A Difference In Scale
CIXIN LIU’S “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” trilogy, which began with “The Three-Body Problem,” is arguably the most significant work of science fiction so far this century: full of ideas, full of optimism, enormous in scale.
But, with more than 1,000 pages across three books, the series demands a high level of commitment from readers. Mr. Liu’s new story collection, “To Hold Up the Sky” (Tor, 334 pages, $27.99) , shows us where he’s coming from, and how far he’s come.
The 11 stories here were all first published in China, some as long as 20 years ago. In his introduction, Mr. Liu denies that there is any systemic difference between Chinese and Western sci-fi. Both have the same underlying theme: the immense difference between the scale of humans as individuals and the scale of the universe around us. This shows in the first story, “The Village Teacher.” Its scenes shift from a mountain village, where a primary-school teacher lies on his deathbed, explaining Newton with his last breath, to a million-warship galactic war, in which Earth and humanity are about to be destroyed. Unless, that is, randomly selected samples, who happen to be from the old teacher’s last class, can prove humanity’s intelligence. Can the small, for once, confound the great?
The poverty scenes in this collection are moving in a way not normally found in sci-fi, but one has to say that the “casual elimination by aliens” trope was old by the time of “Hitchhiker’s Guide.” In “Full-Spectrum Barrage Jamming,” Mr. Liu imagines the final shootout between Russia and NATO, as it might have seemed back in 2001, when the story was first published. It’s a battlefield full of Abrams and T-90 tanks, as well as Comanche helicopters and a Russian orbital fort—but all of them are rendered useless by electronic counter-measures. So it’s back to bayonets. Done well, but the same development was at the heart of Gordon Dickson’s “Dorsai” stories a long generation ago.
In “2018-04-01,” first published in 2009, Mr. Liu is again looking forward, with a narrator who feels he is just an electron in the virtual world, much like the hero in Pohl and Kornbluth’s classic story “Critical Mass.” Mr. Liu cunningly combines old and new: What would happen if immortality was available, but expensive (a scenario used by John Wyndham and James E. Gunn)? And how would you pay for it if the virtual world declares war on the real one, a problem that earlier generations never thought of? Mr. Liu’s strength is narrowing the large-scale tech down to agonizing issues for individuals.
That could be us. Just the same, the stories in “To Hold Up the Sky” seem aimed perhaps at a less-experienced sci-fi audience. If you compare them with “The Three-Body Problem,” they show how much work has to go into top-grade sci-fi these days. It’s not a form for the old ending-with- a-twist short story any more.
) where Kafka talks about his penal colony:
