see what’s to be envied about that.
We should be most envious of ourselves: our current sci-fi readership are the 8 or 9 o’clock sun, or even the 6 or 7 o’clock sun.5 Chinese sci-fi a market full of youth and hope, and this is what gives sci-fi writers like us confidence and strength – compared to this, a little immaturity is really nothing.
5The world is yours, as well as ours, but in the last analysis, it is yours. You young people, full of vigor and vitality, are in the bloom of life, like the sun at eight or nine in the morning. Our hope is placed on you. The world belongs to you. China’s future belongs to you.
– Mao Zedong, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, Talk at a meeting with Chinese students and trainees in Moscow (November 17, 1957).
Some research show that many animals have language and deductive abilities, some of whom can make tools, and even a minority who has writing; but no evidence shows that animals can imagine (what does not exist), so imagination is the only difference between humanity and animals – and our sci-fi fans here today are the most vibrant expression of that.
Thank you, everybody!
Seeing a drop of water in a sea – reflections on traditional literary elements in sci-fi novels (2003)
从大海见一滴水——对科幻小说中某些传统文学要素的反思, posted in 2003-10-01 at the Tsinghua University BBS, Sci-Fi section.
My translation took some paragraphs from Liu Cixin – Beyond Narcissism: What Science Fiction Can Offer Literature, because Liu Cixin reused some paragraphs for that.
Imagine, for example, that Tolstoy had provided the following description in War and Peace (1869):
Napoleon led a French army of six-hundred thousand men to invade Russia, gradually penetrating into its vast lands and soon coming to occupy the deserted city of Moscow. After waiting for a surrender that did not come, Napoleon ordered his army to retreat, but as the harsh cold of the Russian winter came upon them, a large part of the withdrawing French army froze to death or died of starvation. When Napoleon finally returned to France, he brought with him less than thirty thousand men.
In fact, there are many passages like this in Tolstoy’s monumental work, yet he separated descriptions of this kind from the main body of the novel, confining them to independent sections. He was not alone in this. Herman Wouk also attached historical accounts of World War II to the main body of his novel, The Winds of War (1971), as stand-alone appendages. Summed up as “Global Waterloo” and read on their own, they could make a good popular history of the Second World War. Both Tolstoy and Wouk, separated by a century, chose simply and directly to tell their readers: these are historical events, they are not an organic element of my work and not truly part of my literary creation. Indeed, macro-descriptions of historical events cannot form the main body of a mainstream literary work, for then the novel ceases being fiction and becomes a work of history. There are, of course, many novels that unfold against a historical panorama, including both Yao Xueyin’s epic Li Zicheng (5 volumes, published 1963–1999) and Howard Fast’s Spartacus(1951), but the main body of these works is made up of the detailed description of historical figures, reflecting the larger picture of history with a multitude of details. Even these works cannot use macro-descriptions of historical processes to form the main body of their text; that is the work of historians, not novelists.
But sci-fi is different, behold the following text:
Sirius Commander Noelopan led a massive fleet of 600,000 starships on an expedition into the solar system. Humans retreated, taking all available energy from the planets before retreating into outer space and prematurely transforming the sun into a red giant from which it was impossible to extract any energy. The Sirian Expeditionary Force penetrated deeper into the solar system and eventually captured Earth, which had become a desolate planet. After a long wait for peace that failed, Noelopan had to order the army to retreat. The harsh black hole flood period of the first spiral arm of the Milky Way arrived, and on the way back, due to energy depletion and loss of maneuverability, a large number of starships were swallowed up by floating black holes, and Noelopan finally returned to the Sirius system with less than 30,000 starships left in the fleet.
This is also a macroscopic depiction of history, and unlike that earlier passage, it is also fiction, a literary creation of the author, because it is history created by the author, and both Noelopan and his Starfleet come from his imaginary world. This is the main difference between sci-fi literature as opposed to mainstream literature. Mainstream literature depicts worlds that God has already created. Sci-fi literature, on the other hand, creates the world as God did and then depicts it. Because of this difference, we must reflect on certain elements of mainstream literature in sci-fi, taking the perspective of sci-fi literature itself.
1. Details
Novels must have details, but in sci-fi literature, the concept of details has changed dramatically. Consider a sci-fi story Singularity Fireworks, which describes a group of super-consciousnesses for whom Big Bang-esque explosions are nothing more than an amusing evening of fireworks. And every explosion is a Big Bang that gives birth to a universe. The following describes our universe being born this way:
“What a good one! What a good one!” Entity One exclaimed as the firework exploded in emptiness.
“A least better than the last few,” Entity Two agreed nonchalantly. “The laws of its physics forming after its expansion are equally distributed and the elementary particles percolating from its pure energy look good as well.”
The firework’s explosion vanished as its ashes slowly descended.
“Wait a minute! Something more is happening there!” Entity One called out, just as Entity Two was about to light another singularity firework. Handing Entity Two a telescope it continued, “Look in the dust, the cooling matter is forming many tiny, low-entropy aggregations that seem interesting.”
“Huh,” Entity Two raised the telescope. “They can reproduce themselves and microscopic consciousnesses are emerging.” It paused, “Wait, wait, some of them have even managed to infer that they have come from an exploding firework, how fascinating …
There can be little doubt that the above passage provides details. It describes the dialogue and perspectives of two entities watching fireworks. These details are, however, very unusual in that they hardly describe the small things. Mainstream literature often cannot describe the protagonists’ first kiss in less than 200 words; here, however, that length is sufficient to describe the entirety of the universe’s 15-billion-year history, starting with the Big Bang and covering the entire history of life and civilization. It goes even further, unfolding a vision of a supra-cosmos beyond our universe. In contrast to the “micro-details” of mainstream literature, these are “macro-details” that only a sci-fi story could provide.
The same content would be depicted in mainstream literature:
The universe was born in the Big Bang and later formed stars including the Sun, and later the Earth was formed next to the Sun. More than a billion years after the emergence of the Earth, life appeared on its surface, and later life emerged as human beings after a long evolution. Humans went through the primitive age, the agricultural age, the industrial age, and entered the information age, began to think about the origin of the universe, and proved that it was born in the Big Bang.
Is this a “detail”? Obviously not. That’s why macro-details can only be found in sci-fi.
In fact, such details are very common in sci-fi. The best example is in 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the last chapter where the astronaut is transformed into a purely energetic state. In these details, sci-fi writers, with a flick of the pen, move across a billion years of time and ten billion light-years of space, turning the world and history encompassed by mainstream literature into an insignificant speck of dust in the universe.
In the early days of sci-fi, macro-details were rare, and it only appeared in abundance when sci-fi literature extended its tentacles into the depths of the universe, while at the same time beginning its contemplation of the origin of the universe. It is a sign of the maturity of sci-fi, and it is also an expressive style that best reflects the characteristics and advantages of sci-fi.
I do not intend to disparage the micro-detailing of traditional literature. It is also essential in sci-fi, and a sci-fi novel without vivid micro-detail is like a giant with one leg missing. There is no lack of sci-fi composed of nothing but micro-details, such as Light of Other Days (Bob Shaw, 1966).
Now the pity is that, while emphasizing micro-detail, macro-detail is not recognized among critics and readers of domestic sci-fi, and people generally have two reactions: 1. it is hollow; 2. it is just a long synopsis.
Clarke’s The Star (1955) is a classic among sci-fi short stories, and its final line – “What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?” – is a timeless line of sci-fi, and an example of macro-detail. But it would certainly not have been published if it had been written in China, for one simple reason: it has no details. If we say that 2001: A Space Odyssey, though covering a vast region of spacetime, has written all that can be said, allowing no further expansion, then The Star is really like a synopsis of a full-length novel. If you hand this synopsis to an old editor of a domestic publisher who is looking for sci-fi novels, he or she may still think it’s too sketchy.
In China, there are also a lot of very good works that can’t be published on the grounds of “lack of details”, the most typical example being Feng Zhigang’s Planting Civilizations (种植文明 by 冯志刚). At the symposium after the 2001 Galaxy Awards, a woman sternly accused, “The lack of seriousness in sci-fi creation has gotten to such a point that some people have taken the synopsis of a novel and passed it off as a masterpiece!” Seeing Feng’s bitter smile next to me, I was tempted to explain a few words, but looking at her righteous indignation, the words were scared back into my stomach. In fact, this piece is still much more detailed than some foreign classics. If you don’t believe me, you can take a look at The Gravity Mine by Stephen Baxter, which won a Hugo Award in 2001, or Calvino’s The Spiral, or Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon from the ancient time of 1930. I’ve heard that Feng is expanding his “synopsis” into a full-length book,6 which is actually a common practice among Western sci-fi writers, but it really makes you think to note that many of the expanded full-length books are not as important to the history of sci-fi as their “synopses”.
6 A brief search shows that this had no follow-up. Certainly never published, and probably never written.
The emergence of macro-detail has a profound effect on the structure of sci-fi. This reminds us of the study of software engineering (especially MIS software). According to Western theories, the development of software should be from the top down, that is, first build the overall framework of the software, and then gradually refined. In China, due to the limited developmental level of management and IT science, the development of enterprise MIS software is basically the opposite, that is, first they develop the specialized modules, and then they are gradually put together into a large system (which has resulted in many disastrous consequences). The former is very much like the macro-detail-oriented sci-fi, which first builds a world according to the laws of its own creation, and then goes on to further enrich and refine it. The latter, surely, is the construction mode of traditional literature. Traditional literature has no way to write from the top down, because the structure above has already been built, and describing it is not a task of literature.
Sci-fi is precipitously expanding the descriptive space occupied by literature, allowing us to more vividly and profoundly show Earth and humanity from the vantage point of the entire universe. It can also show the several thousand years that make up the traditional world of literature in a new light: watching Romeo beneath Juliet’s window is certainly more interesting when viewed from a telescope in the Perseus Cloud than from a nearby bush.
Sci-fi can make us see a drop of water from the ocean.
2. Characters
The social history of humanity is a history of the rise of the status of the human. From Spartacus rushing out of the gladiatorial arena brandishing his sword to the revolutionaries in France shouting “liberté, égalité, fraternité”, the human has been transformed from a means to an end.
But in science, the status of the human is evolving in the opposite direction, from being God’s creature (everything else in the universe is mere furniture gifted to us by this old man), and the master of all things, to being degraded to being essentially indistinguishable from other animals, and then to being degraded to an insignificant bacterium on a grain of sand in a certain corner of the universe.
Sci-fi belongs to a literature that is inextricably linked to society and culture, but it was spawned by science, and the question now is, in which way do we lean concerning the status of the human?
Mainstream literature has undoubtedly leaned to the former. “Literature is a human study” has become a nearly axiomatic creed, and a novel without characters is unacceptable.
Looking at the short world history of sci-fi, it has not abandoned characters, but how it uses and treats characters have been greatly diminished compared to mainstream literature. Most of classic sci-fi have not been successful thanks to their characters. Of all the movies we’ve ever seen, the most flat and stilted characters were created by 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which scientists and astronauts stare blankly and drone on machine-like at a constant syllable-per-second. Even if the lacking of characters in other sci-fi works is due to the writer’s disinterest or inability, in the movie of 2001: A Space Odyssey, it can only a deliberate choice by the director Kubrick. It’s as if he’s telling us that people are just symbols in this work. He does this so successfully that after seeing the movie, it is hard to distinguish the only two astronauts in the spaceship, who seem to have no distinguishing traits other than their names.
Character status changes in sci-fi as much as detail, again because sci-fi dramatically expands the space available for textual description. Another important reason is that sci-fi’s natural connection to science makes it possible to have a cold, hard view of humanity’s place in the universe.
The concept of characters has been expanded in sci-fi in two main ways:
One is the replacement of the image of the individual by the image of the race as a whole. Unlike traditional literature, sci-fi can depict multiple nonhuman civilizations and assign different images and personalities to these civilizations and the races that created them. These races could be aliens or different groups of humans that went into outer space and branched away from humanity. The aforementioned Planting Civilizations is a prime example of the latter. We call this new literary image the racial image.
Second is the world image. These worlds can be different planets and galaxies, or different branches of parallel worlds, and in recent years, many depicted virtual worlds running in computer memory. This is subdivided into two cases: one is that these worlds are populated (with people of whatever kind), and this world image is, a further extension of the racial image described above; the other case is that of the unpopulated worlds, which are later accessed by people (mostly explorers). In this case, sci-fi is more concerned with the natural attributes of the worlds and the role it plays for the people who enter them. Such a world is often portrayed like a villain in traditional literature, because they conflict with the people who enter it. There is also a very rare type of world-image in sci-fi: a world that exist autonomously, which humans never enter, and which the author depicts from a supra-conscious viewpoint. THis is the case of The Library of Babel (1941). These are rare and difficult to read, but they push the sci-fi use of character to the limit.
Neither the racial image nor the world image can exist in mainstream literature, because a literary image exists on the premise that it is possible to compare it with other objects, and mainstream literature that depicts a single race (human beings) and a single world (the Earth) has to refine the granularity of the image down to the individual. Thus, the racial image and the world image are sci-fi’s contribution to literature.
These two new images have apparently not been recognized by domestic readers and critics. Our comments on sci-fi novels still continue with traditional literary thinking, unable to accept works not centered on traditional character images, not to mention the conscious creation of novel racial and world images, even though the creation and appreciation of these two images is the core of sci-fi literature.
The lack of Chinese sci-fi at the literary level is essentially the lack of these two images.
3. The reality and ethereality of sci-fi topics
In fact, there is not much to discuss on this topic from a theoretical point of view. Sci-fi is for science. Abandon “science”, there is only “fiction”. To show an imaginary world is the beginning and end of this genre. Depicting only reality with sci-fi is awkward like using an airplane propeller in an electric fan.
However, domestic readers favor sci-fi that is close to reality, and cannot accept imagination that is even a little out-there and crazy. Under such circumstances, most of our sci-fi is near-future.
One thing has always puzzled me: why do you want to read sci-fi when you want to read depictions of reality? Isn’t People’s Literature magazine good for it? Isn’t Harvest magazine good? Isn’t the epic Ordinary World (1988) by Lu Yao good? In terms of the level and depth of the depiction of reality, sci-fi is naturally inferior to mainstream literature.
Many years ago, I saw a Soviet comedy movie, in which there was this scene: a large passenger plane landed on the highway and drove with the car, which obeyed all the traffic rules, stopping at the same red light alongside the cars.
This is a wonderful portrayal of the current state of the domestic sci-fi. Sci-fi is a genre that can fly up, but we prefer to let it crawl on the ground.
4. Heroism in Science Fiction
Modern mainstream literature has entered the era of mocking heroes, as in that contemporary popular saying, “The sun is a piece of shit and the moon is a piece of ass-wiping paper.”.
This approach has merit. If you think about it scientifically and rationally, “heroism” is not a positive word. Was the behavior of those German tank drivers and Japanese kamikaze pilots in World War II heroic? Of course, it can be argued that it was not, because they were fighting for an unjust side. But on further reflection, this argument brings us nothing but confusion. Ordinary people can become heroes without being an ethicist, and it is impossible for them to decide the justice or injustice of the cause they are engaged in. More importantly, even for ethicists, judging a war from a moral perspective is difficult. Whether a war is just or not is more a matter of your feet than your brain, i.e., which side you are on. Wars such as World War II, where there is a basic consensus on their moral nature, are extremely rare in human history. According to the traditional notion of heroism, when a war comes, if ordinary people want to do their duty, whether their behavior is heroic or not depends on the luck of the draw. Worse, the probability of hitting that luck is lower than that of a coin toss. Over time, people must have come to believe that the fallen soldiers on both sides in most wars are meaningless cannon fodder. Looking at heroism again with this definition, one realizes that it has brought far more disaster than progress to humanity throughout history. Nor did the heroine of my story, The Glory and the Dream (2003), die for a just cause. So, are all those tragic sacrifices, all those magnificent, earth-shattering feats that only human beings can perform, just meaningless, perverted farces?
A more sensible and fair approach would be to separate heroism from justice, and to treat it only as a uniquely human behavior, an important marker of distinction between human beings and other animals.
As civilization advances, and as the concepts of democracy and human rights are recognized throughout the world, heroism is fading. By mocking heroes, literature is calling for humanism from another angle, and in a way it is historical progress. It is conceivable that if human society develops along its current trajectory, heroism will eventually become something alien.
The question now is: will human society certainly develop along its current trajectory?
Humans are fortunate that since the advent of civilization, the human world as a whole has never faced a sudden extinction event from the outside, but such a catastrophe remains possible in the future.
Suppose that the Earth faces a full-scale invasion by an alien civilization, and in order to defend our civilization, one billion people may need to become cannon fodder under the lasers of the aliens. Or that the solar system sails into a cloud of interstellar dust, and the deteriorating Earth’s ecology necessitates the deaths of three billion people in order to avoid the deaths of six billion people all together. In that case, will our literature continue to ridicule heroism in such a scenario? Will shouting “humanity” and “human rights” save humanity then?
Looking at humanity from the perspective of sci-fi, our race is extremely fragile. In this cold universe, humanity must bravely sacrifice a part of it in exchange for the continuation of the whole civilization, and this calls for heroism. Now that human civilization is in an unprecedented stage of smooth development, it is true that heroism is less important, but that does not mean that it will still be unimportant in the future contemplated by sci-fi.
Sci-fi is the last refuge for heroism and idealism, so let them dwell here for a while longer.
5. A third image in sci-fi
Having previously mentioned the two images that characterize sci-fi literature – the racial image and the world image – it also has a third image that is not found in mainstream literature: the science image. Since sci-fi is a direct product of scientific development, science always exists in it either explicitly or implicitly, whether it is traditional hard sci-fi or later soft sci-fi. It fills the space between lines as a lifeblood, and as a ubiquitous image, it has always been depicted by sci-fi.
Chinese sci-fi has been learning from mainstream literature, but it has not been a good student. We pay close attention to characterization and stylistic sophistication, and as a result, our works seem to be nothing more than school essays. We pay close attention to reality, but compared with the mainstream novelists, it is still just the pretending-to-be-sick moaning of school students. We have dabbled with postmodernism, and the result is a total mess. But there is one thing we learned that we have gone above-and-beyond mainstream literature: scandalizing and demonizing science.
Up to now, mainstream literature just keeps a certain distance from science and does not hurt it, this is because on the one hand, the pastoral setting of traditional literature has little relation with science; on the other hand, to scandalize science, one needs to understand it, and at this point, the mainstream literature may meet an obstacle. Sci-fi, however, has a natural advantage in this regard, and does so with relentless effort!
I think we all know very well what has become of the image of science in our sci-fi.
It’s true that Western sci-fi writers have done a better job of this than we ever have, but that’s no reason for us to do so. Science is quite popular in Western societies, and rethinking on its consequences may be healthy. But even so, this tendency by the sci-fi criticism community has been unanimously condemned by the Western scientific community. In China, science is still a small candle flame in the wilderness among the general public, and a breeze can blow it out. The first task now is not to predict the disaster of science; the real disaster facing Chinese society would be the loss of the spirit of science among the masses.
