The Worlds of Cixin Liu

Cixin Liu is the author of the novel The Three Body Problem, which has inspired a Chinese and a U.S. science fiction series, and of other popular books such as Death’s End, The Dark Forest, and Supernova Era.

Now Tor has brought out A View From the Stars, featuring a miscellany of shorter works including stories, essays, interviews, and vignettes. The release of such a “kitchen sink” compilation may raise suspicions that the publisher is gunning for a growing market of people who religiously watch the shows based on Liu’s fiction and will snatch up anything with his name on it.

While that may be the case, A View From the Stars is a lively collection that one could recommend for publication even or especially if nobody had heard of Cixin Liu. Though he does not say so in as many words, the reader gets the sense that science fiction provided Liu with the escape he craved from life under the brutal, repressive communist regime that has held sway in China since long before his birth.

The opening piece, “Time Enough for Love,” provides an account of Liu’s boyhood back in the early 1970s in what he describes as a bungalow without electric fans, and his introduction to the genre through the medium of Jules Verne’s brilliant Journey to the Center of the Earth. He relates a feeling of awe that came to him at this discovery, a question he posed to his father about the meaning of the term science fiction, and coming to understand that it refers to fantasy based in science.

In another essay, “Poetic Science Fiction,” Liu sets forth an analysis of the genre. He sees it as a bifurcated field in which authors such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke go to lengths to delineate the technical side of things in their stories and novels, while others, like Ray Bradbury, start out with a broad scientific premise and write in a naturalistic vein. All writers in the genre are poetic in their way, Liu suggests. But he cites Asimov and Clarke as exemplars of “science fiction poeticness” and Bradbury as a master of “literary poeticness.” He then goes on to praise the author Ken Liu (no relation) for merging the two categories.

It is a useful way of looking at the field, and may help foster interest in neglected writers such as James Blish (1921-1975) and in a few who have faded a bit since their heyday back in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, like the great J.G. Ballard (1930-2009). To this critic’s mind, Blish and Ballard both straddled Liu’s two realms with deftness, even if Blish could also be clunkily technical.

Wanderlust

It is no accident that one of the first pieces in A View From the Stars is an account of having read Verne and fallen under the spell of the idiosyncratic French visionary. The pieces that follow deal with the crossing of boundaries, literal, figurative, scientific, metaphysical, or all the above. Those who are well read in the genre may appreciate how, in the best sci-fi tradition, certain of the stories in this book look both forward and backward.

In Liu’s 1999 tale “Whale Song,” underwater travel, one of Verne’s passions, figures prominently. The narrative’s eerie prescience lies in the fact the vehicle that his characters put to use is a submersible, the same type of craft that made headlines worldwide in the tragic events of June 2023.

The five people in the Titan submersible set out to reach the ocean floor and view the remains of the Titanic. In “Whale Song,” Liu envisages a different yet similarly ambitious use. One of his protagonists is a dealer trying to smuggle drugs into Florida and meeting continual frustration at the hands of the vigilant authorities. He confers with an ambitious young maritime expert, and they concoct a scheme to load a submersible with heroin, steer the craft into the mouth of a whale, and let the beast carry it to the Florida coast.

What they hope will prove to be an ingenious means of evading the Coast Guard comes to grief, and the story is resonant in many of the same ways as last summer’s disaster. Science and the natural world never bend to our whims as easily as we might wish, as explorers through the ages have found out too late and as Liu’s characters learn when the whale they assumed would be a docile vessel for their own ship spits it out into the Coast Guard patrols’ fields of fire.

As one might expect, a bulk of the other pieces deal with space travel. In his stories and his analyses of the work of such genre stalwarts as Frederick Pohl (1919-2013), Liu alludes over and over to a universe so vast that most of us don’t know how much we don’t know. We will go through our lives with a sense only of that barren little patch we inhabit, unless we harness the insight and vision that science fiction at its finest has to offer.

“From the moon, 300,000 kilometers away, the Earth looks like nothing more than a pretty, blue bauble. Our human faculties have great difficulty making sense of superlarge distances. The vastness of the universe manifests not only in its great size, but in its microscopic detail, and this sort of vastness is even harder for human senses to apprehend,” Liu writes.

He goes on to argue that a proper appreciation of what he calls “the grandeur of the universe” requires a first-rate imagination, a facility for expression that only the most gifted writers possess, plus a keen understanding of trends and developments in highly specialized scientific fields.

“This is sci-fi’s eternal, enormous struggle—and its most alluring goal,” Liu states.

If some people persist in viewing the genre as a ghetto, it may be because few writers put to use the fine style and the lavish knowledge of a Blish or a Ballard. For every luminary, there are thousands of hacks.

Liu understands this, and his deployment of vast amounts of knowledge, in a manner that rarely feels cumbersome or clunky, is an assertion of the potential of the genre he grew up with and a rebuke to snooty critics. In his 2005 essay “The World in Fifty Years,” Liu puts on display a broad grasp of fields as specialized as nuclear fission and fusion, molecular biology, applied fundamental physics, superstring theory, advances in aviation, virtual commerce, the digitization of human existence, and, of course, the elephant in the room—the rise of Artificial Intelligence.

Among his most intriguing predictions is that continued breakthroughs in computers’ ability to ingest and synthesize data will lead to forums where millions of people can make their voice heard as one, and a government will have the ability to communicate with all the residents of a country or the entire planet at the same time.

That may take some effort for readers to get their head around. But few of them will doubt that this Chinese author belongs to the same category to which he assigns his American namesake, Ken Liu. His work unites bold technological vision and writerly skill in a manner with few parallels in the genre.

It may make you wonder just what it would be like to be a head of state in the year 2055, receiving a performance review from the projected world population of 9.9 billion people.