culture
The English-language editions of Liu Cixin’s ThreeBody trilogy
labeled the imaginary aspects as unrealistic and useless, belonging to the category of “mental contamination.” Subsequently, an editorial criticizing science fiction as a genre was published on the front page of Party newspapers and “as a result, the publication of sci-fi novels stopped overnight, and by the next day they’d disappeared,” Liu said. The nascent sci-fi scene came to an abrupt end, and, robbed of an audience, Liu stopped writing, too. In a 2002 article, Liu wrote pessimistically that “the new generation of sci-fi writers has little reason to reminisce about the past, because we don’t really have a past to remember.”
Between the Lines
It was in 2010 that Liu finished Death’s End, the last installment of his Three-Body trilogy. While the books were not an instant mainstream hit, they quickly became popular among those in China’s IT industry. Many IT company CEOs used the saga’s second installment, The Dark Forest, to describe the competition between domestic IT enterprises in their public speeches, even turning some quotes from the novel
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into soundbites. From there, the Three-Body trilogy gradually entered more mainstream scientific and literary circles. Theoretical physicist Li Miao wrote a book called Three-Body Physics that explained the physics principles in the novels. The China Academy of Space Technology invited Liu to deliver a speech about his series. For mainstream literary academia, which had marginalized the scifi genre for a long time, “The Three-Body trilogy was like a strange monster who suddenly appeared; critics didn’t know what to do about it, but they had to face it,” Liu said. He told our reporter that the Three-Body books explore whether human beings’ sense of values and morality are still tenable in extreme circumstances. Liu is not the only sci-fi writer to dive into bleak themes; many other Chinese writers’ post-2000 works depicted the darkness of the cosmos and the end of the world, expressing doubts and apprehension over the role of science and technology and the future of mankind. In Escape from Mother Universe, for example, author Wang Jinkang depicts a post-apocalyptic, polygamous society that,
under an extreme dictatorship, has developed a catastrophic moral system. In his new book, Soloist, Han Song portrays a horrifying and absurd nation in which young people sing in the dark of night only to die and leave behind unidentifiable bodies, women get lost in giant airports and elderly people spend their whole lives demanding remunerations. What is interesting to Liu is that in the 20th century, many Chinese sci-fi novels were brimming with scientific optimism. “In those days, the government had been promoting science and technology and that spirit was imprinted in that era’s sci-fi story lines,” Liu told NewsChina. “Technological advancement’s negative side effects were not as obvious then as they are today. For example, environmental pollution was not such an urgent issue.” Liu said sci-fi authors’ pre-2000 market awareness was not as strong as it is today; now, in order to write an interesting, marketable book, authors tend to set their stories in a bleak future. “It’s pretty easy to see that if you choose a glorious future that sings the praises of scientific progress, your story will lack drama,” he added. Canadian Hugo Award-winner Robert J. Sawyer, who visited China in 2014, said he thinks the reason Chinese authors depict a dark and grim apocalypse has to do with what China and its people suffered throughout history. Yet to Liu, science fiction as a genre is actually more closely related to a society’s development and its progress in the fields of science and technology. For example, sci-fi novels first debuted in the UK during the Industrial Revolution. The golden age of science fiction in the US was from 1930-60, correlating with the country’s ascension to its current role as a world superpower. “Nowadays, some Chinese sci-fi novels have pocketed awards and received attention in the US partly because of China’s rise in power,” Liu told NewsChina. “It is an underlying reason.” NEWSCHINA I November 2015