The power of science lies in the public’s understanding of it. This is the truth. To let the spirit of science take root among the public is a great cause, compared to which [the other purposes of] sci-fi seems trivial. Originally, there is no contradiction between the two, and the old generation of Chinese sci-fi writers were full of hope that sci-fi would become a part of this great cause, but now it seems that this is a very naive hope. But at least, sci-fi should not cause damage to this cause. Science is the mother of sci-fi, do we really want to be her enemy?
If we can’t attract readers without portraying science in a negative light, without making it gruesome and horrible, then let’s stop the pen in our hands. It’s not a big deal, there are many other interesting things to do. If Chinese sci-fi really disappears, as a faithful old sci-fi fan, I sincerely pray that it will die a decent death.
6. Shackles of stereotypes
I have written some comparisons between sci-fi and mainstream literature, and I do not mean to belittle mainstream literature at all. The above mentioned advantages of sci-fi are determined by its own nature, and it is not therefore higher than mainstream literature in skill – on the contrary, currently sci-fi does not make good use of its natural advantages. In fact, facing mainstream literature, we often feel inferior, when seeing their courage to explore and innovate the methods of literary expression. From stream-of-consciousness to postmodernism, a dazzling variety of expressive methods have been developed with the spirit of “I do what I want”. If we look at sci-fi, we have not created our own expressive techniques. The New Wave movement was just an effort to take the techniques of mainstream literature and use them for ourselves, but later found that they were not suitable, and the whole movement has been called by researchers of sci-fi theories as “an effort to yield up the value and status of sci-fi to mainstream literature”. As for the aforementioned macro-details, racial image, and world image, they are all unconscious creations of sci-fi writers, which have not risen to the height of theory, let alone a self-conscious expressive technique. In foreign countries, these techniques are not even acceptable.
In fact, some traditional literary elements extended or subverted in sci-fi, such as characterization and detailing, are undergoing drastic changes in mainstream literature too. Mainstream literary figures like Borges and Calvino have long abandoned those traditional dogmas and achieved great success.
On the contrary, the domestic sci-fi critics are religiously picking up the broken yoke that others have thrown away, solemnly putting it on themselves, screwing the top bolt to the tightest, and lashing out at those sci-fi works that have even slightly crossed the threshold, as if they have become the guardians of the dignity of literature. Look at those online reviews, full of stereotypical dogma, without a little bit of young people’s sensitivity and vigor, sometimes I really want to ask: “Venerable one, how many centuries have you lived?”.
Innovation is the life of literature, but also the life of sci-fi. In the face of this literature from the sea to see a drop of water, we must first have the sea’s bosom!
Interview with Masters of sci-fi (2006)
Source: 《科幻大王》特约采访_workership_新浪博客
Q: What were the main contents of your fantasies and imaginations during your childhood?
A: I spent my childhood in the late stage of the Cultural Revolution. At that time, the cultural life, especially the cultural life that can stimulate the imagination, was poor, so the world of imagination was also poor. When I was a teenager, it was the end of the Cultural Revolution and the beginning of a new era, when many new worlds began to unfold in front of my eyes, but it was a bit late for a sci-fi writer. It is hard to get rid of the mental-branding of the time, no matter how hard you try in the future, you will always feel like dancing in shackles in writing sci-fi.
Q: What was the ambitious goal you set in your mind when you were a teenager?
A: It was the early 1980s, the era of universal scitech worship [in China], and the ideal of teenagers was simple and uniform, that is, to be a scientist, and I was no exception. However, after entering university, facing the slim chance of going to graduate school (at that time, even the undergraduate entrance examination only had a pass rate of 4%), and also contacting some scientists, I found that this career was not what we thought it was, and I was just like other people of my age, so my ideal soon faded away. Then I was in a daze, not knowing what I could do in the future, and I couldn’t talk about my ambitious goals. Sci-fi, to some extent, is a kind of spiritual compensation for the ideal that has become a soap-bubble-fantasy.
Q: How did you grow up? (Briefly describe the goals you set when you were a teenager)
A: Like everyone else, I had an ordinary life with no special experiences. People who write sci-fi are not good at nostalgia, and there is nothing to be nostalgic about. My childhood during the Cultural Revolution was a gray one, with not much to remember, just endless playing. Society didn’t offer much to play with, but kids invented a lot of things themselves, many of which were quite dangerous. The middle school years also came and went in a blur, and what remains in my memory are the innocent melodies of those Taiwanese school songs and the hunger brought about because I had only 9 yuan a month for school meals. Now I think that if I had studied harder at that time, I might now have a job with heavy responsibilities, and I wouldn’t be writing sci-fi. Now people are talking about the so-called tragedy of life in the poor mountainous region of ” sheep-herding - marrying - having children - sheep-herding “, in fact, we and the sheep-herding child is not much different, but only the cycle becomes”go to college - work - buy a house - marry - have children - go to college”, and in some aspects we are not even as good as the shepherd boy. His idleness, his lack of mountains and fresh air, compared to struggling with our duties all day long in the polluted city. Sci-fi, if it does become a way of life, can pull us out of the cycle mentally in some ways, but some authors and readers try to jump out of the cycle in reality with the help of sci-fi, and none of it turns out well.
Q: What were the main books you read as a teenager? What kinds of books were in the sci-fi genre?
A: As I said above, I didn’t have many books to read during my teenage years, so I didn’t have much of a choice, I read what was available, mostly realist literature and the classics that anyone had to read, and it was during that period that Russian literature profoundly influenced my later life, and I don’t know whether it was fortunate or unfortunate now. It didn’t take long to read all the sci-fi books in the country, and then it was just a matter of waiting for the new ones to come out.
Q: What book (or quote) did you read that inspired you the most as a teenager?
A: War and Peace.
Q: What kind of opportunity led you down the path of sci-fi writing?
A: It was a long process of becoming a sci-fi fan, then not being able to resist writing it myself, and then publishing it. Because of the domestic sci-fi’s bumpy road, it also makes this process seem very long, in which there is quite a long time, nearly ten years, sci-fi seems to have left myself, only late at night when I can occasionally think of her, but then, one day in the last century, she suddenly showed up in front of me again.
Q: Although you write in your spare time, it can be said that every piece you write is a masterpiece. Once published, they always cause a strong reaction among readers. How do you keep this good momentum of creation?
A: In fact, I don’t feel that I can maintain this kind of status, as you said. The process of completing each novel is quite difficult, and it is accompanied by a heap of bloody corpses of discarded ideas. Nor is it possible for every piece of work to be a masterpiece; there are many contingent factors that contribute to the success of a piece of literature, not the least of which is that the author’s creative tendencies resonate with the readers’ appreciative inclinations at the time, but in these ever-changing times that resonance is unattainable. Every author, especially sci-fi authors are facing a common fate: readers are gradually tired of your novels, and the readers in front of you are gradually unfamiliar, you want to get rid of this state, and create a brand new world, but as said above, everyone has their own spiritual shackles, how far you can go is actually fated from very early on, and literature style, much like other personality traits, is also predictable when one is three years old.
Q: When did you start publishing? What was the name of your debut novel? What kind of response did you get from readers?
A: In 1999, I published The Whale’s Song in Science Fiction World Magazine, and the response from readers was mediocre.
Q: What kind of accumulation did you have before you started to write sci-fi?
A: I didn’t consciously accumulate anything, but just dabbled with my own interest, and started to read more literature. After graduation, I found that the real society itself is an unsurpassed realist literary work which is continuously being written, but unfortunately, it is the same as other literary novels written into books, in that I couldn’t feel much interested in it. I had a new feeling: the universe is so big, so if I only dwell my thoughts upon humanity, it would be such a bore. Afterwards, I seldom read literature, and my interest shifted to natural science books that I found more interesting.
Q: Can you share your creative experience with the sci-fi fans in our magazine? Can you help those who just try to write sci-fi novels with some tips?
A: We should have a clear understanding of the so-called creative experience. For example, almost all the creative training first said: “Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences.” But if you think about it, you will realize that this statement is ridiculous, at least half of the classic masterpieces are made up of unnecessary things. More ancient, like Balzac, or more recent, like Faulkner, tried to actually omit needless things, and do you see what’s left? That’s why I always think it’s important not to teach people to write novels. Literature is an extremely free thing, and the rules of literature are fundamentally different from the laws of science; the latter are there for us to follow, the former are there for us to break. The flaws of others according to a literature teacher may be an author’s strengths. In other words, in literature, flaws carried to the extreme are strengths, as long as they can be expressed in an aesthetically pleasing way.
Q: As a leading sci-fi writer, what are your plans in terms of sci-fi creation? Can you reveal some never-before-seen information to the sci-fi fans of our magazine?
A: As an amateur writer, it’s hard for me to have a long-term creative plan because it depends on my own work, and you don’t know when you’ll be free. There are just a lot of ideas sitting around in my head, which I hope to write in my lifetime. Recently, I’ve been planning to write a series of three long stories, describing a period of mankind’s journey from the beginning of the Cultural Revolution to five hundred years later, but I’ve only completed the first one so far.
Why not a Three Body standalone book? (2006)
Merged from two posts, 关于〈三体〉单行本_workership_新浪博客 (2006-06-08 18:26:05) and 关于<三体>单行本的一个试验_workership_新浪博客 (2006-06-12 10:22:40)
Many friends have asked why The Three-Body Problem was not published as a single volume. This was determined by the publishing environment during the 40th anniversary (2006) of the Cultural Revolution (1966) and had nothing to do with commercial considerations. As for the future, maybe after this year, the environment will become more relaxed, and we can publish it. Maybe we will never publish it. In fact, it took a lot of determination to even serialize it in a magazine. Otherwise, this book may never see the light of day. I would like to express my gratitude to Science Fiction World [the magazine where it was serealized].
Sci-fi that describes reality is not necessarily good sci-fi. Reflecting reality is not the task of sci-fi, let alone its advantage. It is just an attempt to give readers a fulcrum for their imagination, nothing more, and no more reasons.
Try typing the word “Cultural Revolution” in a Sina Blog post – it cannot be posted, with no explanation (I used special techniques to publish the two characters “文革”). From this, we can also understand the difficulty of publishing The Three-Body Problem as a single problem.
(Though you can enter “文革” in the comments section 🙂)
The second installation of The Three-Body Problem is done (2007)
Source: 《三体》第二部完成_workership_新浪博客
Writing a full-length book by an amateur author is an adventure, not knowing what surprises will interrupt the writing process during this time, which can be as small as extra work assignments or as large as the destruction of the planet. In the past, when I was writing a long story, the process was very smooth, and the accidents seemed to appear in a concentrated way just I would be finishing it, but this time, they all erupted right in the middle of the writing process. It is a painful process to throw down a long story for a while and then pick up again, and constantly throwing down and picking up is very scary. The second part of *The Three is written in this way. What was planned to be a four-month job took nine months.
What puzzled me most about the creative process was the role of the individual in history. The role of the individual in the scientific process is relatively easy to grasp, the laws of nature are there, if Newton could not find it, the later Luton or Maton would find it. But sociology is different, human history is different, just like a person’s life, to use the description from Ball Lightning:
Fickle and unpredictable, all is probability and chance, like a twig floating in a stream that trips over a small rock or gets caught in a small whirlpool…
So the true role of the historical giants has always been a mystery, to quote again from the second installment of The Three-Body Problem:
“Do you really believe in the decisive role of the individual in history?”
“Well, I think it’s a question that can’t be proven or disproven, unless we restart time, kill off a few great men, and see how history proceeds. Of course, you can’t rule out the possibility that the course of history was determined by the rivers carved out and dammed up by those great figures.”
“But there’s another possibility: Those great figures of yours might be no more than swimmers in history’s river. They may have left their names in history because of the world records they set and the praise and renown they won, but they had no effect on the river’s flow…. Ah, with things the way they are, what’s the point of thinking about all that?”
In fact, depicting a three-dimensional panorama of the world from the lowest to the top of the pyramid is the lifelong dream of all mainstream literature and sci-fi authors, but the ability to achieve this goal is very much in the hands of the very best of men. There are not many Tolstoys and Balzacs, after all, and so sci-fi has always been about describing fantastical histories from the point of view of the individual and the titanic, and this is true of everything from The Foundation to Dune.
But we may be able to see the giants in sci-fi as a kind of symbol, specifically the main character in the second part of The Three-Body Problem, he may symbolize such a group of people, who are neither awed by the starry heavens above nor the moral law within,7 but in this way they transcend the imaginary bonds in the head to grasp the truth of the universe, and wield use this understanding resolutely as a weapon of survival.
7 This dictum from the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) was chosen for Immanuel Kant’s tombstone:
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
Survival is an iron wall, in the words of Wandering Earth: “You are walking across a plain when you suddenly encounter a wall. The wall is infinitely tall and extends infinitely deep underground. It stretches infinitely to the left and infinitely to the right. What is it? – Death.”
I can only admit: I care about survival, I believe that an honorable death is worse than a dishonored life, and that dying in love is worse than living loveless. This statement is very low at a personal point of view, but from the civilization point of view it is another thing; in the earth’s atmosphere let people despise, but let’s put it into space, and see it turn into another thing.
Writing a long story is living a life, and I’m done with this nine-month life. It started with Chinese New Year, when it was cold, and now it’s getting cold again; perhaps, the universe is also so reincarnated, only the time scale is billions and billions of times larger.
One feeling: sci-fi authors are really lucky, and sci-fi can really make you young.
Several books on my sci-fi journey (2007)
Source: 我的科幻之路上的几本书, published in《南方周末》2007年9月13日 (Southern Weekend, 2007-09-13)
Books affect everyone in many ways, but it’s the ones that determine one’s path in life that are the most important, and as a sci-fi author, I’d like to list just the ones that set me on the path to sci-fi.
Jules Verne’s novels about big machines. Jules Verne’s sci-fi novels are divided into two major categories in terms of the objects depicted, one is scientific adventure novels, and the other is novels depicting big machines, with the latter having more sci-fi content, mainly including Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Propeller Island, From the Earth to the Moon, and so on. The big machines appearing in this kind of novels are all based on the steam technology and rudimentary electric technology of the 18th and 19th centuries, and are crude and clumsy, symbols of the age of technological childhood. There is a kind of childlike innocence and childish beauty.
In Verne’s time, science began to be transformed into technology and started the process of comprehensively influencing social life. What these big machines show is the kind of naive surprise when human beings first saw the miracle of technology, and this feeling is the very soil for sci-fi to germinate and grow. Even today, the beauty of the big machines of the 19th century has not disappeared, and the specific manifestation of this is the steampunk genre that has appeared in sci-fi literature in recent years, in which this kind of sci-fi work shows not the future that we modern people imagine, but the present that people in the past (mostly the end of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century) imagined. In steampunk movies and television, we can see big steam-driven machines, crudely shaped flying machines like cruisers, intricate copper piping and antique gauges everywhere. Steampunk is an imagined continuation of the era of big machines in Verne’s work, and it shows a nostalgic warmth in addition to the beauty of big machines.
Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is another type of sci-fi, the same techno-sci-fi, but it is at the opposite end of the genre from Verne’s big machine novels, with the latter depicting technology that is one step forward from reality, and the former depicting ethereal worlds that tend to be ultimate in both time and space. I read this book in the early 1980s, and it was the first novel I saw that vividly depicted the whole process of human beings from birth to extinction (or sublimation) in a brisk few pages, in which the charm of sci-fi was fully expressed, and the God’s-eye-view gave me a suffocating shock. At the same time, 2001 showed me a completely different kind of writing, with both philosophical abstract transcendence and literary subtlety, to depict the immensity of existence in the universe that we can’t grasp in our perception or imagination.
Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, on the other hand, exemplifies sci-fi’s ability to create imaginary worlds; the entire work reads like a Creator’s grandiose design documents for an imagined alien world in which every brick is exquisitely laid. As with 2001, the aliens never appear, but the imagined world itself is already mesmerizing, and if Verne’s novels made me fall in love with sci-fi, Clarke’s work gave me the initial impetus for writing sci-fi.
The Dystopia trilogy – Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Zamyatin’s We – are only categorized as the fringes of sci-fi, but I saw in them sci-fi literature ability to reflect and intervene in reality from perspectives that are not possible in traditional realist literature. 1984 does not have a very high status in the literary world, and its influence is mainly in the political and sociological fields. In the just concluded Chengdu Science Fiction Convention, some writers even believed that 1984 prevented 1984 from becoming 1984, which is of course a bit overstated, but in addition to bringing the enjoyment of imagination, sci-fi literature also has special powers beyond other genres of literature. In my discussion with Prof. Jiang Xiaoyuan, we both admitted that among the Dystopia trilogy, 1984, which seems to be the darkest, is the brightest, in which human nature, though repressed, at least exists; whereas in the other two worlds, human nature has already been disappeared by technology. This is a special kind of darkness impossible in realist literature.
From a literary point of view, Tolstoy’s War and Peace is not in the same class as Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War series, but what I am concerned about is the bird’s-eye view of the whole situation that they share; they are both novels depicting human wars in a panoramic manner. Compared with those novels about personal feelings that are like an exquisitely sculpted grain of rice, such a magnum opus can make people appreciate the whole of humanity as a unified racial existence, which also happens to be the perspective of sci-fi literature.
Asimov’s The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science (1960) is more of an encyclopedia than a work unified whole, but it’s true that I haven’t seen any other popular science work with such a systematic introduction to modern science either. Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (1981) and The Dragons of Eden (1977) are also early entries in the Western pop-sci canon, and while they now seem a bit outdated in terms of theoretical novelty, they introduced an aesthetic perspective into their description of science, which is unsurprising today, but in the early 1980s, they really opened up my third eye for looking at science.
The great thing about Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (1976) is that it’s cold, colder than mere cool-headedness, and unmovingly reveals the nature of life. While its conclusions aren’t always correct, they shaw a possibility that the ultimate purpose of life, the living world, and civilization may be something we don’t even think about. Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975), on the other hand, spreads equality and love to all beings beyond the human race, and similarly makes us look at human civilization from a height that we have not before. In any case, both books are “sci-fi”.
But the most sci-fi are The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg (1977) and The Last Three Minutes (1995) by Paul Davies, in which the authors describe in poetic terms the extremes of the universe’s nascent and dying moments, when the world is so far away from reality that it might as well be real. Taking us to places we can never get to in times we can’t experience is the great fascination of science and sci-fi, and it has to be admitted that in this respect science does it better. All the peoples of the world have constructed their own creation myths with the boldest and most splendid fantasies, but none of them is as magnificent and mind-blowing as the Big Bang theory of modern cosmology; the long story of the evolution of life, with its twists and turns and romance, compared with which, the creation myth of human beings by God, or Nüwa, is really bland and boring.
