Science fiction isn’t new to China, as Cixin Liu explains in Invisible Planets, an introduction to Chinese sci-fi by some of its most prominent authors, but good science fiction is. The first Chinese sci-fi tales appeared at the turn of the 20th century, written by intellectuals fascinated by Western technology. ‘At its birth,’ Cixin writes, science fiction ‘became a tool of propaganda for the Chinese who dreamed of a strong China free of colonial depredations’. One of the earliest stories was written by the scholar Liang Qichao, a leader of the failed Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898, and imagined a Shanghai World’s Fair, a dream that didn’t become a reality until 2010. Perhaps surprisingly, given the degree of idealistic fervour that followed Mao’s accession, very little utopian science fiction was produced under communism (in the Soviet Union there was plenty, at least initially). What little there was in China was written largely for children and intended to educate; it stuck to the near future and didn’t venture beyond Mars. By the 1980s Chinese authors had begun to write under the influence of Western science fiction, but their works were suppressed because they drew attention to the disparity in technological development between China and the West. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s, when Deng’s reforms began to bite, that Chinese science fiction experienced what Cixin calls a ‘renaissance’.
Cixin himself has been at the forefront of the scene since the 1990s. He is the first Asian writer to receive a Hugo award (in 2015), and the author whose work best captures the giddying, libidinous pace of the Chinese economic boom. His monumental Three-Body Trilogy – first published between 2006 and 2010, and recently translated into English by Ken Liu, a Chinese-American sci-fi writer – is Chinese science fiction’s best-known work. Barack Obama is a fan, and the forthcoming movie adaptations are already being described as ‘China’s Star Wars’. The trilogy concerns the catastrophic consequences of humanity’s attempt to make contact with extraterrestrials (it turns out that the reason we haven’t heard from aliens yet is that we’re the only species thick enough to reveal our own location in the universe). It is one of the most ambitious works of science fiction ever written. The story begins during the Cultural Revolution and ends 18,906,416 years into the future. There is a scene in ancient Byzantium, and a scene told from the perspective of an ant. The first book is set on Earth, though several of its scenes take place in virtual reality representations of Qin dynasty China and ancient Egypt; by the end of the third book, the stage has expanded to encompass an intercivilisational war that spans not only the three-dimensional universe but other dimensions too.
The grand scale of Cixin’s story is supported by an immense quantity of research. He graduated from the North China University of Water Conservancy and Electric Power in 1988 and worked, until his literary career took off, as a computer engineer at a power plant in Shanxi province. That training might sound narrow, but his science fiction, which situates itself at the diamond end of the ‘hard’ to ‘soft’ scale (‘hard sci-fi’ has a lot of science in it, ‘soft sci-fi’ doesn’t), demonstrates a knowledge of particle physics, molecular biology, cutting-edge computer science and much more besides. The Three-Body Problem, the first volume of the trilogy, takes its title from an esoteric problem of orbital mechanics to do with predicting the motions of three objects whose gravitational fields intersect. It’s relevant because the alien race the humans recklessly make contact with come from a planet that has three suns, which causes serious climate change issues. Brief ‘stable eras’, with regular nights and days, give way without warning to ‘chaotic eras’, during which the days can last years and a sun can be so close that it desiccates everything its rays fall on. The ‘three-body problem’ is the reason the Trisolarans are delighted to find a planet – ours – that has just one sun and a predictable climate. Naturally, they want to steal it from us. Unfortunately for them our planet is four light years away, which gives us four hundred years to prepare for their invasion.
New technology and the science behind it are always well explained (though never boringly) by Cixin. The best bits in his books are set pieces that would be hallucinatory, or surreal, were it not that everything is described with such scientific authority. One of the most visionary scenes comes towards the end of The Three-Body Problem, when the Trisolarans develop ‘sophons’: tiny robots made from protons that have been ‘unfolded’ into two dimensions, according to principles derived from superstring theory. The plan is to send them to Earth to confuse the results from particle accelerator experiments and report news of humanity back to Trisolaris. But attempts at unfolding the proton, using a giant particle accelerator, go wrong. On the first try, the Trisolarans go too far and unfold it into one dimension, creating an infinitely thin line 1500 light-hours long that breaks apart and drifts back down to Trisolaris as ‘gossamer threads that flickered in and out of existence’. On the second attempt the proton is unfolded into three dimensions. Colossal geometric solids – spheres, tetrahedrons, cones, tori, solid crosses and Möbius strips – fill the sky, ‘as though a giant child had emptied a box of building blocks in the firmament’. Then they melt and turn into a single glaring eye, which transforms into a parabolic mirror that focuses a condensed beam of sunlight onto the Trisolaran capital city, setting it ablaze.
Besides theoretical physics, Cixin appears to have read widely in history, political theory, game theory, sociology, even aesthetics. The main character in the second volume, The Dark Forest, isn’t a scientist but a sociologist called Luo Ji who comes up with the ‘Dark Forest theory’, according to which the universe is like a forest ‘patrolled by numberless and nameless predators’. Any planet that reveals its location is prey; survival depends on stealth. Luo Ji is appointed by the UN as one of the Wallfacers, a small group of individuals charged with formulating plans to combat the Trisolarans. They are called Wallfacers after a Buddhist meditation technique that involves staring in silence at a wall, because in order to evade the sophons they work alone and don’t have to reveal the details of their plan to anyone, not even the authorities who set up the programme. Most of the plans aren’t put into action: the former US Defense Secretary Frederick Tyler, for example, has the idea of offering the Trisolarans a Trojan horse: a hydrogen bomb hidden in a mountain-sized shard of ice (in the trilogy, even what doesn’t happen is epic). Luo Ji’s plan involves threatening to broadcast the location of Trisolaris to the universe, and it succeeds at least in forestalling humankind’s destruction. In the final novel, Death’s End, it emerges that there are civilisations even more technologically advanced than the Trisolarans: they monitor the universe for signs of intelligent life and wipe out any potentially threatening solar systems with the push of a button – they see it as a cleaning job.
This pessimistic view of the universe, in which civilisations must exist in isolation for the sake of their own safety, illustrates a point that Cixin makes throughout the series: that virtuous behaviour is a luxury, conditional on the absence of threat. The Trisolarans aren’t bad, they just want to survive. After a devastating confrontation between Earth’s space fleet and Trisolaran weaponry, a handful of Earth ships escape into space. The plan is to re-establish civilisation away from the solar system, but their crews soon realise that the ships’ combined supplies aren’t sufficient to get all of them to their destination. The first to act on this realisation is an American ship called Bronze Age, which nukes the others, harvests their supplies and continues on its way. Early in Death’s End, Bronze Age is recalled to Earth. Humanity hasn’t been destroyed, thanks to Luo Ji, and is now living in peace and prosperity. The men and women aboard Bronze Age think they’re going to be welcomed as heroes but when they get back home they’re charged with crimes against humanity. The actions of a chaotic era – Earth’s, not Trisolaris’s – are judged by the standards of a stable era. The same thing happens to Luo Ji. Earth enjoys stability because Luo Ji is waiting by a button, ready to broadcast Trisolaris’s location. But after he retires he is charged with genocide: in order to test his Dark Forest theory, Earth transmitted the location of another (presumably inhabited) solar system, which was subsequently destroyed. Immediately after Luo’s removal from office, Trisolaris attacks and the whole of humankind is banished to a gulag in Australia, where it descends into brutal civil war.
In this context, radical political movements are shown to be self-deluding. They appear during stable eras but are made irrelevant, or are transformed past recognition, by real crisis. Cixin wants us to know that communism, especially, sucks.
Cixin himself has been at the forefront of the scene since the 1990s. He is the first Asian writer to receive a Hugo award (in 2015), and the author whose work best captures the giddying, libidinous pace of the Chinese economic boom. His monumental Three-Body Trilogy – first published between 2006 and 2010, and recently translated into English by Ken Liu, a Chinese-American sci-fi writer – is Chinese science fiction’s best-known work. Barack Obama is a fan, and the forthcoming movie adaptations are already being described as ‘China’s Star Wars’. The trilogy concerns the catastrophic consequences of humanity’s attempt to make contact with extraterrestrials (it turns out that the reason we haven’t heard from aliens yet is that we’re the only species thick enough to reveal our own location in the universe). It is one of the most ambitious works of science fiction ever written. The story begins during the Cultural Revolution and ends 18,906,416 years into the future. There is a scene in ancient Byzantium, and a scene told from the perspective of an ant. The first book is set on Earth, though several of its scenes take place in virtual reality representations of Qin dynasty China and ancient Egypt; by the end of the third book, the stage has expanded to encompass an intercivilisational war that spans not only the three-dimensional universe but other dimensions too.The grand scale of Cixin’s story is supported by an immense quantity of research. He graduated from the North China University of Water Conservancy and Electric Power in 1988 and worked, until his literary career took off, as a computer engineer at a power plant in Shanxi province. That training might sound narrow, but his science fiction, which situates itself at the diamond end of the ‘hard’ to ‘soft’ scale (‘hard sci-fi’ has a lot of science in it, ‘soft sci-fi’ doesn’t), demonstrates a knowledge of particle physics, molecular biology, cutting-edge computer science and much more besides. The Three-Body Problem, the first volume of the trilogy, takes its title from an esoteric problem of orbital mechanics to do with predicting the motions of three objects whose gravitational fields intersect. It’s relevant because the alien race the humans recklessly make contact with come from a planet that has three suns, which causes serious climate change issues. Brief ‘stable eras’, with regular nights and days, give way without warning to ‘chaotic eras’, during which the days can last years and a sun can be so close that it desiccates everything its rays fall on. The ‘three-body problem’ is the reason the Trisolarans are delighted to find a planet – ours – that has just one sun and a predictable climate. Naturally, they want to steal it from us. Unfortunately for them our planet is four light years away, which gives us four hundred years to prepare for their invasion.
