{"id":129173,"date":"2018-09-10T11:00:31","date_gmt":"2018-09-10T15:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=129173"},"modified":"2018-09-11T16:15:35","modified_gmt":"2018-09-11T20:15:35","slug":"cixin-liu-china-and-the-future-of-science-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/09\/10\/cixin-liu-china-and-the-future-of-science-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"Cixin Liu, China, and the Future of Science Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Beijing.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m so tired of the future.\u201d It was late in the day at the Tsinghua University Art Museum, and I was getting whiny. My boyfriend and an acquaintance thumbed through some catalogues near the exit and managed to ignore me. We had reached the end of an exhibition of architectural models from the firm Foster + Partners: London\u2019s Gherkin, a cruise-ship terminal, sundry airports. I\u2019m a Berliner, and the most dizzying display was a table of alternate models for the Reichstag dome, a dozen potential realities in balsa and cardboard. In the final room, an animated video envisioned some sort of building project in space\u2014on Mars, maybe?\u2014but I couldn\u2019t really muster the energy to watch it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been said that the past is a foreign country, and I\u2019ve come to believe that the future is too. I\u2019d just never been so immersed in it before. In Beijing this summer, I read about two thousand pages of work by Cixin Liu, possibly the world\u2019s most important living science-fiction author and certainly among humanity\u2019s most imaginative prognosticators. (A recent London Review of Books<\/em> piece called his Three-Body trilogy, published in English in 2016, \u201cone of the most ambitious works of science fiction ever written.\u201d) Like life in Beijing, the experience was magnificent and exhausting and thrilling and flawed. Science fiction might be the genre best suited to Chinese society today; the breakneck pace of change becomes a constant, and to live in the present is to anticipate what is to come. When we told our acquaintance that we\u2019d like to return next summer, she responded as many of our Chinese friends did: \u201cYou might not recognize it here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Living at this pace requires flexibility and ingenuity; you are making up the story of the future as you go along. Everything, the first time we do it, is a fiction. The surety of truth comes only with repetition and belongs to things we know from the past. But the past also becomes rapidly unfamiliar once we\u2019re not repeating its methods\u2014another friend, when we told him that we didn\u2019t have Chinese bank accounts and therefore couldn\u2019t use our phones to pay for purchases or order takeout, looked at us with fascinated pity, murmuring, \u201cIt\u2019s like you\u2019re living some sort of social experiment!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Cixin Liu. Photo courtesy of Tor Books.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Reading Cixin Liu on the spotless, teeming Beijing subway (the world\u2019s busiest annually) could be described as therapeutic. I often felt I was caught in the eddies of a time warp in China, a society that\u2019s all but done away with paper currency but does not yet have potable tap water; one in which facial-recognition software will prevent you from stealing toilet paper, but the plumbing can\u2019t handle flushing it. Remember William Gibson\u2019s old saw \u201cThe future is already here\u2014it\u2019s just not very evenly distributed\u201d? In Beijing, that\u2019s true on a meter-for-meter basis. Liu writes hard science fiction, and his plots are propelled by the human pursuit of relentless scientific advancement. To read his books is to be gripped by the frisson of discovery, of the infinite and infinitesimal brought within our comprehension. They give the comforting sense that humanity is rushing toward<\/em> something, rather than just thronging along the subway line and staring at their phones.<\/p>\n

This August, Tor released a new English translation of Liu\u2019s Ball Lightning<\/em>,\u00a0an earlier novel much more limited in scope than the Three-Body trilogy that nonetheless demonstrates the power of Liu\u2019s scientific imagination. Ball lightning is what it sounds like: an unexplained atmospheric phenomenon, usually associated with thunderstorms, in which a slow-moving ball of electricity floats near the earth\u2019s surface, then explodes. The protagonist, Chen, sees his parents incinerated by a freak occurrence of the phenomenon and spends his life trying to understand it. The book follows him through university and graduate school, onto civilian and military research projects, a quest that takes him to the limits of our understanding of physics. It\u2019s also the sort of bureaucratic bildungsroman only Communism could produce, full of meetings, endless hierarchies, and funding issues; ball lightning may fuel Chen\u2019s dreams, but officialdom determines their trajectory. Chen\u2019s dilemma is that in order to pursue his research, he must allow his discoveries to be used to destructive ends. As always with Liu, human curiosity wins out, with large-scale geopolitical ramifications.<\/p>\n

Ball Lightning<\/em> was originally published in 2004, which means that the society it emerged from is now antediluvian in Chinese terms, but the book\u2019s focus on grand scientific and ethical questions places it somewhat outside of the flow of time. The human cost of technical progress and development is always in the air in China\u2014in the form of PM2.5\u00a0<\/sub>particles\u2014and I would imagine that AI developers feel much the same as Chen when their work is in the service of surveillance.<\/p>\n

Liu may be so prodigiously creative that his alternate futures are timeless, but they are by no means perfect. At a sentence level, Liu\u2019s work is uniformly bad\u2014lines on the order of \u201cNo one could have anticipated that my ominous prediction would be fulfilled that very night\u201d abound. His plotlines tend toward the maudlin (Ball Lightning<\/em> has a cringeworthy subplot involving weaponized killer bees, for example). His characters are wooden. Were we to put Liu\u2019s misogyny in terms of an air-quality index, giving the first book in the Three-Body trilogy a rating of unhealthy<\/em> and the last two a rating of hazardous<\/em>, Ball Lightning <\/em>would be very unhealthy<\/em>,\u00a0somewhere in the middle.<\/p>\n

But to be honest, it doesn\u2019t matter. We\u2019re here for one thing and one thing only: Liu\u2019s ideas. (Actually, the misogyny matters. I can\u2019t enjoy Liu\u2019s work fully because of it, but that\u2019s another essay.) His books are propelled by the fascination of scientific discovery, in which the mysteries of existence unfold around the reader. In Liu\u2019s hands, everyday reality reveals itself to be composed of marvels, and the results are nothing less than mind-blowing. For example, as one character explains in Ball Lightning<\/em>: \u201cIn the briefest period after the Big Bang, all of space was flat. Later, as energy levels subsided, wrinkles appeared in space, which gave birth to all of the fundamental particles. What\u2019s been so mystifying for us is why the wrinkles should only appear at the microscopic level. Are there really no macroscopic wrinkles? Or, in other words, are there no macroscopic fundamental particles?\u201d From this single intriguing question, Liu extrapolates a series of ramifications that ripple through human existence, from defense and politics to the nature of the soul and the afterlife. Liu\u2019s visions of the future are so vivid and near at hand because he presents them as extensions of reality around us. Another dimension is available to us within the world we know, accessible through human ingenuity; just because something is invisible to us now doesn\u2019t mean it won\u2019t soon materialize. To join Liu in this perspective is to recognize the most fantastic aspects of our reality.<\/p>\n

This immanence and imminence of possibility felt true to the fabric of my experience of China, the not quite benign magic of the unexpected. The only predictable aspect was my reaction when enchantment eventually gave way to exhaustion. On our final day in Beijing, I dumped Cixin Liu\u2019s books in a trash bin on our hutong<\/em>\u2014they were too bulky to carry back, and we didn\u2019t know anyone who would want to read them in English. I feel a bit cowardly admitting it: the future is nice to visit, but I\u2019m not sure I would want to live there.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Amanda<\/span>\u00a0DeMarco<\/span>\u00a0is a translator living in Berlin.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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