In 2008, The Three-Body Problem was a global literary sensation, and now that the adaptation is on Netflix, it’s got all the hype. Whether you like the series or not, and have contemplated to read the by now 4-body tetralogy, starting with a shorter piece of Liu’s work may be a good idea.
The Wandering Earth is a novella of only 47 pages, but it shares a lot of the attributes that have made the Three-Body books outstanding. And it has also been adapted to screen, but please don’t watch it – at least, not before you give the written version a chance (more on this later).
So what is this Cixin Liu-factor? First, there’s the obvious novelty value: science fiction has been predominantly English-speaking for a long time. While the genre was popular in the Soviet Union and in the Eastern Bloc as well, few of their authors made it to the international scene, mostly due to limitations on their work (censorship and the like) and simple economics.
This quasi-monocultural background to science fiction makes, however, the occasional breakthrough of a non-English work all the more interesting. The novelty value is huge, especially as Liu is the first Chinese author of the genre many readers have ever met.
The dissimilarity to other works goes much deeper than setting, though, and much of it could be as personal to the author as cultural. What really sets Cixin Liu apart is that he writes pessimistic SF. This is still unusual. Western as well as Eastern science fiction tend to have a positive outlook on the future of humanity – scientific progress coupled with societal progress, at least on the long run. Humanity will ultimately unite under a world government, we will explore the Solar System and settle Mars and worlds beyond, we will befriend alien races. We may even befriend Russian or American astronauts or have a female president of the United States.
Even dystopian SF preserves a hint of optimism: though climate change/triffids/nuclear war wipes out most of humanity, some smarter humans find the way to overcome and survive, with the occasional uplifting piece of altruism, heroic sacrifice or romantic love. Of all the 10 authors on my best SF ever written list, Wyndham is probably the least cheerful, showing plenty of human greed and stupidity to lead us straight to our (near) extinction, but still, in the 24th hour, survivors pull together and the books end on a note of hope.
Liu’s pessimism goes deeper than denying a future to humanity. On the contrary, in The Wandering Earth a good part of humanity survives against all odds and will most likely make it to Alpha Centauri. What Liu is pessimistic about is human nature: humans in general may be ready to do their duty and even capable of sporadic acts of dignity, but on the whole, they have close to zero agency, and when they practice that agency, it’s typically for bad things done in the worst possible manner.
Agency is another key word here: it’s an almost unchallenged rule of narrative in Western SF that the protagonist’s decisions and actions should be material to the outcome. During such actions and decisions, the protagonist is expected to undergo some character development. The protagonist’s inner motivation – manifested through these plot-driving actions – is a key element in the story.
While this scheme has merits, it can also produce one-size-fit all, forced stories that become repetitive and seem far removed from our real experience. Come The Wandering Earth, where the protagonist literally doesn’t have a name, he’s is just a nameless guy who lives in China. His role is hardly more than narrating the story; his inner motivation, to survive the cataclysmic years of swinging Earth around to ready it for its interstellar journey. He takes a few individual decisions, like participating in the Olympics, marrying or choosing sides in a borderline civil war, but none of these actions have any perceptible impact on the unfolding of events.
The Wandering Earth is a great communal story, with emphasis on the collective and little space for individualism. Perhaps the most striking scene which is bound to astonish readers from more individualistic cultures is the evacuation of the protagonist’s hometown. Tens of thousands of civilians are queuing for hours, well aware that the further back in the queue they are, the less likely there would be time to save them. There is no space for questioning the prioritizing principle, no space for heroism. It’s all “cold equations”, and it makes perfect logical sense.
In a way, Liu’s pessimism reminded me of SF’s roots, of H.G. Wells. In The War of the Worlds, humanity’s struggle is ineffectual, and the narrator’s role is very similar to Liu’s character – he’s powerless and cannot do more than escape and almost lose his sanity over the horrors. In The Time Machine, humanity’s far future is utterly bleak: instead of overcoming inequality and hostility, humankind splits into two species, both leading a petty and stagnating existence, until degenerating even further under a dying sun.
No great deeds, no exploring space frontiers, no world government, but a long and pitiful process of decay and disintegration. Recalling Wells, Liu suddenly looks a lot less pessimistic – perhaps there is dignity, after all, in the way many of the little people accept their place, their duty and their limitations, and while powerless to counter bad governance, engine disasters or stupid rebellions, they just keep buggering on.
All this speculation on genre rules aside, The Wandering Earth is great reading: it has a flowing and melancholic style, a plot which fascinates by its unusual turns and elements, and many scenes that are likely to leave a lasting impression. While the science is not a strong point of the novella, the underlying idea is appealing – a more realistic approach to colonizing exoplanets, through thousands of years of inter-generational travel, journeying on a real celestial object instead of a small and unreliable closed system of a spaceship. And Alpha Centauri is certainly the hottest up-and-coming neighborhood in the galaxy, with much hope invested in confirming the existence of exoplanet(s) in the system.
Endnote: What the novella is totally unsuitable for, is a China-goes-to-Hollywood kind of film adaptation. Just imagine this dialogue in a classic blockbuster:
[Protagonist’s father to her mother on a family outing] “Oh, I forgot to tell you – I’ve fallen in love with Stella Li. I want to move out to be with her.” “Who is she?” my mother asked calmly. “My primary school teacher,”” I answered for him. “Then go,” said my mother. “I’m sure I will grow tired of her soon enough. I’ll come back then. Is that okay by you?” “If you want to, certainly.” [Protagonist later adds] “It was incomprehensible to us why people in the ante-Solar Era invested no much emotion in matters that had nothing to do with survival.” Turning this into a sentimental, grand Hollywood-style movie? It was never going to work.
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