A message from author: ‘The words mean what they mean’
Liu Cixin’s trilogy portrays a lose-lose universe, but he says reality need not be that bleak, can be win-win
The Three Body Problem, the first volume of the science fiction trilogy by Liu Cixin, has become such an international cultural phenomenon that business and government leaders have studied the books and drawn lessons from them.
However, Liu has warned against drawing too many analogies from his stories.
When the former US president Barack Obama was in Beijing in November he asked to meet Liu, and he has described the books as “wildly imaginative, really interesting”. The book was recommended by the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The first volume won the Hugo award, a first for an Asian author, in 2015.
Xinhua News Agency says more than 1 million copies of the Chinese original and 160,000 copies of the English translation have been sold, previously unheard of numbers for a Chinese science fiction novel.
Wu Yan, a science fiction scholar and professor of humanities at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, says Lei Jun, chief executive of the electronics company Xiaomi, reckons the book gave him ideas about how to deal with market competition.
“It gave him very important ideas about how to make a market work,” Wu says. “I’ve heard that all his company members were told to read this book, study it, and use it as a kind of guide to new developments in the market. … I’ve heard that 360, Tencent, and Baidu also pay attention to it. In the business world people respect science fiction.”
However, Liu says the uncertainty of living on the home planet of the aliens in the
Three Body Problem is not a metaphor for some era in Chinese history, he says.
“The book discusses the fact that the biggest feature of a physical three-body system is that there are no known ways to predict its operation. With three suns, people would not know when the next day would begin. The words mean what they mean.”
Furthermore, an alien attack on Earth should not be seen as representing China’s “century of humiliation”.
“On Earth the most appropriate analogy is the Mayan or other American civilizations when they first meet the Spanish invaders. But it’s really about the relations between the future Earth and other stars. Although Chinese civilization has been impacted by foreign civilizations, it was not destroyed, and the impact was limited. Chinese cultural heritage has continued.”
Yao Haijun, chief editor of Science Fiction World, China’s leading science fiction magazine, says The Three Body Problem has drawn attention from Western readers partly because they seek to understand China.
“It has also set up a link between China and the West through which foreign readers can attempt to hypothesize about the future of the country,” he said in an interview with Xinhua.
Liu makes clear that his work reflects the concerns of all peoples.
“It is not my purpose to show the reality of China from a science fiction perspective. This may not meet the expectations of Western readers. My purpose is very simple: that is, science fiction itself. The content in the book is not a metaphor for reality. If it was understood this way the logic of the book would be absurd. This is a common misunderstanding of readers. I prefer to be understood as a sign that Chinese writers are now taking off in imaginative literature and science fiction writing. However, whatever way readers understand it, I am happy I have readers in the West.”
Writers from the golden age of British and American science fiction influenced his work.
“Science fiction in China is 100 percent imported from the West. There was no science fantasy in China’s long history of culture. So as a writer of science fiction I am very close to Western works. This refers only to science fiction literature, not literature in a broad sense. At present science fiction is very marginal in Chinese literature. China’s realist literature is deeply rooted in native Chinese culture, but science fiction is not, which has caused my work to be closer to European and American works,” Liu says.
H G Wells showed him that science fiction can reflect reality in a way that is not seen in mainstream literature, he says.
“Although my science fiction is not intended to critique reality, he left a deep impression in this regard. However, my novel is not in that genre.
Arthur C. Clarke is very pure and shows science fiction itself. He has a solid foundation in science and a rich, science-based imagination. He is deeply moved by the relationship between man and the universe and nature. His two works 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous with Rama are the most impressive for me. He used imagination to create a lifelike world. The details are vivid, which has had a great impact on my writing. I want to write such works.”
Asked to analyze the difference between Western and Chinese culture, Liu argues that a key factor is how a civilization or its religion views the future.
“Religious backgrounds are where we can see the difference. Specifically, Western culture always considers the end of the world, drawing on the Bible. However, Chinese culture has no end-of-days complex and seldom considers the end of the world, so the attitudes about an end of the world catastrophe are quite different. In the subconscious of Chinese culture, human history goes forward and forward. To me it’s an example of how Chinese and Western ways of thinking are different.”
Chinese culture is more optimistic than Western culture, he says.
“The entire Christian background and other religious backgrounds are absent. Even if religion appears, it has not become culturally dominant. I’m not saying which one is better though.” In the second volume of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, titled The Dark Forest, the central problem with contacting an alien civilization is explained. Suppose an advanced civilization on planet A detects another civilization on planet B. Since planet A knows nothing about the motives or future decisions or capabilities of planet B, decision-makers on planet A could easily conclude that the safest course is to destroy planet B while they have the chance. Of course, planet B follows exactly the same logic.
Some see the dark forest as a metaphor for highly competitive Chinese markets.
“Commentators compared the harsh environment in which IT companies compete ruthlessly to the cosmos of The ThreeBody Problem in which every civilization sees survival as its highest priority,” Ken Liu, the award-winning translator of The
Three Body Problem, told the website AllChinaTech.
The dark forest is also widely discussed among international relations theorists because it closely resembles “realist” ideas that states inevitably compete to maximize their own power because they fear the power of other states.
However, Liu himself says the dark forest problem does not dominate relations between nations on Earth. Even in future interstellar relations, a dark forest is only one of many possibilities, he says.
“The relationship between different groups of human beings on Earth is very different to that between mankind and creatures from other planets. The conflict between a newly rising power and a veteran powerhouse has occurred frequently in history. However, war is not always the only solution.
“We are the same species on Earth and are more likely to understand each other. Civilizations are not isolated from each other. They can exchange and discuss many things that they do not understand. This opportunity does not exist between interstellar civilizations. The dark forest applies to beings on different stars, not between humans. This is readers’ biggest misunderstanding of my book.”
Problems can be solved through a peaceful approach in which everyone benefits, he says.
“I do not think there will be a massive international war.”
My purpose is very simple: that is, science fiction itself. The content in the book is not a metaphor for reality. If it was understood this way the logic of the book would be absurd.” Liu Cixin