New technology and the science behind it are always well explained (though never boringly) by Cixin. The best bits in his books are set pieces that would be hallucinatory, or surreal, were it not that everything is described with such scientific authority. One of the most visionary scenes comes towards the end of The Three-Body Problem, when the Trisolarans develop ‘sophons’: tiny robots made from protons that have been ‘unfolded’ into two dimensions, according to principles derived from superstring theory. The plan is to send them to Earth to confuse the results from particle accelerator experiments and report news of humanity back to Trisolaris. But attempts at unfolding the proton, using a giant particle accelerator, go wrong. On the first try, the Trisolarans go too far and unfold it into one dimension, creating an infinitely thin line 1500 light-hours long that breaks apart and drifts back down to Trisolaris as ‘gossamer threads that flickered in and out of existence’. On the second attempt the proton is unfolded into three dimensions. Colossal geometric solids – spheres, tetrahedrons, cones, tori, solid crosses and Möbius strips – fill the sky, ‘as though a giant child had emptied a box of building blocks in the firmament’. Then they melt and turn into a single glaring eye, which transforms into a parabolic mirror that focuses a condensed beam of sunlight onto the Trisolaran capital city, setting it ablaze.
Besides theoretical physics, Cixin appears to have read widely in history, political theory, game theory, sociology, even aesthetics. The main character in the second volume, The Dark Forest, isn’t a scientist but a sociologist called Luo Ji who comes up with the ‘Dark Forest theory’, according to which the universe is like a forest ‘patrolled by numberless and nameless predators’. Any planet that reveals its location is prey; survival depends on stealth. Luo Ji is appointed by the UN as one of the Wallfacers, a small group of individuals charged with formulating plans to combat the Trisolarans. They are called Wallfacers after a Buddhist meditation technique that involves staring in silence at a wall, because in order to evade the sophons they work alone and don’t have to reveal the details of their plan to anyone, not even the authorities who set up the programme. Most of the plans aren’t put into action: the former US Defense Secretary Frederick Tyler, for example, has the idea of offering the Trisolarans a Trojan horse: a hydrogen bomb hidden in a mountain-sized shard of ice (in the trilogy, even what doesn’t happen is epic). Luo Ji’s plan involves threatening to broadcast the location of Trisolaris to the universe, and it succeeds at least in forestalling humankind’s destruction. In the final novel, Death’s End, it emerges that there are civilisations even more technologically advanced than the Trisolarans: they monitor the universe for signs of intelligent life and wipe out any potentially threatening solar systems with the push of a button – they see it as a cleaning job.
This pessimistic view of the universe, in which civilisations must exist in isolation for the sake of their own safety, illustrates a point that Cixin makes throughout the series: that virtuous behaviour is a luxury, conditional on the absence of threat. The Trisolarans aren’t bad, they just want to survive. After a devastating confrontation between Earth’s space fleet and Trisolaran weaponry, a handful of Earth ships escape into space. The plan is to re-establish civilisation away from the solar system, but their crews soon realise that the ships’ combined supplies aren’t sufficient to get all of them to their destination. The first to act on this realisation is an American ship called Bronze Age, which nukes the others, harvests their supplies and continues on its way. Early in Death’s End, Bronze Age is recalled to Earth. Humanity hasn’t been destroyed, thanks to Luo Ji, and is now living in peace and prosperity. The men and women aboard Bronze Age think they’re going to be welcomed as heroes but when they get back home they’re charged with crimes against humanity. The actions of a chaotic era – Earth’s, not Trisolaris’s – are judged by the standards of a stable era. The same thing happens to Luo Ji. Earth enjoys stability because Luo Ji is waiting by a button, ready to broadcast Trisolaris’s location. But after he retires he is charged with genocide: in order to test his Dark Forest theory, Earth transmitted the location of another (presumably inhabited) solar system, which was subsequently destroyed. Immediately after Luo’s removal from office, Trisolaris attacks and the whole of humankind is banished to a gulag in Australia, where it descends into brutal civil war.
In this context, radical political movements are shown to be self-deluding. They appear during stable eras but are made irrelevant, or are transformed past recognition, by real crisis. Cixin wants us to know that communism, especially, sucks.
by Nick Richardson, LRB | Read more:
Image: Amazon
[ed. I thought The Three Body Problem interesting until about the last quarter of the book when all the physics got too overwhelming.]