Then there is the poetic view of space and time in general relativity, the elf-like microcosm in quantum physics, the world created by these sciences is not only beyond our imagination, but also beyond what we could possibly imagine, and absolutely beyond the power of human myth writers to create. Yet the imagination and the beauty of science is imprisoned in cold equations, and the common people can only glimpse her with great difficulty. But when the beauty of science is shown in front of people, its power to shock and purify the soul is enormous, and some aspects of the beauty of traditional literature are hard to reach. Sci-fi is a bridge to the beauty of science, which releases this beauty from the formula and shows it to the public in the form of literature.
Why is humanity still worth saving? – debate between Liu Cixin and Jiang Xiaoyuan (2007)
Originally published in New Discoveries magazine, Issue 11, 2007. Host and scribe: Wang Yan
Where will the human race be taken to in the end? Can humanity’s belief in the future be sustained? With what? Science? What can science solve? What can’t it solve?
On August 26th, 2007, at the “White Night” bar run by poet Zhai Yongming, the editorial board of New Discoveries invited two guests to Chengdu to attend the “2007 China (Chengdu) International Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention”. The editorial board of New Discoveries invited two guests to Chengdu to participate in the “2007 China (Chengdu) International Science Fiction and Fantasy Conference”: Liu Cixin, a famous sci-fi writer, and Jiang Xiaoyuan, a professor at Shanghai Jiaotong University who has been frequently publishing sci-fi commentaries in recent years, to have a fascinating conversation about our common doubts, and a face-to-face exchange of ideas on sci-fi, scientism, and the relationship between science and humanities, and other issues. The following is the record of the conversation.
Liu: Historically, the first sci-fi novel, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, was anti-science, and her portrayal of science was not very bright. And even earlier, in Gulliver’s Travels, there is a chapter about scientists [on Balnibarbi], and they are described in a very comical way. You can see a science degenerating into an academic formality. But Jules Verne suddenly became optimistic because he was inspired by the rapid development of science and technology in the late 19th century.
Jiang: A lot of things from the West were brought in, and they were selected, and Verne fit our need for propaganda and education. His early optimism is inseparable from the development of science and technology in the 19th century, when people did not yet see science as a monster, but he became pessimistic in his later years.
Liu: Verne did write some very complex works, with a lot of complex human nature and plots. One is about a ship on which many people form a society. Also his Facing the Flag has an anti-science element, depicting that science can bring about some disasters. Then there’s The Begum’s Millions. But these do not dominate, and almost all of his still-read works are more ideologically innocent. It’s worth noting that the later Golden Age of sci-fi came during the Great Depression, in the 1920s. Why? Probably because people wanted to take comfort in the illusions created by sci-fi and escape from reality.
Jiang: It’s said that book publishing was booming at that time. There’s a little story about Verne, he wrote about the Xujiahui Observatory [L’Observatoire de Zi-Ka-Wei] in Robur the Conqueror. He said there was a flying machine, and the director of the Xujiahui Observatory thought it was sent by intelligent beings from other planets, similar to what we call UFOs today, but the directors of the observatories in other countries didn’t believe him because he was Chinese, but later on, it turned out to be really from an extraterrestrial civilization. This story made a mistake: the director of the Xujiahui Observatory at that time was not Chinese, but a Frenchman, a compatriot of Verne.
Liu: Verne created the image of the big machine in his novels, which has been used in many anti-science works since. Forster wrote a very famous anti-science sci-fi work called The Machine Stops. The story is that the whole society is a big running machine, and people don’t even walk anymore, they live underground. One day the machine breaks down and civilization is destroyed.
Jiang: Many readers have noticed an evolution from optimism to pessimism in your work. Is this similar to the pessimism of Verne in his later years? Is there also some ideological change behind it?
Liu: The connection is not very strong. Whether it’s pessimism or optimism, it’s actually a need for expression. In the past few years of writing sci-fi, I haven’t had any ideological shifts. I’m a fanatic of Technologism, and I personally believe that technology can solve all problems.
Jiang: That is actually scientism.
Liu: Some people say that science can’t solve all problems, because science may cause some problems, such as the corruption of human nature, degeneration of morality, or even as Nancy Kress said, “Science makes humans turn into non-humans.”8. But what we have to be aware of is that human nature is actually changing all the time. We and Stone Age humans would think of each other as inhumans. Change should not be rejected or feared, as we are definitely changing. With high-enough technology, I can’t think of any problem that it can’t solve. My guess is that those who think that science can’t solve the problems we face are doing so, because they have a concern that the human itself should remain uncorrupted.
8 I cannot find such a statement in English, so I translated literally.
Jiang: The argument against scientism, that science may corrupt the human, is only one aspect of it, and the other aspect is that science really can’t solve some problems, and some problems can never be solved, such as the purpose of life.
Liu: What you say does hold true, but I’m not talking about issues that are that broad. And I think the purpose of life can be solved by science.
Jiang: Can we rely on science to find the purpose of life?
Liu: Science can stop me from searching for the purpose of life. For example, we can use science to eliminate the desire to find the ultimate purpose from our brain.
Jiang: I think a lot of scientific and technological developments are neutral, depending on who uses them: bad people use them for bad things, good people use them for good things. But there are other things that are fundamentally bad. What you’ve just described is a very dangerous and even evil thing, and no matter who uses it, it’s evil. If we go ahead and develop something like that, it is evil. Why has the West promoted anti-scientism over the years? Against scientism, not against science itself. Scientism is very ugly in the eyes of many Westerners.
Liu: What I want to point out is this: Is there truly a difference between convincing you with words, and influencing your essential judgment by putting a chip in your head?
Jiang: Of course there is a difference. By convincing me, you honor my free will.
Liu: Now I’m going to ask this question, which I’m going to write about in my next work9: if you build such a machine, but it doesn’t directly control your thoughts, and you take whatever thoughts you want, is this acceptable?
9 This is the “mental seal” in The Dark Forest.
Jiang: This is acceptable, but the person who goes to get the thoughts should be wary of it.
Liu: Right, that’s what I was going to say. According to your point of view, in the Dystopia trilogy, 1984 is the brightest, in which human nature is only repressed, while in the other two, human nature disappears. If you were given the choice of 1984 or Brave New World, which would you choose?
Jiang: Probably more people would choose to go to Brave New World. The premise is that you only have two choices. But what if there are other options?
Liu: One of the things I remember you talking to me about is that humanity is not philosophically ready for total extinction. Now let’s link the human-corrupting science and technology up with the existential catastrophe. If this cataclysm were to come, wouldn’t you have to use this tool?
Jiang: Look at it this way. If we are to prepare for the cataclysm today, then I think there are two most important things. The first is for us to gain interstellar navigational capability, and that capability is not merely in launching an occasional spaceship, but migrating on a large scale. The second is for us to find a new homeworld.
Liu: That’s great. But what if the disaster is imminent, say next May, what do we do now?
Jiang: Do you think that using technology to control people’s minds can solve this disaster?
Liu: It by itself can’t avoid the disaster, but it can organize human beings in a way that transcends the moral bottom line and preserves the whole at the expense of the parts. Because right now human morality can’t handle the kind of dilemma in The Cold Equations: one person dies, or two people die together?
Jiang: If you want me to accept mind-control technology (microchips in the head) on the grounds of preventing a future catastrophe, that’s a catastrophe in itself, and one can’t accept an catastrophe now just because one expects another in the future. The day of that disaster is still unknown, and it may or may not come. In fact, similar confusions have been discussed in several Western works, and ultimately they all denounce this as evil. Like in Digital Fortress (1998), where everyone’s email is monitored, it’s said that it’s for the purpose of counter-terrorism, but it’s already a form of terrorism.
Liu: I’m just giving an example to illustrate a point: whether technology is evil or not, and whether its role in human society is evil or not, depends on what the ultimate purpose of human society is. Mr. Jiang believes that controlling the mind is evil because it takes away humanity. But if the ultimate purpose of human beings is not to sustain their humanity, but to survive, then it is not evil.
Jiang: This involves a value judgment: is it important to survive or sustain humanity? It’s as if there are two paths ahead: one is to lose humanity but still survive, and the other is to sustain humanity until the final moment and then perish. I believe that not only me, but also many people will choose the latter. Because the loss of humanity is the same as extinction of Humanity.
Liu: In fact, from the beginning of writing sci-fi until now, I have been thinking about this question: which one is more reasonable to choose?
Jiang: At this time I think we must respect free will and everyone must vote. People like me can vote the not-surviving option.
Liu: You’re right about all of this, but what I want to emphasize now is a question of scale. What sci-fi does is that it can be seen on a scale that we don’t normally see. Conventional moral judgments can’t do the job of judging humanity as a whole. I’ve been thinking in terms of sci-fi, and saw that the traditional moral bottom line is deeply questionable. I can’t say it’s wrong, but at least it’s dangerous. The concept of human nature is truly vague. Do you really think that an unchanging human nature exists from primitive times to the present? What is the one thing about human nature that has remained unchanged throughout the ages? I can’t find any.
Jiang: I think free will is part of what is unchanging. I have always believed that science cannot deprive people of their free will. There was an incident in the United States where the local government followed the advice of an expert to fluoridate the drinking water to prevent dental disease, which caused a lot of objections, the most extreme of which was: I know it’s good for me, but I should still have the freedom not to want these benefits, right?
Liu: That’s the theme of A Clockwork Orange.
Jiang: We can agree to disagree that I think it’s always bad to use technology to control ideas, while you think it’s good in some cases. Western sci-fi is now the product of an anti-scientific ideology, a shift that has been underway since at least the New Wave Sci-fi. Anti-scientism was part of the four main demands of the New Wave movement, such as the third demand to be able to consider the darker parts of science in the future.
Liu: In fact, anti-scientism was already quite prevalent in the middle of the Golden Age.
Jiang: In the West, the mission of the New Wave has been accomplished. Do you think the mission of the New Wave in China has been accomplished?
Liu: Actually, there was a debate in the 1980s about whether sci-fi should live under the roof of “Science” or “Literature”, and in the end the latter won. This can be said to be a belated victory of the New Wave in China. At present, most Chinese sci-fi writers are pessimistic about science and skeptical about the development of science and technology, which is a proof that they are influenced by Western thinking. In my opinion, Western science has developed to such a point that it’s time to limit its power, but Chinese scientific thought has just been born, and I don’t think it’s appropriate to demonize it yet.
Jiang: I have a different view. Between the development of science and scientism, it is not the case that scientism promotes the development of science, as like how the Chinese economic policy starts by development at the expense of pollution, and then fix the pollution after development is done. Scientism actually harms science from the beginning.
Liu: But we are talking about the attitude towards science in sci-fi, introducing its positive effects and promoting scientific ideas, which is not a mistake, right?
Jiang: In fact, in China, the authority of science is already too big.
Liu: The authority of science in China is great, but the spirit of science in China is not.
Jiang: We are moderately limiting the authority of science, and doing so is not the same as destroying the spirit of science. The spirit of science does not include the unlimited worship of science itself – the spirit of science includes the spirit of skepticism, which means it is possible to be skeptical of science itself.
Liu: But there needs to be a ratio between skepticism of science and affirmation of science. How can all sci-fi works be 98% anti-science? That’s not reasonable. If, in the eyes of the people, scientific development brings about a dark world, always evil, always catastrophic, always irrational, then how can the spirit of science be promoted?
Jiang: I used to think this was problematic, but now I am more inclined to accept it. Let’s say, for example, that a small child gets good grades and is very proud of them. It’s not unreasonable for an adult to stop praising him for every high score and start only criticizing his shortcomings.
Liu: Can you tell us in what ways the authority of science is expressed in China?
Jiang: In China, many people believe that science can solve all problems, and in addition, they believe that science is the best system of knowledge, above all other systems of knowledge.
Liu: This is where I really differ from you. Although I don’t think that science is superior to other systems, I do think that it is the most complete system of knowledge that we have at the moment. Because it recognizes logical reasoning, it requires objective and experimental verification and does not recognize authority.
Jiang: As a student of astrophysics, I used to believe in this completely, but I have had a change of heart since about 2000, and of course this change has developed slowly. The reason was that I was exposed to some Western anti-scientism works and I felt that there was really something to it. You believe that science is the best system, so you assume that everyone needs to have the spirit of science. But I think it’s fine as long as a portion of the population has it.
Liu: It should at least be mainstream.
Jiang: It’s not that only people with the spirit of science can make the right choices; the opposite may be true in many cases. Let’s take an example to illustrate this.
In the Steven Soderbergh’s version of Solaris (2002), where some people are on a space station and encounter a lot of strange things, and the hero, Chris, meets his wife, Rheya, who is long dead. There is a Dr. Gordon, who says to Chris, “Rheya is not human, so kill (every one of) her.” Dr. Gordon’s judgment is perfectly in keeping with the spirit of science and materialism. In the end they are faced with a choice: either go back to Earth or be sucked into the depths of the ocean. Chris decides at the last minute not to go back to Earth, preferring instead to shout Rheya’s name and let the ocean suck him down. Here, he is lacking in scientific spirit and is only doing it for love. Of course, Soderbergh lets him jump off the ocean and goes back to his house, where Rheya is waiting for him. Isn’t this choice, made not out of the spirit of science, even better? So Soderbergh says that the planet of Solaris is actually a metaphor for God.
Liu: Your example does not show that decisions made by scientism are wrong. There is a question of scale. The hero is only making this choice on a human scale, rather than the humanity scale. Think about it the other way around. What would be the consequences if we followed your choice and brought her back to Earth? This thing is not human, you don’t know what her nature is, and you don’t know how much energy she has, or what she will bring to Earth.
Jiang: It’s good to have love. There are things in the human world that are higher than the spirit of science. I want to make it clear that there are not necessarily other systems of knowledge that are better than science, but there can be many other systems of knowledge that should be on an equal footing with science.
Liu: Science is the system of knowledge that humanity can rely on the most. I recognize that for spiritual needs, religion does have better methods, but the existence of science is necessary for our survival. There may be a more rational system of knowledge in the universe, but until there is, why can’t we trust science?
Jiang: I’m not saying I don’t believe in science, only that we have to be tolerant of other people’s unbelief in science. When faced with a problem that can be solved by science, I will use science to solve it, but when science cannot solve it, I will use something else.
Liu: The consequences of this disbelief don’t seem to be very serious in a time of peace, but not so in a time of extremity. It seems that our discussion has to end up on the ultimate purpose whichever way we go. One can simplify the world image and do a thought experiment. Suppose you, me and her [the host] are all that’s left of the human world, and the three of us carry everything of human civilization. And we have to eat her to survive, do you?
Jiang: No, I won’t.
Liu: But the entire civilization of the universe is concentrated in our hands, Shakespeare, Einstein, Goethe… If we do not eat, all the past civilization will be completely annihilated with your irresponsible move. You know the universe is very cold. If we all disappear, there is only a darkness, in which there is no distinction of humanity or inhumanity. By choosing to be inhuman now, humanity will have a chance to re-emerge in the future.
Jiang: The question of whether to eat or not to eat is not one that science can solve. I think it is more responsible not to eat than to choose to eat. If you eat, you lose your humanity. It took a long time for human beings to evolve to this point of humanity, and I can’t lose it like that. I want the three of us to fight together and see if we have a chance to survive.
Liu: The premise that we’re assuming that either the two of us will survive or the three of us will perish together is a very powerful thought experiment. It’s an ironic fact that being destroyed is like a wall across the face, as I once wrote in The Wandering Earth: “You are walking across a plain when you suddenly encounter a wall. The wall is infinitely tall and extends infinitely deep underground. It stretches infinitely to the left and infinitely to the right. What is it? – Death.”.
Jiang: It reminds me of the most profound question in Battlestar Galactica: “Why is humanity still worth saving?” In the scenario you just envisioned, we lose our humanity by eating her, and a humanity that has lost its humanity has cut itself off from Shakespeare, Einstein, Goethe, etc. What is left to save?
But literature may offer a better alternative. When I was very young, I read Byron’s long poem Don Juan, which contains a similar scene:10 several people are stranded on a boat, and lots are cast to decide who will be eaten, but Don Juan is adamant that he won’t eat. Luckily he didn’t eat it, because the cannibals died of poisoning. At that time I was very touched and decided that in the future, if I encountered such a situation, I would definitely not eat anyone. I don’t know whether eating people will poison me or not, but Byron’s moral of the story is for us not to lose our humanity.
10 This is in Don Juan, Canto 2. As CliffsNotes say:
The lot falls on Pedrillo, Juan’s tutor, who is thereupon bled to death. Almost all in the boat commit cannibalism except Juan and three or four others. Several of those who have partaken of human flesh drink sea water and go into convulsions. In spite of this, they might have cast lots again had they not succeeded in catching three sea birds and had it not rained for the first time since the ship sank. Later they have the good fortune to catch a turtle that is sleeping on the water.
Gemini 1.5 read the whole thing and added:
While most of the survivors resort to eating his flesh, Juan and a small group abstain. Following the act of cannibalism, a significant portion of those who consumed Pedrillo’s flesh exhibit severe adverse reactions. They are described as going “raging mad,” engaging in blasphemous outbursts, experiencing convulsions, “And with hyaena-laughter, died despairing.” (Stanza 79).
I would like to ask Mr. Liu a question: among Chinese sci-fi writers, you can be said to be an alternative, because most of the others go for anti-scientism, but you firmly believe in the benefits and light brought by science, and yet you are considered to be the most successful, what is the reason for this?
Liu: It’s because I show a cold but calm rationality. And this rationality is reasonable. You chose humanity, and I chose survival, and readers identified with that choice. To subvert Kant: I admire with awe the starry heavens above me, but remain untouched by the moral law within me.11
11 This dictum from the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) was chosen for Immanuel Kant’s tombstone:
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
Jiang: It’s rather cold.
Liu: When we think of these issues in terms of sci-fi, it is very cold.
Postscript to The Three-Body Problem (2008)
If there are extra-terrestrial civilizations, does there exist a universal moral code? In the small picture, this is a question that interests sci-fi fans; in the big picture, this question concerns the life or death of the human civilization.
The Chinese sci-fi authors from the 1980s tend to give the affirmative answer. In sci-fi works from that era, aliens appear in amiable form, guiding the lost sheep that is humanity with benevolence and tolerance of the Heavenly Father. In Jin Tao’s Moonlight Island, aliens comfort humanity’s broken heart; in Tong Enzheng’s Far-away Love, the romance between alien and human is both beautiful and majestic; in Zheng Wenguang’s The Mirror Image of the Earth, the moral deficiency of the humans even manages to scare away the aliens who possess technology orders of magnitude more advanced than humans but have the heart of Buddha!
But the idea that “Man is born good” is questionable even in the world of humanity, and so it is even less likely to be true at the cosmic scale.
To answer the question of cosmic morality, only the rational thinking of science can be convincing. Here, we naturally think of extrapolating the development of different human civilizations throughout world history to the civilizations of the entire universe, but the research of human civilizations is already very difficult, because there are too many unquantifiable factors intertwined together. In contrast, the research for cosmic civilizations is more quantifiable and mathematical, because the distance between star systems make civilizations into points, like how the complex movements of football players are hidden by the distance when watching a football match from the last row of the stadium, and all that is left is a matrix of twenty-three points1. (The ball is a special point. In ball sports, only football games can exhibit such a clear mathematical structure. Perhaps this is one of the charms of the sport.)
I was once so immersed in the game of making cosmic civilizations into points that I couldn’t get myself out. In the 1990s, when bored, I often wrote unremarkable programs that I found quite amusing. The algorithmic poem generators which are now making a popular comeback online are products from that era. I also wrote a program that simulated the evolution of point-like cosmic civilizations. Each intelligent civilization in the universe is reduced to a point, and each point possesses only about a dozen parameters that describe the basic properties of the civilization. Then I set the number of civilizations to be huge and simulate the evolution of this system. For this, I even invited a respectable scholar who specialized in electric power grids and excelled at mathematical modelling. He is not a sci-fi aficionado, but nevertheless treats it as a hobby, and he improved many aspects of my error-laden model. The largest simulation of the program consisted of 300,000 civilizations within a 100,000-lightyear radius. This simulation, which was written in the now outdated Turbo C IDE on an Intel 286 machine, ran for a few hours and revealed some interesting results. Of course, I was merely an engineer, unqualified for research at this level, and this is just a sci-fi fan playing games, meaningless from a scientific point of view. However, from the sci-fi point of view, these results are very valuable, because regardless of whether the result is true, the degree of its strangeness is difficult to reach by imagination alone.
I believe that it is entirely possible that cosmic civilizations with no morality can exist, so how would humanity, which has morality, survive in such a universe? This is the original motivation for writing Remembrance of Earth’s Past.
Of course, The Three-Body Problem did not reveal the entire picture of the universe, and the two civilizations concerned do not realize the full picture, either, but only a tip of the iceberg. Take, for instance, if even the star system closest to us possess an intelligent civilization, then the universe must be very crowded, so why does it seem so empty? Hopefully, I can elaborate on this in the second volume of Remembrance of Earth’s Past.
For readers who are filled with admiration and awe for the moral law within,12 the cosmic picture that will be slowly unravelled in Remembrance of Earth’s Past will for sure leave them uncomfortable, but it is only sci-fi. There is no need to take it seriously. 🙂
12 This dictum from the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) was chosen for Immanuel Kant’s tombstone:
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
From the serial publication of The Three-Body Problem, I found out that Chinese readers seem to like sci-fi novels that describe the ultimate fate of the universe. This was more or less surprising. I came from the sci-fi boom in the 1980s. I personally think that writers from that era created real Chinese-style sci-fi that was never seen again at scale. The most distinctive feature of these sci-fi works was the complete exposition of technical details, without even a shadow of “style over substance”. Sci-fi fans nowadays though have opened their eyes and would like to embrace the universe with thought and ideology. This raises the bar for the sci-fi writer, and regrettably, The Three-Body Problem is not such an “ultimate sci-fi novel”. Writing sci-fi in the style of 2001: A Space Odyssey is very difficult. Especially with long novels, it is easy to create an empty frame with none of the compelling narration of a novel, the accuracy of popular science, or the rigour of a paper, so I do not have the confidence to write a novel that rivals 2001.
Oh, the series I have in mind is called Remembrance of Earth’s Past. No deep meaning. The difference between sci-fi and other fantasy fiction is that the former still has a thin thread connecting it to reality, which makes sci-fi a modern myth instead of a fairy tale (ancient myths were real to their readers at the time). Thus, I always think that the best sci-fi should make the craziest and the most intangible imagination sound as real as reports in the newspaper. The recollection of the past always sound real, so I wish to write my novels the same way historians narrate real events in the past. Whether I can actually achieve this is another matter.
I tentatively title the next volume of Remembrance of Earth’s Past to be Dark Forest, which is inspired by a popular saying in the 1980s: “a city is a forest, every man is a hunter, and every woman is a trap”.
Oh, lastly, and most importantly: thanks to everyone!
Beyond Narcissism: What Science Fiction Can Offer Literature (2009)
Source: 刘慈欣：超越自恋——科幻给文学的机会, 《山西文学》 2009年第07期 (Beyond Narcissism: What Science Fiction Can Offer Literature, published in Shanxi Literature, the 7th publication of 2009)
Already translated at https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/119/Liu%20Cixin.html.
Interview with People’s Daily, foreign edition (2010)
Source: 人民日报海外版关于科幻的采访_workership_新浪博客
1、How do you think the “Science Fiction World open letter incident”13 will affect the whole Chinese sci-fi literature community?
13 Seems like some drama in 2010-03. Unimportant now. See 【汇总】科幻世界公开信事件汇总【3.31夜】.
The greatest significance of this incident is that it shows the great power that sci-fi harbors. The road of sci-fi literature in China has been bumpy, but in the previous crises, this power did not exist, for example, in the 1980s, when sci-fi readers, although spreading over all social strata, did not form a self-conscious group, that is, sci-fi fans or readers’ group, so in that crisis, sci-fi did not get strong support from the society. Compared with the readership of other literary genres, the sci-fi readers’ group shows a stronger sense of identification and enthusiasm for this kind of literature, and they also share many common characteristics and strong cohesion in their way of thinking and values. It can be said that the sci-fi fandom is the most valuable and cherished treasure of sci-fi literature, the foundation of sci-fi’s existence and the source of its power. It is also because of the existence of this community and this power that at the very beginning of the event I thought that Science Fiction World would be able to overcome this difficulty, or at least get around it.
What I hope is that after the dust settles from this incident, people who love sci-fi will focus their attention on the larger and more essential threats facing sci-fi literature.
2、What do you think are the current problems with sci-fi literature in China? How should they be solved?
As I said before, the sci-fi readership is the most cherished thing in domestic sci-fi literature, and it is the foundation of sci-fi’s existence. Then, what unites so many readers together? What makes them have such a strong sense of identity and passion for sci-fi literature – the kernel, that is, the soul of sci-fi?
What is the soul of sci-fi? It is impossible to say it here in one or two sentences, but all those who read sci-fi strongly feel its existence, just like the existence of the sun is still felt on a cloudy and rainy day. Certain ways of thinking or complexes expressed in sci-fi literature, such as the awe of the universe and the curiosity of the unknown world, the pursuit of the ultimate purpose of mankind, and the pursuit of the beauty of nature based on reason, are not found in other types of fantasy literature, which is also where the soul of sci-fi lies.
Now, there is a kind of unconscious or conscious “de-soulization” of sci-fi literature, which is the greater threat to sci-fi I mentioned earlier, and this threat is far more terrifying than that caused by a boss who does not know how to run a sci-fi magazine. This will destroy the foundation of sci-fi. Of course, merely sticking to the soul of sci-fi will not make sci-fi prosperous, which also needs the cultivation of the market and other efforts, but as long as the soul of sci-fi is still there, sci-fi fans will be there, sci-fi will be there. It may be a miserable business, but it will persist, and one day will be able to create a new glory. However, if this soul is lost, it may be able to usher in the short-lived prosperity, but sci-fi will ultimately lose the readers’ sense of identity, and its fate will be difficult to find a way. Its fate can hardly be predicted. When we pull our eyes back from the stars and cast them upon the puny little heartaches of peple living in this world of human feelings, sci-fi is not far from death.
I am a member of the sci-fi community, and I wonder how many others like me have read Science Fiction World from its inaugural issue all the way to the present day. After this incident, readers are filled with worry and anxiety. I also have this kind of worry, and it has been going on for more than ten years, I don’t know since when, this kind of worry lingers in the mind and lingers, sometimes to the point that it makes me exhausted. But it’s not these kinds of real-life events that worry me; I know that as long as the world of sci-fi fans exists, sci-fi will exist, and these kinds of difficulties can be overcome. My concern is that sci-fi is losing its soul.
Sci-fi won’t die suddenly, but it will bleed out, and when that day comes, there will be no one at its deathbed.
To paraphrase an online slogan: You can take whatever you want, but you cannot take sci-fi’s soul. Leave sci-fi to sci-fi! This is not to be shouted at the bosses, nor to the readers. Nobody can help us when the soul of sci-fi is lost.
- Do you think sci-fi literature is a niche culture in China? What are the reasons?
I don’t think sci-fi literature is a niche culture. After joining the Writers’ Association, I met two poets who self-published a book of poems, and they only printed about 1,000 copies of the book, mainly for giving away, and they gave me two copies of the same book of poems, which is a niche literature. Nowadays, there are still a lot of people who read sci-fi, all over high schools and universities. It’s niche only in comparison to the top-ranked bestsellers, or to paraphrase sci-fi critic James Gunn, it’s more accurate to say “Sci-fi is popular literature for the few.”. If we take sci-fi movies and television into consideration, then it is definitely popular literature.
- Do you think sci-fi literature should be promoted as a popular culture?
Yes. Sci-fi has never been an elite literature, and the efforts to elitize it in history have all ended in failure. Sci-fi should show the public’s dream of the future and the unknown world, it is the display of human curiosity and enterprising spirit, not the obscure and lofty literature of the elite, and elitism will do harm to sci-fi.
- What kind of characteristics do you think the sci-fi literature in China has? Has it changed in recent years?
Chinese sci-fi literature has different characteristics in different periods, from the nationalist anxiety of the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China to the self-conscious utilitarian goal of science popularization in the 1950s and the 1980s. Nowadays, sci-fi in China shows a diverse characteristic, with various styles of works emerging, and there is no absolute dominance of any one style or concept.
- What do you think is the next development direction of sci-fi literature in China? Is it a feasible way to combine it with movies, television and animation?
I feel that the development of sci-fi literature in China will still be diverse, with various styles of works co-existing and a tendency to integrate with other types of fantasy literature.
The combination of film and television with film and anime is of course a good thing, and besides the modern media trend, there is a very special reason. Unlike other types of literature, certain scenes and moods depicted in sci-fi are almost impossible to express in words and can only be expressed visually. So many times when I see the magnificent images in sci-fi movies, I am deeply impressed by the weakness of words.
But there is a point to make clear: sci-fi film and television is not sci-fi for just sci-fi fans, but for the whole public, we do not have a lot of box office, so do not think of that kind of purist sci-fi things. In fact, even in the United States, of the famous sci-fi masterpieces, only a very small portion has been made into movies.
- What is the ideal sci-fi literature in your mind?
It’s the same thing I’ve said so many times: good sci-fi makes you suddenly stop on your way off the night shift, and do something you rarely did before: look up at the stars.
Interview with City Pictorial (2010)
Source: 《城市画报》采访大刘的无删节版稿子
刘慈欣：我是工科男 我不是文青 by 许晓 (Liu Cixin: I’m an engineer guy, not an artistic youth. Interview with City Pictorial, by Xu Xiao)
I don’t have much to say except a warning. Life reached an evolutionary milestone when it climbed onto land from the ocean, but those first fish that climbed onto land ceased to be fish. Similarly, when humans truly enter space and are freed from the Earth, they cease to be human. So, to all of you I say this: When you think about heading into outer space without looking back, think twice. The cost you must pay is far greater than you could imagine.
Final statement made by Captain Neil Scott, from Death’s End
Q: Winning the Galaxy Award, the highest prize for sci-fi in China, for eight consecutive years is an amazing record. Indeed, it would be unimaginable for a non-sci-fi writer to win the Mao Dun Literature Prize for eight consecutive years. How did you achieve this “monopoly”?
A: The Galaxy Award and the Mao Dun Literary Award are very different from each other. The Galaxy Award is not a national literary award, but an amateur award organized by the Science Fiction World magazine, and it only evaluates short stories, plus the fact that there are very few authors in China who write sci-fi – there are only ten to fifteen of them, and all of them are amateur authors – so it is not difficult to win this award. I’ve only won the award eight years in a row, and there are others who have won it ten times in a row, such as Wang Jinkang and Xinghe. The authors and readers of Science Fiction World are kind of like on a bus: they get on the bus and then get off the bus. A lot of people write for a while and then stop writing. People who write sci-fi don’t take the award as seriously as mainstream authors take their mainstream awards. They do so with a playful mindset, but there’s nothing wrong with that.
Q: The first decade of the new century is coming to an end, looking back, what kind of mood drove you to start writing?
A: The first time I wrote sci-fi was when I was in high school, because I was a sci-fi fan, and I started to write when I was looking at it. In China, sci-fi fans really appeared as a group in the 1990s. I became a sci-fi fan in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when there was no such group as “sci-fi fans” and they were very isolated from each other. Now there is a community of sci-fi fans, which is of great significance to the development of sci-fi literature in China.
Q: Nowadays, there are many sci-fi fans and they often comment on your works on the Internet. Do these voices have any influence on your work?
A: I sometimes go online to read these comments, but I don’t read much because I have a limited time. They certainly have an effect, because I’m not someone who writes fiction for myself or for critics only. The main target is still the reader. But I definitely have a bottom line that I stick to.
Q: What kind of bottom line?
A: The bottom line of sci-fi. I must stay loyal to my own definition of sci-fi: science itself must have a relatively large role in the sci-fi I write. Worldwide, this type of sci-fi is actually shrinking. For example, in the US, sci-fi now focuses more on literary techniques and modernist expression styles.
Q: If someone is ready to start reading your work, what would you recommend to such an entry-level reader?
A: With the exception of Supernova Era, all my other works are pretty much the same, and they all fall into the category of stories that can’t stand up if you take away the sci-fi idea. Supernova Era is not quite the same; if it were any other random disaster where only children were left on Earth, the story would still hold up. However, for an introduction, I’d suggest checking out my short stories, if you don’t think it’s good, you won’t waste too much time.
Q: In 1950, the famous Italian Enrico Fermi asked, “Where is everybody?”. It’s been said that The Three-Body Problem trilogy is nothing but the story of a woman messing with her man, then they starting messing with each other, then both were messed by the universe, and finally the universe was messed by who knows what.
The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life – another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod – there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization. It’s the explanation for the Fermi Paradox.
The Dark Forest
A: I really didn’t pay much attention to the gender of the protagonist when I was writing. For example, if the protagonist of the third installment is female, it’s because the protagonist of the second installment is male, for that simple reason.
Q: There are also people who say that The Third Body gives them a glimpse of what a Hollywood blockbuster feels like. Do you like that comment?
A: I like it. Hollywood blockbusters are commercial productions, but they’re all skillfully made, and rarely do they invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a movie and then screw it up. I’ve never seen a Hollywood blockbuster that I particularly despised. What I can’t stand to watch is an arthouse movie. It’s torture. As long as you have spend well a lot of money on it, I’d like to watch that movie, but I can’t stand arthouse movies even if it’s well-made. Plus, none of the arthouse movies have strong storylines, and the ones with strong stories aren’t called arthouse movies. Movies like like Kramer vs. Kramer and American Beauty are all painful for me to watch. I’m an engineering guy, I’m not a literary guy, I’m not interested in arthouse. My novels aren’t high-literary either, they’re unrefined by literary standards.
Q: In the first book of The Three-Body Problem trilogy, the Cultural Revolution is an important backdrop to the story. What was the reason for writing it that way?
A: It started out as a desire to write a novel focused on the Cultural Revolution. After all, I spent my childhood and teenage years there and knew much about it. Then I realized that readers are not interested in the Cultural Revolution because they are all gen-80s and gen-90s, so I faded it into the story background.
Q: What do you think about Mao Zedong?
A: Whether writing a novel or telling a story, this kind of person is very eye-catching, and if such a character appears in sci-fi, he must be very charismatic.
Q: The Three-Body Problem trilogy portrays three very different female protagonists: the rational Ye Wenjie, the dreamy Zhuang Yan, and the motherly Cheng Xin. Which one is your favorite?
A: None of them is the type of women I like. They are just tools to advance the plot. For example, Cheng Xin, the heroine in the third installment, is just a symbol that represents the universal values and morals of humanity. When you say people don’t like the main character, it means people don’t like themselves. Cheng Xin is a very ordinary and normal person, the choices she makes at every critical moment are the choices that every normal person would make, in line with universal values and morals, but it is precisely this choice that drives humanity to extinction.
Q: According to the Dark Forest Hypothesis, survival is the first goal, and the choices Cheng Xin makes at critical moments are contrary to this axiom.
A: To make survival the primary goal is precisely the viewpoint of a Übermensch, and it is quite difficult. Ordinary people, like the Cheng Xin, must first follow their inner sense of morality. At a critical moment, the Übermensch is the one who can have the mental strength and vigor to jump out of the bounds of morality and grasp the final goal of survival.
Q: Dis-identification with Cheng Xin may affect the reader’s sense of agency and identification with the novel. Did you worry about this?
A: I didn’t write her with the intention that readers would like her. This is not someone readers will like. She’s actually selfish, but this selfishness is different from ordinary selfishness because she doesn’t perceive it herself. People who follow morals are actually very selfish because they don’t care about anything but morals and conscience, and Cheng Xin is exactly such a person. She would consider herself noble, consider herself unselfish, and consider her values and moral code to be universal and correct. As to what consequences following it would bring, she would only consider whether it would bring peace to her conscience. This kind of person has a spirit of sacrifice and is able to sacrifice her life for her values and moral code, but this does not change the verdict of selfishness. If someone that can perform “great loving without kindness” were to appear in the novel, they would be unselfish and work to benefit Humanity itself, because sacrificing one’s conscience is the greatest sacrifice thing to do, and it is much harder than merely sacrificing one’s life.
Q: Do you have a problem with Harry Potter? Because the fundamental premise of Harry Potter is saving the world with love, and you have the character of Cheng Xin destroying the world with love twice, and you were saying it without disguise.
A: People who write fantasy celebrate love, but people who write sci-fi are more rational. If you look at the world’s major sci-fi classics, none of them are interested in love, just plain rationality. Moreover, the setting of The Three-Body Problem is an existential deadlock, with a dark undertone, and honestly, in this setting, love can’t save anyone. People who write sci-fi should keep their worldview in a state of uncertainty, if they are too determined to perceive everything, it’s hard for them to write any novels, especially sci-fi, which is about humanity’s confusion and exploration of the unknown. As for myself, I don’t have an iron-clad view of human society. It may be this way in this set of books and that way in that set.
Q: Do you think authoritarian governance is the best way to solve the humanity-wide existential crisis in sci-fi?
A: According to the current trends in society, the current form of society is not conducive to solving the crisis. If the humanity-wide crisis in the novel arrives, human society must be led more efficiently (and arguably more evilly) by a strong government – or just as well, not by a government, but a coalition, or even an AI. One thing is for sure: Humanity must make the decision to sacrifice the few to preserve the many, and the governments or other leadership organizations in the novel exist to ensure that this decision is made. What The Three-Body Problem is trying to say is that there is a contradiction between humanity’s current moral system and humanity’s self-preservation in a catastrophe.
Q: Outside of Cheng Xin, how would you characterize Yun Tianming?
