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China's Arthur C. Clarke
HughPickens.com writes Joshua Rothman has a very interesting article in The New Yorker about Liu Cixin, China's most popular science-fiction writer. The author of thirteen books has retained his day job as a computer engineer with a State-run power plant in a remote part of Shanxi province, because it helps him to stay grounded, enabling him to "gaze at the unblemished sky" as many of his co-workers do. In China, Cixin is about as famous as William Gibson in the United States and Cixin is often compared to Arthur C. Clarke, whom he cites as an influence. Rothman writes that American science fiction draws heavily on American culture, of course—the war for independence, the Wild West, film noir, sixties psychedelia—and so humanity's imagined future often looks a lot like America's past. For an American reader, one of the pleasures of reading Liu is that his stories draw on entirely different resources.
For example, in The Wages of Humanity, visitors from space demand the redistribution of Earth's wealth, and explain that runaway capitalism almost destroyed their civilization. In Taking Care of Gods, the hyper-advanced aliens who, billions of years ago, engineered life on Earth descend from their spaceships; they turn out to be little old men with canes and long, white beards. "We hope that you will feel a sense of filial duty towards your creators and take us in," they say. "I doubt that any Western sci-fi writer has so thoroughly explored the theme of filial piety," writes Rothman. In another story, The Devourer, a character asks, "What is civilization? Civilization is devouring, ceaselessly eating, endlessly expanding." But you can't expand forever; perhaps it would be better, another character suggests, to establish a "self-sufficient, introspective civilization." "At the core of Liu's sensibility," concludes Rothamn, "is a philosophical interest in the problem of limits. How should we react to the inherent limitations of life? Should we push against them or acquiesce?"
For example, in The Wages of Humanity, visitors from space demand the redistribution of Earth's wealth, and explain that runaway capitalism almost destroyed their civilization. In Taking Care of Gods, the hyper-advanced aliens who, billions of years ago, engineered life on Earth descend from their spaceships; they turn out to be little old men with canes and long, white beards. "We hope that you will feel a sense of filial duty towards your creators and take us in," they say. "I doubt that any Western sci-fi writer has so thoroughly explored the theme of filial piety," writes Rothman. In another story, The Devourer, a character asks, "What is civilization? Civilization is devouring, ceaselessly eating, endlessly expanding." But you can't expand forever; perhaps it would be better, another character suggests, to establish a "self-sufficient, introspective civilization." "At the core of Liu's sensibility," concludes Rothamn, "is a philosophical interest in the problem of limits. How should we react to the inherent limitations of life? Should we push against them or acquiesce?"
The Clarke comparison certainly grabbed my attention. My next question was "where can I find these works in English?" I see that one of the links above leads to English translations of a couple of stories.
Thanks for the tip!
This will probably come across as a kneejerk response, but the submission makes it sound like Liu's themes are almost entirely derived from PRC propaganda. You hear this sort of stuff all the time if you pay any attention to Chinese state media ... planned economies are best, the individual's primary responsibility is to the family unit, Western ideas have failed, and so on. If anything, these books demonstrate the poverty of a literary scene where everybody has to constantly watch what they say.
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Any sufficiently advanced set of three laws will be indistinguishable in fame from the Asimov's one.
Ezekiel 23:20
He is one of the best hard sci-fi writers of all times. Sadly, the genre of hard sci-fi is the tiny minority of all sci-fi works produced nowadays, so the few authors who did work in it, stand out for the fans.
"The Three Body Problem" is a truly HARD sci-fi work by Liu Cixin, and if I'm to judge by this book only, then yes, this man indeed is China's A. C. Clarke.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Stupid snarky comment aside, the GP was referring to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... :p
I've been reading too many Asimov books lately...
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Are you saying that space somehow becomes less nutty if we envision a Chinese future in it? Since China has now become the world's great builder at the same time as US/Europe retreat from science, this scenario might well come to pass. Now we're talking about space nutters with budgets in the trillions, a government studded with engineers, not lawyers, and no anti-sciecnce hippies hobbling every project. You're going to want to negotiate a new long-term contract with your local bridge authority.
"Clarke gave us the three laws."
I think the first one is, "any sufficiently clueless Slashdot poster is indistinguishable from a garden slug."
The Westeren frontier was a much more complex place than you realize. The early settlers, who themselves represented a variety of recent immigrant cultures new to the US, encountered tribes with many different cultures of their own, including those with opposing values in conflict with each other. The first local settlers walked into a war between the invading Navajo and the agrarian Hopi, a conflict which moved through centuries of war into the American court system, and continues in muted form to this day.
Don't forget state money creation on an unprecedented scale, and a high tolerance for non-performing loans.
And "saving or hoarding money" in the modern world doesn't "lock up potential resources" - it isn't backed by anything, so taking money out of circulation just raises the value of the remaining currency.
Or...if you have talked to any native Chinese in some depth you might realize that a lot of them actually have different values than Westerners about social responsibility and such. Far beyond what we are accustomed to with our emphasis on individuality, etc. Their system of government didn't develop in a vacuum and was certainly informed by their culture. So, I think you're right that your comment is a bit of a kneejerk response that assumes their authoritarian government has a hand in EVERYTHING.
That said, I would also assume that if his books were promoting pro-capitalist or anti-government ideas they would have been censored immediately, so maybe we're missing all the "Westernized" Chinese sci-fi books because of this...
This--very much this. Values, and as crucially *narratives*, are very much formed by the culture in which you grew up. If you've ever had a serious discussion with an intelligent politician, you'll learn that they understand the narratives they need to draw on to sell policy positions. Lawyers do a microcosm of that in jury arguments, where they try to put together a story that fits a comfortable narrative that the jury will believe, based on who the jury is and what they've experienced.
The great thing about science fiction using another culture's narratives is that it does what science fiction does best--explores the human condition in a new way.
Like reading Childhood's End after the Asimov robot novels (which are mostly more hopeful), seeing science fiction explored from a different cultural context can give us profoundly different insights.
Ouch!
Table-ized A.I.
Under our current leadership America is becoming more and more like China everyday.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
The distance to Mars is the same in English or Mandarin.
Sure. Tell that to the people who caused the Mars Climate Orbiter to disintegrate in the Martian atmosphere. They are now painfully aware of the fact that the distance to Mars depends on the locale being used.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
It's unfortunate that a good sci-fi book and a good hard sci-fi writer appears on Slashdot, and the discussion turns around PRC propaganda, anti-Chinese sentiment, bad communism, eviltotalitarian government, etc, etc, just because the author is from China? You might want to read the book first before commenting, you might be surprised. It might even open your eyes to a whole new world from your stereotypical veil.
A couple of people here had already read the book, and given a pretty insightful comment, kudo to them. I read the whole series, in Chinese, last year, in one week, and I couldn't give a better comment.
The Three Body Problem is a serie of 3 books, involving science, philosophy, religion, world conflict, environment, culture, love, etc. If you like the Clarke's Space Odessey and the Rama series, and the Asimov's Foundation series, and the Herbert's Dune series, you would like these books as well. The books leave you with a lot of issues to ponder upon, from a humanity, as a whole, perspective. Theses issues are not specific to one people or one culture.
Please put down your stereotypical glasses and forget for a moment that the author is Chinese, and read the book just like you would do any other book. You might enjoy it a lot more.
From TFA, it seems that Liu has more of a leaning to the utopian Star Trek. Has he pushed that anywhere new? Or even how humanity will be different in the billion years of his story?
Not to mention, the idea that "capitalism" is the bane of humanity is so hilariously false it's difficult to even find words. If it weren't for capitalism intruding into China's once-red-totalitarian-socialist economy, he'd still be digging up beets for a living, not working in a power plant or writing science fiction.
Just because capitalism is better than totalitarianism doesn't mean that capitalism is good, and it certainly doesn't mean that capitalism is the high point of human evolution.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
One concern, do you think the significant differences in the language will cause the translation to miss the mark? I see other people enjoyed it, but I think you're in the perfect position to evaluate how the translation effects the book's delivery, given you initially read it in Chinese. Of course, this would require you to read it in English, so no worries if you don't have an English copy available.