Sometimes success happens to exactly the right person. If you had told me a decade ago that one of the most popular of New Times Bestselling authors in the field of Science Fiction would be a translated Chinese author I would not have believed you. Set aside for the how tactical commercially engineered the Oprah and Obama reading lists are, it was Obama listing Cixin Liu’s breakthrough novel The Three-Body Problem that made that happen.
I am not taking away from Cixin Liu or his achievement. The opposite if all those hopey Changey readers picked up the Three-Body Problem and hated it then we would have this short story collection, six other translations, a movie adaptation from China that played in theaters here, or an Amazon series in pre-production. Yes, the sales dipped a little with plenty of people who didn’t get it. That said Chinese Science Fiction in general was all the ships that were lifted with the rising tide.
Personally, I added five Chinese authors that I am going to read whenever I can. Stanley Chan’s The Waste Tide being by far my favorite Chinese Science Fiction novel, and Han Song as the master of the surreal short story. That said much of that movement owes the broad appeal of Cixin Liu’s Three-Body trilogy.
I think personally we owe Cixin Liu for having such a unique style. As an engineer, he writes Sci-fi that blends the line between mind-bindingly huge epic concepts and plausible-sounding hard sci-fi. If there is a secret sauce for the Cixin Liu formula it is these deep philosophical thoughts, historical thinking, and weird speculative science. I don’t think his characters are very strong but that is fine. The ideas at the heart of the stories are so intense. The settings always Chinese but I think that international feel and view into another culture is part of the appeal for me.
There is a limitless feel to Cixin Liu’s ideas. As this is a short story collection I preferred some stories more than others. One of the stories that showed his engineering mind is the story “Fire in the Earth.” This was almost a short novel and this one didn’t hook me. Even though I didn’t like this story the setting in a Chinese mine did have some interesting implications that bubbled under the surface.
So I know I already said his imagination feels limitless but to me the best stories in this collection are the ones that test those limits. Some of these stories feel like you are inside a bubble using your hand test whether it is going to pop or not.
“In my sci-fi, I challenge myself to imagine the relationship between small people and the great universe – not in the metaphysical sense of philosophy, nor as to when someone looks up at the starry sky and feels such sentiment and pathos that their views on human life and the universe change.”
The first story “The Village Teacher” certainly is about the small people and the great universe, the story cuts back and forth between a teacher in a small Chinese village and vast galaxy-spanning space opera. It is an excellent way to start the collection. It serves as a mission statement showing the Yin and Yang of these stories. The small and the great. The human and the eternal void.
The second story is my favorite in the collection “Time Migration” could and should be an episode of Black Mirror. This story uses a technological hook to force the characters to address epic timespans of many thousands of years in a few short pages and it works. The closing notes reminding us of conclusions not new in science fiction but done in a totally original way. For a real beautiful closing paragraph, this story is incredible.
Every story in this collection is worth reading but the other stand-out for me was “Ode to Joy.” This story involves a concert at the U.N. fist contact with an alien musician and a giant space mirror. It considering everything from the nature of music, god and is overflowing with epic ideas. Any story where an alien musician uses a giant mirror to turn Proxima Centauri into a metronome is going to have my attention.
There are stories and characters here but if you are considering reading Cixin Liu you need to be reading take philosophical asides. “When it was born, the universe was smaller than an atom, and everything within it was intermixed as a single whole; the natural connection between the universe’s small parts and its great entirety was thus determined. Though the universe has expanded to whatever its current size, this connection still exists, and if we can’t see it now, that doesn’t mean we won’t be able to in the future.”
Some are galaxy-spanning and some are sharp and political. “What we are dealing with amounts to a grain of sand in the Cosmos. It ought to be easy.”
Sometimes deep and sometimes bluntly on the nose, Cixin Liu comments on the universe both vast and cosmic and bluntly real. It is important stuff. I am a fan and think you should be too.
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