A: He starts out as an otaku, sensitive, and unpopular, a character that definitely doesn’t fit in today’s society. Right now I don’t know what he is doing after his brain was captured by the Trisolarians, but later I may write a book about his entry into the alien society. His kind of character, withdrawn from human society, is paradoxically suitable for entering an alien society, because he usually does not rely on human relationships to survive. In contrast, we, who are well-socialized animals, might fall apart when we enter the alien society.
Q: What you are saying is that otakus are easy to make a home on an alien planet.
A: Right. If you mix too well with human society, you might fall apart faster when you enter an alien society.
Q: There are a lot of ambiguities buried in the novel, such as Yun Tianming, such as the later encounters of the Trisolarian fleet, which are not expanded upon.
A: Readers can never understand the invisible constraint the author must face: length. You can’t write as much as you want in a full-length novel; there’s an agreement between the author and the publisher. The current market is usually 200,000 words for a long sci-fi story, and with 360,000 words written for the third installment of The Three-Body Problem, it’s already 110,000 words over the limit, so where else can you go?
Q: Will that be followed by extra stories around the series?
A: It’s hard to say at the moment. I do not dare to write a 4th entry for another reason, if the last part of the plot14 is expanded to a 4th book, it will become a pure “space opera”, ethereal story, and the real life of humanity does not have anything to do with this kind of sci-fi is very difficult to write, and readers will also find it very painful to read.
14 At the end of the story, most of humanity has been destroyed except a few hanging on in a tiny bubble space. They received a universe-wide broadcast to return the bubble space back to the wide universe, so they decided to do so, and started surviving on a planet with a spaceship. It is unclear what they would be doing from then on, but probably they would simply die and not be able to restart human civilization.
Q: At that time, I heard that when The Three-Body Problem 3: Death’s End was almost finished, many people on the Internet ran to tell me about it.
A: Death’s End is a consequence of both the readers and the writer being in a hurry. It was written in such a hurry that the readers were also rushing, and the editor was also rushing, but that was not the reason for the rush. The biggest reason is still the author’s own haste. I wanted to finish writing quickly, because after all, I am an amateur author, and found an idle period. Whether I will be busy in the future, I can’t say. 360,000 words, conceptualization, and writing, one year to complete, it’s too hasty. If only I have spent two more years, I could have done much better.
Q: When can we expect your next full-length book?
A: The three books of The Three-Body Problem make up one whole story, so readers were waiting impatiently for each installment. Now that it’s complete, I don’t think people will be too anxious for the next full-length book. When I’ll write it, I can’t say.
I feel like I’m writing like a tour guide, taking readers on a tour of my own imaginary worlds. I’ve been leading this tour for more than ten years, but I haven’t even finished half of the attractions yet, not to mention those being newly developed. So there is always some anxiety in my heart. Because I know that accidents can happen at any time: floods can block our way, our bus can be hijacked by gunmen. As an old sci-fi fan, I know that this is not an idle worry. Of all the mishaps sci-fi may encounter in the country, the most worrying is social unrest. At a meeting for Science Fiction World readers and writers, I told my readers and friends that sci-fi is a kind of literature for years of peace. They were all unimpressed, but it’s true. Only in a stable life can we be interested in and shocked by the disasters of the world and the universe. If we ourselves live in a crisis-ridden environment, sci-fi will no longer arouse our interest. As a matter of fact, two of the first three ages of Chinese sci-fi were interrupted by social unrest, which is the biggest killer of sci-fi.15 Now that the calm has lasted for more than twenty years, it feels like at the grassroots level of society, some kind of spring is winding up, and the last straw that broke the camel’s back could come at any time. Hopefully, this is just a sci-fi fan’s idle worry. I hope the peace will continue, since that would be a great blessing for sci-fi.
Liu Cixin’s blog post on 2010-09-02 10:19:36. Posted in Sina Blog.
15 First period: 1950 – 1966, interrupted by the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Second period: 1976 – 1983, interrupted by the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign (1983). Third period: 1990s – now.
Q: You have a poetic expression when describing good sci-fi: “It will make you want to look up at the stars.” Can you tell me what the starry sky in Shanxi is like for us?
A: Shanxi is a big energy province with a high density of power plants and serious air pollution … So, starry sky …?
Q: How about if you asked fans scattered across the country to photograph the stars in their eyes and send them to you?
A: It’s basically impossible, unless with a professional digital camera. You can’t get it with an ordinary camera. How about you take a picture of one? It’s black.
Q: I can see that you are very rational, and you douse cold water over all artistic flames. Besides being rational, do you have a strong sense of crisis?
A: I don’t have much sense of crisis in my life, I just take things as they come, and I can withstand even the biggest social waves. But I have a strong sense of crisis about sci-fi. It’s my hobby, and I worry that it’s going to fall into a slump. In the 1970s and 1980s, sci-fi hit a low point, and sci-fi fans of my age have experienced it, with psychological trauma and memories. Once society is in turmoil, people simply don’t have the heart to interpret sci-fi, there are enough crises around, who comes to see crises in sci-fi.
Q: I heard that in your college days you once traveled to the China-Vietnam border with a consolation group and witnessed the fighting, bloodshed, and death where you could see the Vietnamese army. Is that true?16
16 During the Sino-Vietnamese conflicts (1979–1991), some civilians were organized into groups and visited Chinese soldiers near the frontiers. They typically brought poems, songs and dances, food, etc, to improve the morale of the soldiers.
A: All I can say is that war is not the same thing as what we think or see on movies, but these have little impact on the novel, and I never intended to include in the novel what the real war I saw was like.
Q: What life experiences do you think you’ve had that kids in the big city who are well-dressed and well-fed might not be familiar with?
A: I didn’t grow up in a big city, nor did I grow up in a rural area. I grew up in an industrial and mining enterprise, which happens to be at a neither-up-nor-down sub-level in the grassroots level of Chinese society. Most people in China are very ordinary people like me, so I don’t think my life experiences had influenced my sci-fi writing in a way that’s different from other writers.
Q: Is it because your previous books didn’t sell well enough, and the financial stability they brought you wasn’t stable enough, that you didn’t become a full-time writer?
A: That’s one of the reasons. Writing one book per year is exhausting in terms of the normal demands of life, and there’s no way to guarantee that your book will always sell. Secondly, I live in a place where there are no sci-fi clubs and very few people who share my passion. If I don’t work, I’d be completely cut off from society. As a fiction writer, it wouldn’t be a good idea to stay home all day. Thirdly, my job provides me with a very stable life.
Q: It was rumored that the power plant you work for was facing closure, and someone asked if he could know something about your living conditions, saying that he couldn’t accept that someone as talented as you was living a life of despondency.
A: The organization I work for is a centrally-managed enterprise, how can I be in poverty?17 It is normal for the electric power system to close down a plant and build a new one. It doesn’t mean that all the people in it will lose their jobs.I especially hate some people who always prefer martyrs and ascetics. I don’t like martyrs and I don’t want to be an ascetic. I especially like Heinlein’s quote, “We write for Joe’s beer money, and Joe likes his beer. It’s our obligation to give him at least as much fun from our books as he’d get from a six pack.” – and the truth is, I’m not even short of that kind of money. I must be considered well off by the standard of my city, and to tell you a joke, we don’t dare wear overalls on the street for fear of attracting thieves. A lot of media reporters always like to guess that this Liu Cixin must be someone curled up in a poky little house with gloomy light day and night, writing sci-fi – it’s not like that, I have two suites in the city, both large, not poky.
17 Liu Cixin graduated from from the North China University of Water Conservancy and Electric Power in 1988, and then had been continuously employed as a computer engineer at the thermal power plant in Niangziguan, Shanxi. His main job is computer network and monitoring in power plants. He used his spare time to publish 13 novel collections, including “Ball Lightning”, “Supernova Era”, “The Wandering Earth”, and the first two of “Three Body”, all of which were created during this period. In his own words, he could write on the work-computer during work-time, and it felt like stealing morsels of enjoyable time from the company. In 2009, the Niangziguan Thermal Power Plant was shut down. Later, he was transferred to the Yangquan Literary and Art Creation Research Office to engage in “specialized literary creation and research”.
Q: Your regular job is as a computer engineer for a power system, so what time do you generally use to write your books?
A: After work evenings, and all Sundays.
Q: What do your friends and colleagues think of your work?
Q: They don’t care – unless it becomes a bestseller and sells tens of millions of copies, then they will care. Right now they just think I’m doing some personal work in my spare time.
Q: What would you do if you were sent by Earth to make contact with extraterrestrial life?
A: I’m sure I’d be told what needs to be done.
Q: Would it be Cheng Xin or Luo Ji?
A: In terms of my values, definitely Luo Ji.
Death’s End completed (2010)
Source: 《死神永生》完成_workership_新浪博客, published on Sina Blog, 2010-09-02 10:19:36.
360,000 words.
At this point, all of The Three-Body Problem trilogy is complete, three books in total, 880,000 words, a very long work.
Recently, almost every day, I received emails, text messages and phone calls, urging for the third part. For a long time, I felt that I was like Yang Bailao, and I heard Huang Shiren’s voice from time to time: “Mr Liu, last year’s debt should not pass the New Year’s Eve, so why don’t you sell off your daughter to cancel your debt?”.
In fact, this book was not written slowly. Dark Forest was published in 2008. Then for external reasons, I did not write for more than a year. Then the third part was also written about a year. Actually, if one were to write 360,000 words of a long story, to ensure the quality, one should properly spend three to four years.
We have been calling for quality, but how does quality come? In terms of long novels, first of all, it takes time. Of course, there might be geniuses who can create world classic from careless scribbling, but such a person appears once every hundred years. Ordinary authors like us take a long time to write a long novel, to build a world brick by brick, to have a long conversation with our own minds.
But even without the urging of readers, I couldn’t have spent three or four years writing a full-length novel. This is a time of urgency, and the author is not exempt from it. Nowadays, the author who can stand the loneliness, as well as the man who sits still, not to say there is no such person, but they are extremely rare.
I want to write faster for is another reason: a sense of crisis. I feel like I’m writing like a tour guide, taking readers on a tour of my own imaginary worlds. I’ve been leading this tour for more than ten years, but I haven’t even finished half of the attractions yet, not to mention those being newly developed. So there is always some anxiety in my heart. Because I know that accidents can happen at any time: floods can block our way, our bus can be hijacked by gunmen. As an old sci-fi fan, I know that this is not an idle worry. Of all the mishaps sci-fi may encounter in the country, the most worrying is social unrest. At a meeting for Science Fiction World readers and writers, I told my readers and friends that sci-fi is a kind of literature for years of peace. They were all unimpressed, but it’s true. Only in a stable life can we be interested in and shocked by the disasters of the world and the universe. If we ourselves live in a crisis-ridden environment, sci-fi will no longer arouse our interest. As a matter of fact, two of the first three ages of Chinese sci-fi were interrupted by social unrest, which is the biggest killer of sci-fi.18 Now that the calm has lasted for more than twenty years, it feels like at the grassroots level of society, some kind of spring is winding up, and the last straw that broke the camel’s back could come at any time. Hopefully, this is just a sci-fi fan’s idle worry. I hope the peace will continue, since that would be a great blessing for sci-fi.
18 First period: 1950 – 1966, interrupted by the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Second period: 1976 – 1983, interrupted by the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign (1983). Third period: 1990s – now.
But no matter what, we should travel faster in the world of sci-fi, and in this second life, we should have fun in time. To quote from Death’s End: “A moment here; eons there.”.
The prehistoric age of the AI phylum (2011)
Source: AI种族的史前时代, 刘慈欣, 2011-02-11 01:37:00. Written on the occasion of IBM Watson.
When computers were first created, their computing power far surpassed that of humans, and later they beat them at chess, recognizing human faces and understanding many languages. But even so, deep down, we still feel that we are not dealing with true intelligence. It is conceivable that even as the performance of computers continues to improve at a rapid pace, and even as their fuzzy-math-based pattern recognition and reasoning capabilities are further refined, we will still have difficulty seeing them as true intelligences, and we will lack a certain key sense of being confronted with true intelligence.
Because their computational processes are inherently transparent and predictable.
It is not AI for a computer to win a game of chess against a human being, it is AI for it to lose a game of chess and then become so enraged that it electrifies the mouse and kills the human player playing the game.19
19 There is a persistent urban legend in China about a chess AI in the 1990s who played against a chess master three times and was defeated three times, and then electrocuted him “in a rage”.
From the not-so-long history, the development of AI has roughly gone through two stages.
The first stage is very idealistic, trying to use the software logic and hardware improvement to directly realize the intelligence, in the spirit of Genesis. With the failure of Japan’s fifth-generation project, it was found that this would be difficult to do, at least in the foreseeable future. AI research then turned to databases and knowledge bases, a brute force strategy that attempted to realize intelligence based on the retrieval of huge amounts of data and knowledge. The prevalence of expert systems in the 1990s was the initial result of this research.
I once participated in the development of an expert system for turbines,20 and what impressed me most was: in the process of constructing the knowledge base, when those human experts realized that their lifelong experience was summed up in just a few sentences, they were upset at first, but soon regained confidence, and thus found their own value, knowing that computers could not do anything great with just a few rules. At most they could only be used as an aid for novices to learn. When the turbine system really broke down, the computers could not do much with just a few rules. They were right. It’s true that those lookup-table (simple, albeit complicated) things don’t qualify as real intelligence, and real experience is hard to express in a knowledge base.
20 Liu Cixin’s day job is a programmer at a coal-power electric power generation, so he is very familiar with turbines. He has dabbled with AI since the 1990s.
But things are changing.
Looking back on my own work experience over the years, it is a process of increasing fear of IT systems. The DOS system of the 1980s was relatively reassuring, despite its rudimentary function, because it behaved in a very simple way, doing whatever it was told to do. All actions were within the bounds of predictability. The operating system at that time was more transparent, and it was said that some patient people had read through the source code of all of DOS. They could trace bugs of the program down to the assembly level. Later, however, the operating system evolved rapidly, the simple C:> prompt became a gorgeous GUI, and the system gradually turned into a black box, with unpredictable behaviors. The IT system seemed to have grown from an innocent child to a deep schemer.
By now, the system feels completely black box. It obeys only on the surface, and we do not know what it is thinking in its heart of darkness. Sometimes, the server hard disk drive sounds like a low cold laugh, and the little lights on the switches are like a million little impish eyes. When you’re looking for bugs in the maze of hardware and software, it’s like crawling through the slimy intestines of a monster, feeling annoyed and desperate. There are many times when testing a piece of software to see if it is correct takes much longer than programming it, and this is especially true for software that is run continuously online.
It should be recognized that all this is psychological, DOS system is not necessarily more stable than WIN2000 or XP, not to mention those Unix-based distributed control systems for running power generation plants. These are from Europe, totally robust, reliable, rock-solid. Still, with the evolution of IT systems, people always feel that they are gradually losing control of something.
For operating systems, not only their vast number of users, but also developers have this feeling of losing control. One of Microsoft’s system designers said, “[The process of system development] is like being stuck in a dark, sticky quagmire, sinking no matter how hard you struggle, and controlling the whole picture is a delusion.”
This may be a vision of AI in its infancy.
In fact, in essence, whether under DOS, Windows, Unix, or Linux, the behavior of the software is also transparent and predictable, theoretically. With sufficient manpower, every run of any program can be analyzed to produce an accurate process map. Theoretically, it is also possible to compile such monitoring software, which will accurately record each and every step of the operation of other software to generate a complete report of the computational process. Even the random numbers generated by the software can be predicted, because the RANDOM() function is pseudo-random. Even if the function is truly random, the rest of the computer process is still legible.
When the author was working on that turbine expert system, he had been asked to record the reasoning process of the system, or the process of retrieving the knowledge base. When the string of retrieval tree diagrams was displayed or printed out, both the turbine experts and those of us who programmed the program found it tedious to the extreme.
But as technology develops, the opacity and unpredictability of IT systems are increasing, and although quantitative changes have not yet produced qualitative changes, perhaps some non-von-Neumann computer systems, together with new software technologies such as evolutionary algorithms, will make this breakthrough a reality.
Here is a fundamental question: is human intelligence unpredictable in nature? In nature, macro-scale unpredictable objects, most typically chaotic systems, is the brain a chaotic system? It would not be if intelligence were truly generated by a giant interconnection of neurons, and although the number of neurons is enormous, exactly equal to the number of stars in the Milky Way, this interconnection is still inherently transparent and predictable, and theoretically allows for the precise monitoring and recording of the thought process in its entirety. But who knows what else lies beneath this giant interconnection that makes thinking a truly unpredictable process. Roger C. Penrose in The Emperor’s New Brain argues that human intelligence is inherently impossible to reproduce by computers.
The goal of science, which is to make opaque and unpredictable nature transparent and predictable, is now engaged in a bizarre human endeavor in the field of artificial intelligence, trying to create something that is inherently opaque and unpredictable, which doesn’t sound good. The day a true AI is created is the day our fears become reality, but we still relish it. It’s human nature, man or woman, to want a lover whose behavior is not completely predictable – else it would not be charming. There is a great temptation to create something higher than yourself and unpredictable, despite the possibility of being electrocuted while playing chess with it.
Looking at IBM Watson in front of us, we understand that we are in the prehistoric age of the AI phylum.
1 and 100,000 earths (2012)
一个和十万个地球, published in the 2012 New Year Special Issue of 《周末画报》 Weekend Pictorial. The idea is turned into a story in Fields of Gold (黄金原野) (2018).
Author’s note: This is an article based on a speech given at the Hong Kong Book Fair in July last year and published in Modern Communication’s Weekend Pictorial. I gave a lecture on this topic at a training class of the Shanxi Provincial Writers Association not long ago, but there was little interest. A writer friend, who was attending the class, came down and said something very interesting to me: “You know, literature! Why are you making such idle worries?”.
Compared to other animals, human babies are very fragile. While a baby horse can walk upright on its own within ten minutes of birth, human babies have to stay in their cradles for quite a long time, during which time it is impossible for them to survive without careful outside care. If left to its own power, a human being would never emerge from the cradle. The reason for this phenomenon is evolutionary necessity; the human brain is larger in size, and when it is fully developed, it is difficult to be born, but only in advance, that is to say, all human babies are born prematurely.
If human civilization as a whole is regarded as a baby, then it is also a premature baby. The speed of civilization is much faster than the speed of natural evolution, and human beings actually entered modern civilization with the brains and bodies of primitive people.
A frightening question therefore arises: without outside care, would the baby of human civilization never have been able to get out of its cradle?
This seems to be a possibility now.
In the distant future, when people look back on the history from the mid-20th century to the present, all the earth-shattering events that have happened during this period will be worn down by time, and only two things, which we have neglected now, will become more and more important: firstly, humanity took the first step out of the cradle; and secondly, humanity took the step back. The importance of these two events cannot be overestimated. The year 1961, the year of Gagarin’s flight into space, could replace the year of Jesus’ birth as the first year of humanity; and the decline of space exploration after the Apollo moon landings would leave a trauma for humanity even worse than the expulsion from the Garden of Eden.
The late 1950s and early 1970s will be remembered as the Golden Age. Just over three years after the launch of the first artificial satellite, the first astronaut went into space, and just over seven years after that, a man landed on the moon. At the time, people were inspired by the ambitious goal that in another decade or so, humans would be on Mars, and that reaching Jupiter’s orbit to land on Io would not be far away. Even before that, the grandiose “Project Orion” was born, a spacecraft powered by exploding atomic bombs that could send dozens of astronauts to the outer planets at a time.
But soon after, the Apollo moon landings were canceled due to funding interruptions, and the rest of the flight program was canceled. Since then, human space exploration has been like a rock thrown up in the Earth’s gravity field, reaching its peak for a short time and then plummeting. The last moon landing of Apollo 17 in December 1972 is an important turning point. After that, there are still space stations and space shuttles, all kinds of artificial satellites and the economic benefits they bring, the exploration probes to other planets, but the nature of the human space business has quietly changed. The human space exploration turned its eyes from the stars to the ground. Spaceflight before Apollo 17 was man’s effort to get out of the cradle, and after that it was about getting more comfortable in the cradle. Space became a business with an economic logic. It must make a profit, and the pioneering spirit has been replaced by the shrewdness of businessmen, and the wings of the human heart have been broken.
In fact, looking back, did humanity ever really want to get out of the cradle? The driving force behind the space exploration boom in the mid-20th century was the Cold War, the fear of rivals and the desire to surpass them, and a kind of political advertisement of power. Humanity never actually genuinely thought of space as a future home.
Now, the moon has been turned back into an inhospitable world with no human presence, the manned planetary flight programs of Russia and the United States have fizzled out, and Europe’s Aurora program to explore the solar system has been put on hold, with no light in sight. After the retirement of the space shuttles, the Americans, who had once set foot on the Moon, even lost the ability to put people into near-Earth orbit for a long time.
Why? Nothing but technical and economic reasons.
Let’s look at the technical reasons first. It is undeniable that humanity does not currently possess the technology to carry out large-scale space development within the solar system. In the most basic and critical propulsion technology in space navigation, humanity is only at the stage of chemical propulsion, and large-scale interplanetary navigation requires nuclear propulsion, and the current technology is still far from this. Nuclear-powered rockets and spaceships are still just something in sci-fi.
Then let’s look at the economic reasons. With current technology, sending a payload into near-Earth orbit costs the same amount of money as the same weight of gold; sending it to the moon and other planets costs ten or even a hundred times as much. Before the industrialization of space development, all these inputs could only get very little return, for example, the Apollo moon landing project cost $26 billion, equivalent to more than $100 billion nowadays, and only got a bit more than two tons of moon rocks. (Of course, the technological achievements of the moon landing project produced huge benefits in the subsequent civilization process, but these benefits could not be quantified, and it was definitely not the decisive factor in the decision-making process for the Apollo project.)
To summarize, space development is a huge risk, both technically and economically, and it is politically unacceptable to regard space as the new home of humanity and to stake the future of humanity on such a big risk.
The above reasons are solidly argued, seemingly irrefutable, and dictate the current human space policy and its resulting decline in the space business.
But let us examine the one grand enterprise in which humanity is currently fully engaged and which it sees as the only way out for the future survival of civilization on Earth: environmental protection.
From the technical point of view, space navigation and environmental protection have different colors in people’s minds; the former is strenuous, high-speed and adventurous, implying cutting-edge and high technology; the latter is a kind of gentle green public welfare, and though there is technology in it, the difficulty is far lower from the former in the impression.
But that’s just a perception. In fact, the technology required to achieve humanity’s current environmental protection goals is much harder than large-scale interplanetary voyages.
On a cognitive level, to protect the environment you first have to recognize it, to understand its laws on a global scale. The Earth’s ecosystem is extremely complex, and although various disciplines have made huge amounts of research and understanding of its details, at the global scale, humanity currently does not have a grasp of its laws, either at the level of basic science or applied science. There is very little that human science can know about the operation of weather systems, the changes and interrelationships of large-scale biomes, and so on.
Taking global warming as an example. Is the Earth’s climate really warming? If so, is the warming related to human activity? Unlike the overwhelming and unanimous propaganda, the scientific community is still inconclusive on these two crucial questions, so curbing global warming is more like a political movement. It is no exaggeration to say that humanity does not know as much about the surface of the Earth as it does about the surface of the Moon, and probably will soon know less about it than about the surface of Mars.
At the operational level, the technologies currently required for environmental protection, such as the replacement of fossil energy sources with renewable ones, the treatment and recycling of industrial and municipal waste, the preservation of biodiversity, and the protection and restoration of forest cover, involve complex technologies, a good part of which are not much easier than the technologies for interplanetary voyages within the solar system.
But the technological challenge of environmental protection is not the main one. Now that global wars and upheavals are far behind us and human society has entered a period of sustained peaceful development, especially in the Third World and underdeveloped regions, which are developing at an unprecedented rate, these fast-growing regions have the same goal: to reach the economic level of the developed Western countries and to live in the same modernized and comfortable way. This does not seem to be an unattainable goal. At the current rate of development, it will take only half a century for most of the underdeveloped regions, including third world countries like China and Brazil, to catch up with the West economically.
However, people have overlooked the fact that if all human beings were to live like the developed countries of Europe and America, it would take four and a half earths to consume enough resources.
Under such circumstances, if we want to achieve the ultimate goal of environmental protection, to maintain the earth’s ecology from collapse, and to control the extinction of species that is now occurring at a rate faster than the Cretaceous extinction, it is far from enough to rely only on self-discipline to reduce pollution, improve energy conservation, and emission reduction. Even if all the goals of the Copenhagen Conference are realized, the ecology of the Earth will still sink like the Titanic.
The only hope is to de-growth. But growth is unstoppable, and it is contrary to basic human values and politically unworkable for some countries and regions to allow the rest of the planet to remain in the backwardness and poverty of agrarian societies while they relax in the comfortable recliners of modern civilization.
Examine another possibility: dramatic environmental change brought about by non-human factors. The Earth’s environment has always been in fluctuation, but the history of human civilization has been too short for people to notice. With each fluctuation, the Earth’s environment as a whole changes drastically, and may become completely unsuitable for human survival. For example, the Last Glacial Period didn’t end until 10,000 years ago, and if another ice age were to happen, the continents would be covered in ice and snow, existing global agriculture would collapse, and it would be a catastrophe for modernized societies with huge populations, and such a drastic change in the environment is almost inevitable in the long run, and there is a very high probability that it may happen in the not-too-distant future. Existing environmental protection measures are only a drop in the bucket for such environmental changes.
If human civilization is to survive man-made or natural environmental changes in the long term, it can only change its environmental protection behavior from passive to active, and artificially adjust and change the earth’s environment in a holistic manner. For example, people have put forward a variety of programs to mitigate the greenhouse effect, including the establishment of a large number of giant solar evaporation stations in the ocean, the sea water evaporation sprayed into the high altitude in order to increase the amount of clouds; in the Lagrange point between the sun and the earth, the construction of a piece of the earth’s umbrella with an area of 3 million square kilometers, etc. These projects are all unprecedented super-projects, the magnitude of its large-scale, like a handwriting of God, involve sci-fi level technology. Its difficulty is far greater than interplanetary navigation within the solar system.
In addition to the technical difficulties, when we look at environmental protection from an economic point of view, we find that it is very similar to space development: both require huge upfront investments, and there is no obvious economic return at first.
However, human investment in environmental protection is disproportionately large compared to investment in space development. For example, the 12th Chinese Five-Year Plan has invested more than 3 trillion yuan in environmental protection, but only about 30 billion yuan in space exploration. The situation in the rest of the world is similar.
The solar system has a huge amount of resources, in the eight planets, in the asteroid belt, from water to metal to nuclear fusion fuel, human survival and development of all the resources needed, according to the Earth can ultimately support a population of 100 billion people calculated that the total resources in the entire solar system can support 100,000 Earth.
Now we are witnessing the fact that Humanity has given up the 100,000 Earths in space and intends to survive on just 1, and the means of their survival is environmental protection, an endeavor as arduous and adventurous as space exploration.
Like environmental protection, space development interacts with technological progress, and space development promotes technological progress. Before the Apollo project, the United States did not have the technology needed to land on the moon, and a significant portion of the technology was developed in the course of the project. Nuclear fission technology has become a reality on Earth, and there are no insurmountable obstacles to the realization of nuclear propulsion in space. Although controlled nuclear fusion has not yet been realized, there are only technical obstacles rather than theoretical obstacles.
Navigation and control computers on the Apollo 11 rocket more than 40 years ago had only 1/100 of the capacity of the present iPhone 4.
Space exploration is similar to the bygone Age of Sail. It is also a voyage to an unknown world to open up space for human existence and create a better life. The beginning of the Age of Sail was the discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus, whose voyage was supported by Queen Isabella I of Spain (or more precisely, the Queen of the Kingdom of Castile, back when Spain did not exist), and she had difficulty in paying for the fleet, and is said to have pawned all her jewelry and then supplied it to Columbus for the voyage. This has now proved to be a most judicious venture, so much so that it is said that the history of the world can be said to have begun in the year 1500, for it was not until that time that the whole world was known as an entirety.
Now humanity is on the eve of the second great age of navigation. We are now much luckier than Columbus. Columbus couldn’t see the new continent he was looking for, and didn’t see any land after sailing on the Atlantic Ocean for several days, and at that time he must have been full of hesitation and uncertainty. The new world we want to explore can be seen when we look up, but no one has footed the bill yet.
Perhaps human civilization as a whole, like individual human babies, can really never get out of the cradle without parental help.
But from a cosmic point of view, Earth’s civilization is parentless, and humanity is an orphan of the universe, so we really have to be on our best behavior.
Book recommendations (2012)
Source: 【北京青年报】刘慈欣：科幻阶梯阅读荐书榜（菜鸟-明星-骨灰）
Ladder Reading Book Recommendation List: This list introduces a reading theme every month, and recommends books around that theme, launching a basic book list from “Rookie” to “Star” or “Diehard”.
This month’s theme: sci-fi.
Rookie
Relative to other genres, the number of original and translated sci-fi novels is not very large. I feel a bit reluctant to divide into three levels, and can only make a rough distinction by style.
Generally speaking, early sci-fi novels are more suitable for rookies, because the scientific and technological content involved in sci-fi at that time is now people’s common knowledge, and the threshold of reading in terms of knowledge is low. At the same time, compared with modern sci-fi literature influenced by modern and postmodern styles, early sci-fi focuses more on telling good stories, and the writing is clearer and more fluent.
- Verne’s sci-fi novels, including Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, From the Earth to the Moon, and Propeller Island.
Verne’s sci-fi works have not yet been completely separated from the style of European adventure novels back then, but the most charming factors of sci-fi literature have already appeared, science and technology as an important role for the first time in the novels, and the relationship between humans and nature instead of the relationship among humans has become the main object of depiction. Although most of the content in the novel is no longer sci-fi but reality, it does not reduce the charm of the work in any way.
It should be noted that the style of Verne’s work is so unique that it has hardly been reproduced in later sci-fi literature.
- Wells’ sci-fi novels, including The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, etc.
Wells’ works are much more sociologically complex than Verne’s, and also subvert Verne’s techno-optimism by showing anxieties about the future. In contrast to Verne, Wells had a profound influence on the development of world sci-fi literature, with his depictions of aliens and time travel, etc, and his depictions of biological sciences, etc, providing the initial paradigm for subsequent sci-fi.
Star
This level implies a clear understanding of the overall contours of sci-fi literature. Sci-fi literature brings together works of different styles, and there is a big difference between different styles of sci-fi. Professional readers should have a rough idea of the types of works they like, and the following is a list of representative works of three different styles of sci-fi:
- The Fountains of Paradise (Arthur C. Clarke): The quintessential representative of techno-sci-fi, with imagination and storytelling centered on technological ideas. This genre is known as Campbellian sci-fi, and still represents the most popularly recognized style of sci-fi literature.
- The Martian Chronicles (Bradbury): High-literary sci-fi, but not as obscure and edgy as the later New Wave sci-fi, this book makes you realize how poetic and beautiful sci-fi can be.
- 1984 (Orwell): Sci-fi with a sociological core. A panoramic description of a possible future society.
Diehard
To be honest, I’m not sure what this level means, so I had to list some of the more out-there, avant-garde and difficult-to-read works. Sci-fi is popular literature, so there are not many novels written in this kind of excessively formalistic style. If you feel disconnected while reading them, it is very much because you are experiencing a cultural gap.
- Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars (Stanley Robinson): One of the hardest sci-fi out there, like a memoir written by an engineer who experienced a mega-project first hand, describing humanity’s great journey to open up a new world.
- The Man in the High Castle (Philip K. Dick): A classic of alternative history. The story is subtly detailed and seemingly static, with the background unfolding unnoticed as the story progresses.
- Doomsday Book (Connie Willis): A classic of time travel and winner of the Nebula and Hugo awards, the story advances slowly in an extremely trivial narrative, but is full of heart-stopping tension. The book depicts Europe in 1348, which was ravaged by the Black Death, and is the closest thing to an apocalyptic scenario in the history of humanity.
- Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein): A sci-fi novel that has made countless young people crazy, but only young people in the West. To feel the charm of this book you need to cross the cultural gap, but also need to endure the author’s endless preaching.
- Gravity’s Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon): The mainstream literary world has the modus operandi of the robber barons: when it sees sci-fi novels that excels in literature, it loots them out of sci-fi literature and declares that they actually belong in the mainstream, so over time, sci-fi settles into second- and third-rate literary status. Let us use the same trick, and loot sci-fi out of the storehouse of mainstream literature. The book is regarded as the pinnacle of modern literature, and its content is actually quite sci-fi, with a fantastically complex plot full of technological elements such as physics, rocket engineering, advanced mathematics, and psychology, though the messy, obscure dreaming of a modernist text. With more 800 pages, it is an ordeal of reading. Other mainstream literary classics that we can loot include Lord of the Flies and A Clockwork Orange.
- The Red Ocean (Han Song21): A magnificent and eerie epic that looks down on humanity’s past, present and future from an unprecedented dimension, the reading experience is beyond imagination.
21 Famous (by sci-fi author standards) in China, but obscure out of China. The best English-resource I know of is this: Jia Liyuan – Gloomy China: China’s Image in Han Song’s Science Fiction. His style is generally hyper-violent, absurd, body-horror, posthuman, with a cyclic cosmology – terrible things happen, and will continue to return, because it is fate. For example, The Red Ocean tells about a future history over a few thousand years, where human survivors of a nuclear war use genetic engineering to create aquatic humans, and at the same time build undersea cities, transforming the blue ocean into a red ocean.
3 billion years of struggles – What is it all for? (2013)
Source: 走了三十亿年，我们干嘛来了？, preface to Zhao Yang’s book Cosmos, Future Tense (2013-07).
A rigorous study of those success-ology22 books shows that most of the methods and “secrets of success” are not generically useful, because there is a sampling bias: only successful cases are presented, not the failure cases. However, there are more reliable ways to achieve success, and research has shown that a person who develops a vision or ambition from an early age and works consistently toward that vision over the years is a more reliable way to achieve success. The now popular 10,000 hour rule is another way of saying this.
22 成功学, a genre of books much like How to Win Friends and Influence People, focused on teaching one to achieve material success, typically through business. Extremely popular in the 2010s.
As a writer of sci-fi, I tend to see all of humanity as a whole, and in the subconscious of sci-fi literature, Humanity is one person. So of course we want to know what this “person” is going to do to succeed in the universe, and it stands to reason that having a vision and consistently striving toward that vision is the key to human success (or at least survival). So let’s examine the human ideal, first to see what that ideal is, and then to gauge how ambitious it is.
What is the common ideal of humanity? A complex question, but one that can be answered with some certainty. Imagine a comprehensive questionnaire survey of more than six billion people around the world on this issue, like “How would you feel successful?” and the mainstream answer can be roughly determined by the statistics: to build a society that is rich in material wealth, with a democratic system, and where everyone in the world can live a happy life on both the material and the spiritual levels. There should be no problem in making such an ideal one that is recognized by all races and nations of all humanity.
Note that there is an implicit premise here: whether we talk about “society” or “the world,” we are actually referring to the earth.
Scholars, politicians, and civilians alike, subconsciously seldom think beyond the orbit of the moon when they speak of “society” and “the world”. The common ideal of all humanity, then, can be reduced to a single phrase: good Earthbound life.
In order to examine the ambitiousness of this ideal, let’s set up a reference. In the backward age of agriculture, the ideal of an honest, law-abiding farmer living in a remote and closed village was to cultivate his ancestral acre of land well, to keep his bed warm in winter, to marry a wife, and to have three children.
This is a low enough reference point. Considering the popular joke “sheep-herding – marrying – having children – sheep-herding”23, it is obvious that modern people are not interested in this ideal, but full of contempt and pity for it.
23 Popular joke in China: “Why do you herd sheep?” “To save money and marry a wife in the future.” “What would you do if you have a wife?” “To have a baby.” “What you plan to have your child do in the future?” “To herd sheep.”
Now let us make a comparison. In order to be quantitative, we propose:
\[\text{ambition index} = \text{radius the person is content to reach} : \text{radius the person can possibly reach}\]
Let’s take a look at the farmer’s ambition index. According to his humble ideal, he is content to reach the distance from the village where he lives to his own field, which varies greatly from one region to another. An average of 2 kilometers is reasonable. Then look at the radius of the world he can reach through his efforts, that is reasonable in his cultural environment. He should be able to know from the village teacher or an outsider that he lives on a big sphere called the Earth, take half of the equator circumference of 20,000 kilometers. That is, he can reach the radius of the world through his efforts.24 His ambition index is then \(2/20000 = 0.0001\).
24 It is probably too difficult for the shepherd to leave China, which requires a visa. However, it is simple and cheap for a Chinese person to travel across China on trains. The east and west ends of China are about 4000 km apart, giving an ambition index of \(0.0005\).
If we look at Humanity, the radius of the region in which he lives is exactly the radius of the world that the farmer knows and can reach through his efforts, i.e., 20,000 kilometers half of the circumference of the Earth’s equator; and the radius of the universe that he knows, at present, is about 15 billion light-years. But to reach the other stars outside the solar system is far beyond his ability, and even now it seems likely that he will never be able to reach them, so we do not take into account the distances beyond the solar system, or the Oort Cloud, which is about 1 light-year away from the Sun, and which would take more than 20,000 years at the fastest speed that modern spacecraft is capable of. It’s reasonable to consider as the reachable radius as that of the Kuiper Belt in the periphery of the solar system, 20 billion kilometers, which should be reasonable, because Voyager 1 has already flown 15 billion kilometers. The ambition index for Humanity is then
\[\text{radius of earth} : \text{radius of Kuiper Belt} = 0.000001\]
Now we see that the ambition index of humanity is only 1% of that of the farmer, in other words, his lowly and humble ambition which makes modern people despise and pity him is actually 100 times greater than the ambition of Humanity!
If put into the past, this all-too-human ideal of “a wife, three children, in a warm bed” would still be reasonable. In the past history of humanity, which was full of hunger, disease, turmoil and war, for a considerable number of years, only a little more than half of the newborn babies survived, and only a little more than half of those who did survived lived to be more than 15 years old. In most stages of the history of civilization, poverty and hunger accompanied most people, and even I did not have enough to eat until satiety until I was in junior high school. Note that I had a good family situation compared with other children. So in the old days, it should have been a great ideal for all humanity to merely seek for food and comfort.
But now it’s different. Most people have enough food and clothing, and they are beginning to think of lust and the other finer things of life. About one-tenth of the earth’s population is still hungry and lack of minimum health care, but modern civilization is solving poverty with unprecedented speed, and the day when poverty is eliminated is not far away. On the other hand, with the progress of society, the era of barbaric struggle for supremacy has come to an end, and universal values are more and more commonly recognized, so the possibility of a world war is rapidly decreasing. In a nutshell: humanity has settled down for the first time since coming out of Africa 200,000 years ago.
The first organic molecules that could replicate themselves were born in the turbid oceans under lightning strikes on ancient Earth, and then after more than three billion years of long and tortuous evolution, the first intelligent civilization finally appeared on Earth. Looking back at this unimaginably long road behind us, we naturally sigh with great emotion, and now it’s already time to ask ourselves: after more than three billion years of walking, what the hell are we doing here?
In other words, humanity should make a greater common ambition. What this is can be revealed in different ways, scientifically and religiously, but there is one biggest and most obvious revelation: the visible universe is 15 billion light-years wide, and there is 20 billion kilometers of reachable space [within the Kuiper Belt] already, whereas we are now living within a range of only 20,000 kilometers. The earth is a grain of vibrant dust, in a vast empty expanse, as if there is a skyscraper in which only one tiny cupboard in a basement is inhabited. This great revelation has been hanging above us, a silent beckoning that has been deafening and has haunted humanity throughout its history. This revelation, like the one given by the oceans three billion years ago to the first organic molecule that could reproduce itself, has made the mission of human civilization crystal clear.
Of course, we know very well that this kind of big and empty preaching will not impress Humanity, who has become an otaku shut in a nutshell earth. He cares more about how to live a richer and more comfortable life, not how to become more successful in the cosmos. If we look at this mission from another angle, we will find that it is vital to his survival.
The Earth’s ecosphere is an unstable and dynamic closed system, and like living organisms, it has a limited lifespan, as evidenced by the Biosphere 2 project in the Arizona desert. We do not perceive the aging of the Earth’s ecosphere because it is too large compared to Biosphere 2, which occupies less than a kilometer of land, and whose life span is measured in geologic epochs, which, although long, will always come to an end. The earth’s ecology is like a whirlpool or an isolated wave in a long river of time, and the dynamic balance can be upset at any time, and drastic changes or even collapse can occur at any time.
To take one example: a 12-meter rise or a 12-meter fall in global sea level would be a great catastrophe for the fragile modern human society. In the former case, as we all know, coastal cities and economic zones will be submerged, and the large number of people migrating inland will lead to unimaginable social upheaval and economic collapse; whereas a drop in sea level is even more frightening because the only reason for such a drop is the increase in land glaciers due to the global cooling of the climate, and in such a drastic climatic change, the global agricultural system will completely collapse, and two thirds of the existing population may die of starvation before reaching a new level of stability. Two thirds of the current population could die of starvation before a new stability is reached.
But little thought has been given to the fact that in just 20,000 years, sea level has fluctuated not by 12 meters, but by 120 meters, and that during the Last Ice Age 20,000 years ago, global sea level was 120 meters lower than it is today! So, even without taking a very long-term view, the earth is only a temporary place to live, and the future of humanity lies in space.
To sum up, we should re-conceptualize the significance of space exploration.
The propaganda department has a knack for puffing up the significance of an otherwise commonplace event like a balloon, but when it comes to spaceflight, this knack is gone. When it comes to the significance of aerospace achievements, it is only to enhance national strength and promote economic development, specifically, to be able to forecast the weather more accurately, to have their own GPS, to have more communication bandwidth, to make tomatoes grow bigger or smaller by breeding in space, etc. In the minds of the propaganda department, the true picture of space exploration is not established.
Humanity, as a community wandering in the long river of time, is a long procession of more than six billion people. It can be divided into three categories: most are in the middle of the procession of people, do not think much, and go with the tide. Some stand vigilant on of the edge, guarding against the threat from the two sides of the vast wilderness. A very small number of people, who are in the vanguard, always facing the front of the territory that no one has ever set foot on. They cut through the thorns and thistles to open up a wider living space for the community behind them. This is undoubtedly the greatest cause of all, and spaceflight is such a cause.
In the famous Soviet space movie, Taming of the Fire (1972), a general complains to a national leader about the space scientists who, he says, “think only of exploring the universe, not of the national interest.” Now, the nation he was referring to has disappeared into the mists of history, along with its interests, and is irrelevant to all but historians, but their achievement in spaceflight have not disappeared with the nation. If humanity continues ten thousand years from now, there probably won’t be any children foolish enough to ask, “Grandpa, which was the first socialist union?” But surely some child will ask, “Grandpa, who was the first to send a man out of the Earth?”
In fact, the friends I know who are engaged in the space industry do not realize the destiny of their career, and they talk about the same sweet and sour things of mundane life. For the astronauts and every citizen in the country engaged in the space industry, not realizing the nature of space will result in the loss of a great spiritual treasure.
Cosmos, Future Tense is precisely a book that reacquaints us with the space industry. The content of this book is rich, from the space city to planetary exploration, from the space shuttle to the space power station, from space food to astronaut psychology, covering almost all the fields of the space industry, with rich and informative technical details and a huge amount of information, told in vivid language, describing for us a grand picture of the human space industry.
But the biggest highlight of this book is also the “future tense”.
Recently, it has been suggested that the advancement and popularization of IT technology has created an illusion of progress, but there have not been many breakthroughs in other technological fields other than IT since the 1960s. This situation is especially obvious in the field of spaceflight. In the decades after the moon landing, spaceflight technology has not made any major breakthroughs in most of the basic technologies, including propulsion systems, and has only been tinkered with and improved upon. Cosmos, Future Tense recognizes this, and describes not only what spaceflight is now, but more of what it should be and what it could be, which puts the book in a much higher perspective than other popular science works on spaceflight. These predictions of the possibilities of space technology are not sci-fi, but are based on a solid scientific and technological foundation. They even gave convincing scientific explanations to the dreams of astronautics in my poorly written The Three-Body Problem trilogy series.
Cosmos, Future Tense tells us that the development of the entire solar system as a home for human beings and the expansion of living space to 100,000 Earth-equivalents is not a vain dream, but a grand wish that can be realized both theoretically and technologically. If we expect Humanity’s ambition to go beyond the shepherd’s, this book provides scientific arguments for this ideal and boosts the confidence in opening up new worlds in the future, which is indeed the most exciting part of Cosmos, Future Tense.
A precious experience of apocalypse: Preface to Wang Jinkang’s Escape from the Mother Universe (2013)
Source: 珍贵的末日体验——刘慈欣评《逃出母宇宙》.
The disasters facing mankind are many and varied, and in 2012, Science et Vie, a leading European science communication magazine, once launched a feature: Twenty Versions of the End of the World. If classified according to the scale of disasters, they can be roughly divided into three categories: local, civilization, and apocalyptic. Local catastrophe refers to a catastrophe faced by a local area and some members of human society; civilization catastrophe refers to a catastrophe that involves the human world as a whole, a catastrophe that may cause human civilization to regress or even disappear altogether, but human beings, as a species, can always survive in sufficient numbers to begin to restore or rebuild their civilization anew. An apocalyptic catastrophe is the pinnacle of catastrophe, in which no one can survive, and human beings, as a a species will disappear completely.
To date, the vast majority of disasters encountered by human society have been localized, including natural disasters, such as earthquakes and large-scale infectious diseases, and man-made disasters, such as wars and terrorist attacks. These disasters, though tragic, have had a very limited impact, with their geographical scope generally not exceeding one tenth of the total land area of the Earth, and the affected population generally not exceeding 300 million.
Looking back at history, human civilization has hardly experienced any civilization catastrophe since its birth. The Great Flood recorded in the Bible was only a local catastrophe according to today’s vision, and there are two that are closer to civilization catastrophes that have been recorded with certainty in history: the Black Death in Europe in 1438 and the Second World War in the last century. But these two are not really civilization level. The Black Death killed a third of the European population at the time, but did not affect the rest of the world. As one sci-fi novel, The Years of Rice and Salt, describes, civilization would have grown in other parts of the world even if the entire population of Europe at the time had died of the Black Death. The Second World War was almost global in scope, with an unprecedented number of battlefields and casualties, but because it took place before the nuclear age, the state of the art limited its destructive capacity, and the combined TNT equivalent of the explosives consumed in World War II was five million tons, one-tenth the size of the largest nuclear bombs that appeared in the immediate post-war period. Regardless of which side won the war, human civilization would have continued.The only real civilization catastrophe that has almost occurred so far was the nuclear standoff between NATO and the Warsaw Pact in the last century, an all-out nuclear war that would have been destructive enough to destroy the civilized world if it had broken out, a terrible specter that is now so far away. But that it did not come to pass, which restores some of our almost lost faith in human sanity.
As for apocalyptic catastrophe, it has never happened and there are no obvious signs or possibilities at present. It is now essentially certain that none of the possible catastrophes that could occur on earth would be of an apocalyptic nature. The catastrophes we can think of that could occur on a planetary scale, such as environmental degradation, new ice ages, natural or man-made mass epidemics, etc, could only lead to a massive reduction in population or a regression of civilization, and it is unlikely that humanity would be completely wiped out at the species level. Surviving humans will gradually adapt to the post-catastrophe world with the help of knowledge and technology left over from before the catastrophe, allowing civilization to continue.
The apocalyptic catastrophes can only come from space.
The universe is filled with unimaginably enormous forces, some of which we see but can hardly comprehend, and some of which we are not even aware of yet, forces that can bring stars into being and destroy any world in an instant. Our planet is just a tiny speck of dust in the universe, so small as to be negligible on the cosmic scale.
If the Earth were to disappear in a second, the effect on the solar system, that is, some adjustment of the orbits of the remaining seven planets as a result of the loss of Earth’s gravity, would occur mainly in the case of the small-mass Earth-like planets Mercury, Venus, and Mars, while the orbital changes in the large Jovian planets would be negligible. If this disaster, which seems to us shocking to the world, occurred, it would be viewed from the solar system’s neighbor, the Alpha Centauri, as seeing from tens of thousands of kilometers away, a mosquito falling into a candle. Even on Jupiter, with the naked eye is difficult to see the solar system there is any obvious change, except that in the direction of the sun, a faint bright spot disappeared.
Disasters from space are more difficult to predict than those on Earth. With mankind’s current level of technology, it is difficult to make predictions for space disasters such as sudden solar catastrophes and close supernova outbursts. Another type of space disaster is impossible to predict even from the nature of the physical law. If there is some kind of catastrophe in space moving toward the Earth at the speed of light, since there is no signal in the universe that can exceed the speed of light, there is no way that information about the catastrophe can reach the Earth in time for the catastrophe. In other words, we are outside the light cone of the catastrophe, and it is by no means possible for us to predict it.
Apocalyptic catastrophe has been fully expressed in sci-fi literature. Just as love is the eternal theme of mainstream literature, disaster is also the eternal theme of sci-fi. Escape from the Mother Universe is a work that expresses the apocalyptic disaster from space.
The conception of “Escape from the Mother Universe” is very grand, and the source of the apocalyptic catastrophe is the whole universe. The sci-fi setting of this book has something very unique about it compared to other works with similar themes. In most of the doomsday sci-fi novels, the end of the world like a wall towering in front of mankind, all clearly seen. However, the description of the Escape from the Mother Universe is more conforming to the laws of human cognition. The novel shows the gradual cognitive process of mankind for the disaster from multiple perspectives, the truth is unveiled step by step, the twists and turns, peaks and turns, in the great despair of the dawn of hope, and then ushered in a greater despair, finally to a tragic ending. The novel takes the reader from the peak of hope to the valley of darkness, experiencing the apocalyptic experience that only sci-fi literature can bring. Meanwhile, different from the space disaster often expressed in traditional sci-fi novels, the cosmic disaster in Escape from the Mother Universe is a brand new type of disaster, involving the most cutting-edge knowledge of physics and cosmology, showing the overall picture of the evolution of the universe and the deepest mysteries of space-time, and this kind of imagery is ultimate, with incomparable broad horizons and philosophical heights.
Wang Jinkang once said: young sci-fi authors look at the future from the past, middle-aged sci-fi authors like the author look at the future from reality, and he himself looks at the future from history. These words accurately characterize Wang Jinkang’s sci-fi novels, including Escape from the Mother Universe.
It is because of this far-reaching perspective of looking at the future from history that Escape from the Mother Universe has a heavy and profound connotation. The author looks at the imaginary end of mankind with deep rationality, and describes a picture of human society in an apocalyptic disaster. The novel is one entry in his series Stay Alive, so in the author’s world setting, the survival and continuity of human beings is the overriding goal. To achieve this goal, the apocalyptic society created values and moral systems that are compatible with the apocalypse, with behaviors and institutions such as human oviposition, polygyny, and ultra-authoritarianism. These anathemas of traditional society become justified in the world setting of Escape from the Mother Universe.
Not long ago, Robert Sawyer, a Canadian sci-fi writer, came to visit China, and when he talked about the darkness and harshness of our sci-fi novels in depicting apocalyptic themes, he thought that this was related to what happened to our nation and country in history, and as a Canadian, he was optimistic about the future of mankind in the universe. I fully agree with him that the imprint of history inevitably appears in the imagination of the future. But looking at the place of Earth’s civilization in the universe, humanity as a whole is less like modern Canada and more like the indigenous Canadians of 500 years ago, before the arrival of European settlers. At that time, hundreds of tribes, comprised of different ethnic groups and representing at least ten language groups, lived together in Canada from Newfoundland to Vancouver Island. Imagine if an indigenous sci-fi writer had envisioned their future with the same optimism – in retrospect it would clearly be too optimistic. The recently published book by Georges Erasmus and Joe Saunders, Canadian History: An Aboriginal Perspective, which has attracted widespread attention, contains a poignant account of this.
Because he looks at the future from the perspective of history, Wang’s work has a distinctive Chinese cultural coloring, which is vivid and heavy even in the imagined future and the imagined doomsday. Although Escape from the Mother Universe boldly subverts the traditional value system, its deep thought is Chinese, and the way of thinking and behavior of the main characters also has distinctive Chinese cultural imprints, and the recurring image of the worrying Qi Ren is a vivid symbol of this. This work leaves us with a profound proposition: does the ancient Eastern culture and value system, including the Chinese civilization, have a greater advantage in the future apocalyptic disaster?
Of course, Escape from the Mother Universe is only one possibility, and the beauty of sci-fi lies in presenting different futures and different options to people, and we certainly look forward to the emergence of another type of more optimistic sci-fi describing the end of the world, and presenting a completely different picture of the end of the world, for example, in which the core values of the human tradition can be preserved.
Back to the topic of space disasters. Human society has not been prepared for these unpredictable catastrophes from space, either theoretically or in reality. Most of the research on doomsday has remained in religion and has not risen to a scientific level. Most thinkers focus on the reality of human society, and even if they think about the future, they are limited to a linear extrapolation of reality, and seldom consider such sudden changes as the apocalyptic catastrophe. Therefore, from the classic writings of thinkers in the Age of Enlightenment to the theories of today’s diverse schools of thought, there is little research on the politics, economy, law, ethics and culture of human society about the apocalyptic catastrophe. At the practical level, almost none of the country’s constitutions and laws deal with apocalyptic catastrophes, which is obviously a major deficiency in the human constitutional system. I once discussed this issue with a scholar who believed that the existing legal system already has a relatively well-developed structure for catastrophes. In fact, this scholar did not notice the difference between local catastrophes and civilized and apocalyptic catastrophes. The biggest difference is that in the event of a local catastrophes, there is an external rescue force, which is generally very powerful, and often the whole society concentrates on rescuing the disaster-stricken areas and people that only occupy a small part of the country. However, in the case of civilized and apocalyptic catastrophes, the human world as a whole is in the midst of a catastrophe at the same time, and external rescue forces do not exist at all.
At this point, the existing legal and moral systems will not be applicable.
For apocalyptic catastrophes, the central legal and ethical question is: what to do if even concentrating all of society’s resources will still only allow a minority of people to survive? So far, modern legal and ethical systems have been vague about this question. It is undeniably difficult to discuss this question in the context of existing societal values, with heated debates and multiple options: one can choose to allow some or a few to survive, or one can choose to adhere to the traditional values of humankind and allow all to face death with equanimity. The rights and wrongs of these choices can be debated in an informed manner, but whichever choice is made, in the end it must be legally and ethically clear – this is the responsibility that a civilized world owes to itself, else the world will be plunged into a state of fear and uncertainty when the catastrophe comes, and in the final pandemonium, mankind will lose both its dignity and its future.
In this sense, the shocking apocalyptic experience brought by Escape from the Mother Universe highlights the unique value of sci-fi literature.
Written on 2013-11-20 in Yangquan.
Interview by The Bund (2014)
Source: 外滩画报, 独家专访科幻作家刘慈欣 - 真有宇宙创造者的话，也在科学范畴之内 (The Bund, exclusive interview with sci-fi writer Liu Cixin – “If there is a Creator of the universe, then it will also be within the scope of science”).
Since the publication of his first full-length series of novels, the Three-Body Problem trilogy, Liu Cixin has become a “god-like being” to many of those who love his work. This is a set of works that is considered as a “milestone of Chinese sci-fi literature”, and it has become a big hit among Chinese sci-fi fans. Discussions of the work began to enter the realm of the academy, and as his publisher, Yao Haiyan, editor-in-chief of China’s most influential sci-fi magazine, Science Fiction World, put it, “The Three-Body Problem embodies cutting-edge imagery, and lets readers see how far the Chinese can go in the world of imagination.”
Liu Cixin married at the age of 31 to a wife who works for the same company as he does and is also an engineer. They have a daughter who is now in middle school. They live not in a city as we know it in a general sense, but in a relatively closed company-town, not uncommon in China, built around a large state-associated enterprise, with a full range of functions, including schools, hospitals, shopping centers, and places to relax. That place is located near Yangquan, a mining city in northern China. With a history of nearly a thousand years, Yangquan is known for its rich minerals, especially coal, and is not geographically accessible, being more than an hour’s railroad ride away from Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi Province. Liu Cixin’s workplace is more than an hour’s drive from Yangquan, in a scenic area called “Niangziguan”. In his mouth this “very remote” location, he also has a middle school alumni called Robin Li, later famous for founding “Baidu”.
Liu Cixin said, as a power plant engineers, the most important duty is to stand ready at the post, so that problems can be resolved in a timely manner. Negligence has serious consequences. However, during a year, the real busy time of this work is only three or four months, and the rest of the time, “you just have to stay in the office, read, write, and do not interfere with the day-to-day work.” It was in this kind of slow-time-stressful-time schedule that Liu Cixin completed most of his works, including the The Three-Body Problem trilogy, which won him great success, honor, and wealth.
Liu is still an engineer, leading a seemingly formal and stereotypical life, and his lifestyle hasn’t changed much. He says he still reads at least four hours a day, in English during the day and in Chinese at night. He uses the Internet to read English books during the day, because English books are not easy to buy there, and because the Internet makes it easier for him to look up vocabulary. He also insists on running 8–10 kilometers of exercise every day, because he believes that he will be able to go to space tourism in his lifetime, but “the price of space tourism is too expensive now, it costs 20 million dollars for a trip”, and he has to rely on exercise to keep his body in good health, so as to wait for the day when the cost comes down to a level that he can afford.
During the days when he was saving up for space travel, he cooked, did housework, sent the kids to school, and took care of the family, like most husbands in Chinese families. He also smoked and drank, but not in a socializing kind of way. “I don’t smoke much, only one carton in three or four days, and I drink because I get anxious when I think about writing and I can’t sleep without drinking.”
His wife knows that he writes sci-fi, but only through family members’ briefings, and does not communicate with him about the content of his work. Other family members know very little about his writing. He had already written [the first draft of] a novel called Supernova Era in 1989, but his father was unaware of his son’s creative talents even at his death in 1992. His mother was still unaware that her son was a major figure in China’s sci-fi literature.
Not only because of his remote location in the city, Liu Cixin was also, by personality, uncomfortable with socializing with his peers, and seldom interacted with the closed circles of the sci-fi community. “Only very few people there. Can’t represent the face of the wide world.”. Of course, the key reason is still “no time, no energy”. He doesn’t have Weibo or WeChat, and finds these “fragmented messages too time-consuming”. The most interaction he has with the outside world is based on communication about the publication of his work.
“I don’t have a car, and I really don’t need one at home; if I go out, the distance is more than 500 kilometers, so a car won’t come in handy; I also need to get a driver’s license, so I really don’t have the time.” Now Liu Cixin feels that time is getting more and more insufficient, and the habit of watching a movie regularly every day has stopped; the computer games that he used to be very obsessed with are no longer played. Perhaps he has become a kind of life that even Liu Cixin himself would be uninterested in hearing more about.
The Liu Cixin that would be interesting to himself may start from his childhood when he opened Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth.
Born in 1963, he grew up in a seemingly free but also dangerous environment, just like all the children of his time. The self-proclaimed “earliest batch of sci-fi fans” in China started to work hard when he was in middle school, and kept submitting articles, which were also rejected, and sometimes not rejected at all, and sank into the sea, but he was still happy to work on it.
The political environment of the 1980s, surprisingly, also affected sci-fi literature, which was very niche at the time.25 “There was a time when sci-fi was almost forgotten from my life”, and he found a new interest – computer games. He has a very reasonable explanation for his “keeping up with the times”: “I’m not like some people who write for their own eyes, but I definitely write for other people’s eyes, and if I can’t publish it, why do I write it? Sci-fi is my hobby, nothing more. It is not a particularly difficult thing, there are other contents of life. However, these words are not to be taken at face value. In 1989, he tried to move closer to mainstream literature by writing Supernova Era, naturally hoping to be published.
25 First period: 1950 – 1966, interrupted by the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Second period: 1976 – 1983, interrupted by the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign (1983). Third period: 1990s – now.
This is Liu Cixin, or perhaps Liu Cixin-plural, who, in the name of rationality, is willing to be tamed by reality. The spacetime of fantasy cannot override reality, and the universe is their unreachable shore and the final frontier.
Liu Cixin was not born for sci-fi, but when he discovered the path of sci-fi, he never stopped transforming his own creative DNA. In this sense, Liu Cixin may not know “Liu Cixin”. One day, Liu Cixin may be able to unravel the mystery of “Liu Cixin”, which should also be a mystery.
We are familiar with the image of engineers in the following ways: their appearance and clothes are clean, neat, and even genteelly stylish, revealing that they have been well-educated, but it is also obvious that they do not spend more time and money on these aspects. They are very polite when they talk to people, and pay attention to logical organization, but do not give up their rationality just because of the differences in the subjects of the conversation. They usually have some technical specialties and are popular, but they don’t deliberately cater to others just to be popular.
This is the case with Liu Cixin, who, like many northern Chinese men, is brisk, talkative, and funny, and who expresses himself in a single breath without seeming to look at the listener too much. Only once in our conversation did he notice my reaction, and then ask, gravely, “Do you think this is funny?”
Rationality is the most important logic of life for such people, and so is Liu Cixin.
However, “writing sci-fi is like living in two parallel worlds, the world of sci-fi on the one hand and the world of reality on the other, and these two worlds do not cross at all.” So Liu Cixin is often contradictory, at least in his expression.
One minute he would think that writing sci-fi is a way to escape from the dreary life, but the next minute he would think that he is “like a fish in water” in real life, so why should he use writing to escape? On the one hand, he recognizes that he has an optimistic and enterprising nature, and that he may even take an aggressive approach to certain issues, but almost everyone around him – colleagues, friends, publishers – would describe him as “mild-mannered” in one word.
But for a man who has always projected his heart into two often dichotomous worlds, such an error should be allowed.
Keys to the interview: B = The Bund; L = Liu Cixin.
B: The Three-Body Problem put you at your creative peak, so to speak? So, can you create another peak?
L: I don’t know. Only when the work is published and I come face to face with the readers can I know the public’s reaction. I myself think there’s still hope to create another peak, but that can only be a hope.
B: You are a “god-like being” to many sci-fi fans, where do your “god-like” inspirations come from?
L: You might not imagine it, but it’s actually extremely difficult to get inspired. Though Three Body contains one idea after another, I don’t have that kind of uninvited inspiration. Inspiration is a very heavy journey for me, and I don’t know when it will come.
B: What kind of state do you mean by “extremely difficult”?
L: If I can think of something, I think of it, if I can’t think of something, I can’t think of it. From the publication of the third installment of the series until now, I couldn’t come up with a single idea that satisfied me, or that excited me. I spend a lot of time thinking about this every day, including when I came back from Chengdu just now, and I was also thinking about it when I was on the airplane, and I didn’t have any ideas that could excite me…
B: So, creating is sometimes painful for you.
L: Not sometimes, but most of the time. The most appealing thing about sci-fi writing is that one day you get really inspired, and the happiness is incomparable, but those times are very rare. Before The Three-Body Problem came out, I did feel inspired to produce a story that was mind-blowing and unlike anything I’d ever seen before, and that was the most exciting time, and after that it was all just brute labor. After I wrote it, the book sold well, the reviews were great, and I was happy, but that joy wasn’t on the same level as the joy of harvesting inspiration. It’s hard to describe the feeling. But that’s the thing about inspiration, maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and have it, maybe I won’t have it until I die, it’s totally possible.
B: So do you get anxious?
L: I do, when it happens I can’t sleep.
B: Do you care what people think of you?
L: Yes, of course.
B: Let’s not talk about the praises, but what about the criticisms, how do you feel about them?
L: If the criticism is right, I will learn from it; if not, I will ignore it. But I have this principle about other people’s comments: I’ve gone from being a sci-fi fan to a sci-fi writer, and sci-fi has a center principle in my heart. Just like some people would ask me what kind of principle should be followed in sci-fi creation, I said I should follow the principle of “copper coin”, not to say that I have fallen into addiction to money, but that the copper coin is round outside and square inside, and the meaning of “round outside” is that our methods of expression should be diversified and flexible, suitable for readers with different appreciations; and the “square inside” is that we should have a core concept of sci-fi. The inner square means that we should have a core idea of sci-fi, which is a bottom line that cannot be broken, and it is also the basis for the existence of a literary genre.
B: What is the core principle of sci-fi as you understand it?
L: On the basis of science, imagination is developed. Science is the soul of sci-fi. It’s not a philosophy that everyone recognizes, and many works don’t follow it, but my own writing and my favorite works follow it.
B: So do you think that sci-fi writing should at least follow the path of scientific development?
L: Sci-fi literature has evolved and is very colorful. Orson Scott Card, the author of Ender’s Game, said that nowadays all kinds of literature, including sci-fi, have been quarantined by critics, who put you in the appropriate cage for the genre you belong to, and a whole bunch of people have been locked up in sci-fi’s cage as well. Once you’re in there, the critics don’t care: They say you count as sci-fi and that’s that. So there’s quite a diversity among sci-fi literature these days, all kinds of it.
B: Some people have commented on your sci-fi writing, saying that “Liu Cixin has single-handedly brought Chinese sci-fi to the heights of the world”, what do you think about that? Do you think the distance between you and other sci-fi writers who write in Chinese is that big?
L: Depends on which way you look at it. In terms of influence, there is definitely a distance, and everyone can see that. When The Three-Body Problem came out, we all expected it to lead to the development of sci-fi, but it’s been three years since the last The Three-Body Problem was published, and there hasn’t been a single full-length book with more influence than it, so the gap – I don’t have to be modest – is indeed vast.
But when it comes to the quality of the work, the gap isn’t that big. Personally, I feel that many writers nowadays have reached considerable heights in their writing. As for why the influence of these works is not as great as that of The Three-Body Problem, there are many reasons, such as what the readers happen to appreciate, the publisher’s publicity, and more importantly, luck. Just as there are many online words that become inexplicably popular all of a sudden, the same is true of literary works, which may become populary with a mysterious luck, and naturally there is a positive feedback effect there, and they become influential. This is something I am still very conscious of. As for the world-class level, the overall level of Chinese sci-fi works is actually relatively low, and there is a big gap from the maturity of American sci-fi literature. No golden phoenix can fly from a chicken nest, and at most, more excellent chickens will fly out.
On the whole, I regard this kind of comment as a kind of encouragement, but it can’t be taken seriously.
B: And how do you see the gap between us and the West in terms of science and technology, or specifically in terms of creativity?
L: We can only compare ourselves to the advances we have reasonably been able to achieve, not to compare ourselves to the technological giants as they stand now. The three industrial revolutions, they grabbed it in their hands, but we didn’t grab even one of those. Those public intellectuals [Gongzhi] have to compare us to others in everything, and then degrade ourselves, and that’s very disgusting and a very stupid way of thinking. It’s like every one of us, first we have to overcome ourselves, then we can overcome others. Others have others’ conditions, we have our conditions. As long as we’re making progress. Our foundation is here, we have heavy burdens, we have just left the agricultural society and entered the industrial society, from the sci-fi point of view, China’s future is amazing, full of uncertainty, full of hope and challenges. But in mainstream Western civilization, that amazement is largely gone.
B: So would you argue that religion and science go hand in hand? In writing, would you need to draw on the power of faith?
L: All religions are essentially atheistic. People always say that science will eventually lead to religion, but in fact it is the opposite, all religions will lead to atheism. For example, there is a Creator of the whole universe, there is a Creator, in the sci-fi portrayal of how he creates the universe, it’s just that he’s in a laboratory, starting the Big Bang. Just an engineer, or a scientist, on a bigger scale. I mean, if there really is a Creator of the universe above us, then from the Creator’s point of view, God doesn’t exist, because the world was originally created by the uncreated Creator. By analogy, that’s how I see religion, so I can’t take it as faith, and even if God did exist, I wouldn’t believe in it with devotion and awe because it’s likely that he had been a lousy engineer. There is no way to falsify the creation envisioned in religion right now, and there are plenty of indications that many of the parameters of the universe were precisely modulated, otherwise there would be no way for life to emerge. If there is a creator of the universe, he is within the realm of science and would not run outside of it. He created the laws of the universe based on that level of his being, just as we can create bacteria.
B: In that case, how do you explain the religious feeling in sci-fi?
L: According to the mainstream view in our country, religion and science are incompatible. Religion and science have opposing sides, but religion and science have some common origin. Consider the sense of reverence for God in the Western Christian culture, which gave birth to modern science. By transferring this sense of reverence to the universe, people became eager to understand God’s behavior and will, and this gave them the spiritual power to explore the secrets of the universe. There is such a complex relationship between religion and science. Because sci-fi as a form of science in literature, sci-fi and religion are similarly related. In fact, religious feelings often appear in sci-fi. Some question religion, and others directly express religious feelings. For example, A.C. Clarke’s most famous work is called “The Star”, it is very short, a few thousand words, and that’s a masterpiece of religious feelings in sci-fi. In addition, the movie “2001 A Space Odyssey” is not so much a sci-fi movie as a religious movie, and it shows the religious feelings so well that it is almost biblical in sci-fi movies, so there is no contradiction between sci-fi and religion.I’m not religious, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have religious feelings. I spoke of my awe for the lightyears, and it is the same as a Christian’s awe for God, the only difference is that I don’t pray to that thing, since I know it’s not conscious. I don’t think the universe is conscious, but have the same kind of awe of this immense existence is a religious feeling.
B: But haven’t you ever had that kind of compassionate pity – there’s always a time when one is feeling powerless in the course of science?
L: I’ve had moments of powerlessness, and I can list the reasons for my compassion one by one, and I know the way for me to get out of it, whether it can be done or not is not certain. But this has nothing to do with God. I don’t need to resort to anything other than reason. For example, if I say that my father died at 65, esophageal cancer, which by then had spread throughout my body, this is a time of compassionate pity for me, there is no way out of it, but I will accept it. I would fall into depression, but I would also be clear that no one could save me.
B: Does the fact that you’re so determinedly rational give you a naive streak that’s always present in your novels?
L: Rationality is not naivety, finding spiritual solace is.
B: Do you have any memories of your upbringing that are particularly memorable?
L: The social order in the mines was not too good at that time. All boys were involved in fights. I also built powder guns and knives, the kind that could hurt people. The life of a child in those days was more dangerous than it is now, and memories like danger are not easily forgotten. I’m rarely nostalgic, I don’t feel it, it’s like telling someone else’s story. Sometimes I ask myself, did I really go to high school and college, and what did I feel then? The only time I think about it is when I walked my daughter into her classroom in that middle school, and it’s a strange feeling, did I really go through all of that like she did? In terms of literature, I’m a very slow person.
There is nothing different about me from other people. The path I took was the most common one that Chinese people have taken, elementary school, middle school, university, and then to work in factories and mines. Factory and mining enterprises are the most grassroots enterprises in China, which can present the living condition of the most people. Don’t focus your eyes on the big cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, there are a lot of people in these places, but they only account for a small portion of China’s population, the real majority of Chinese people live like me. Nowadays, it seems that all Chinese people are white-collar workers, getting up early in the morning and working from 9 to 5 every day is so tiring. No, most of the Chinese people are still living a very ordinary life in these second and third-tier cities. I can’t tell you how fast or slow the pace is, it’s just not as modernized as up north.
B: Don’t you find this ordinary life boring?
L: Life is definitely dull, but sci-fi is not. Just like you just asked me how I insisted on writing sci-fi for more than ten years, in fact, you should have asked the opposite question. You don’t need ask how I persisted on writing sci-fi, as not writing it would be the real difficulty. It is a way to escape from the dullness of life. Everyone has his own way to escape, some people are watching football, some people are fishing, like the most common where we play mahjong day and night. Besides, I’m not interested in human emotions and tenderness, I’m only interested in the kind of reactions people have in extreme states, where everyone’s out of control, but it has to end sometime.There’s one thing about sci-fi, and it’s the biggest difference from mainstream literature: it rarely involves author’s insertion. Someone asked me which of the novels I’ve written are based on myself. Not a single one, and then someone asked, “Which one of these heroines you’ve written is your favorite type? Again, not one. They’re all tools, storytelling tools, and I rarely put my personal emotions into my stories. Because genre literature, not just sci-fi, needs a story that resonates with the reader, not self-expression or self-catharsis. It’s not the same as mainstream literature. As popular literature, sci-fi, you have to win people’s resonance, and that doesn’t work if you put yourself too deeply into it. Everyone is different, you have to consider everyone’s feelings, you can’t just express your own.
B: How do you feel about death, a proposition that sci-fi can’t leave untouched?
L: I’m a 100% atheist. There’s nothing left after death, so I especially cherish being alive. I never expect anything to come out of death. Let me tell you something. There is a Chinese sci-fi writer named Tong Enzheng, the author of Death Ray on a Coral Island, who got cancer in the United States, and when he was dying, he told someone that what he regretted the most in his life was that he had no religious beliefs, and that death was a darkness to him. People then told him, “Well, wouldn’t it be better if you believed now,” and he said it was impossible. That’s it, you can’t believe just because you want to. The difference between him and me is that I don’t have any regrets. I don’t have any expectation of the world after death, I only hope to live as long as possible.
B: Some critics say that the characters in your novels seem to be genderless, what do you think?
L: That’s what I call a lack of literary ability and refinement. Of course I want to write women with good femininity. I dislike manly woman. I also dislike genderless people. Men should be like men, and women should be like women, but the novel has become what it is. Can’t be helped.
B: What do you mean, “can’t be helped”? You can’t control your characters?
L: Yes, I can’t manage them, I’m not capable enough, I admit it frankly. Speaking as literary-criticism, I’m not a professional writer. There is also an objective reason – note that I’m not excusing myself – that is, a sci-fi novel has a difficult task of “describing the background”. In mainstream literature, you can write the word “farm”, and the reader’s brain immediately lights up with an image. Sci-fi novels have to set their world-stage, and you have to introduce the world clearly. Often this occupies half of the novel. The other half is spent on characterizing the characters. To write men like men, and women like women, requires a lot of details, but a “long novel” does not mean you can write as long as you want – the publishers have length restrictions. For Death’s End, I had to delete 40,000 words describing the love story of the male and female protagonists when they were in university. With the details gone, of course the men are unlike men, and the women are unlike women. Of course, the main reason is my incompetence.
B: Will you consciously break through this bottleneck in your next creation?
L: Creatively, we should maximize our strengths and not avoid our flaws, since flaws can’t be avoided, and flaws carried to the extreme are strengths. You say I don’t understand people? I live at the grassroots level and I’ve met all kinds of people. Although the power plant is relatively remote, I spend more than three or four months a year in the metropolis, and often go abroad, but still I just can’t write about people skillfully.
B: Would you try to write a work that isn’t sci-fi at all?
L: Unlikely. My strength is in sci-fi. I’m not very good at anything else, and I’ve written fairy tales, which I didn’t publish and gifted to a friend. It wasn’t really an attempt, just because I owed my friend a favor. You know, it’s not easy to come up with a sci-fi idea, and I would never write a sci-fi story just as a personal gift, but a fairy tale doesn’t matter. It doesn’t waste any ideas, and that’s the main reason why though my friend was trying to get me to write him a sci-fi story, but I honestly couldn’t bring myself to do it. Other than that, I haven’t written anything in any other genre.