Invisible Planets: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese SF in Translation

by Ken Liu

Imagining that the political concerns of Chinese writers are the same as what the Western reader would like them to be is at best arrogant and at worst dangerous. Chinese writers are saying something about the globe, about all of humanity, not just China, and trying to understand their works through this perspective is, I think, the far more rewarding approach.

What did I do all that for? I just wanted an opportunity to be a hero on the battlefield. It was my only chance to do something with my life, you know? Even if I died, it would be worth it.”

Li Xiaoxia was right. Pea was right. The Drill Instructor was also right. We are just like the rats, all of us only pawns, stones, worthless counters in the Great Game. All we can see is just the few grids of the board before us.

“Remember what I told you? I didn’t choose you, and you didn’t choose me,” she says, smiling almost apologetically. I begin to feel anxiety again, as though my fingers are wrapped around a handful of sand, leaking grains. “You’re the other half of me, cloven by Zeus’s thunderbolt.”

Time passes quicker in my mind than it does in the real world. Every day I’m exhausted. I’m always working overtime. I accomplish so much more in twenty-four hours than others. No wonder the company thinks I’m a model employee.

Suddenly I feel an intense jealousy of these fish. Their lives are so simple, so pure. There’s only one direction—against the current. They do not have to hesitate, overwhelmed by an endless array of choices. But if I really lived a life like that, maybe I’d still complain. A man is never content with what he has.

“Ah Fu, do you think everyone has to grow up?” “I think so.” “And then what?” “And then you grow old.” “And then?”

This story is also dedicated to all the grandmas and grandpas who, each morning, can be seen in parks practicing tai chi, twirling swords, singing opera, dancing, showing off their songbirds, painting, doing calligraphy, playing the accordion. You made me understand that living with an awareness of the closeness of death is nothing to be afraid of.

The Talking Club is enough for the rest of us. But something is different about you. You remind me a lot of the younger me. Though you look quiet, inside you there is a dangerous spark. I have lost the ambition and the will to change the world, but I do not want to see everyone become like me.”

Why not? My dear, there’s nothing that’s impossible. Numerous steps, each meaningless by itself, when added together become a rule, a principle.

My darling, starting with the Odyssey, every knight errant has told romances of faraway places to court the ladies they love. Can you tell which stories are real and which are not?

Looking at your happy face, I sigh. The sound is so quiet that you cannot see anything strange in my smile. How can I explain this to you? How do I make you understand? Stories cannot gather anything together, if they’re fated to separate. Yes, I say quietly. We have been sitting here for an afternoon telling stories, and together, we possess a universe.

The young were no longer so terrified about survival; they cared far more about appearances.

Mankind streamed across the river of time, aiming straight for the Door Into Summer. In that moment, our tiny planet was falling like a single drop of dew in a boundless universe, tumbling toward that plane made up of the broken remains of a planet.

I finally understood why my mother would rather turn her rotting passion into ghosts that danced at the edge of light than set foot outside this eternal hell. When she saw the stars wink out, one after another, she was the happiest woman in the world. When darkness covered her eyes like a flood, she and the man she loved disappeared together on the shore of life and time.

The priest extinguished all the lanterns in the universe just so he could recognize the woman he loved at a glance in a flood of refugees. My knight brought back that star fragment so the inextinguishable flame could warm the loneliness in my dark eyes. The night completed my mother; the day completed me.

Science fiction is a literature of possibilities. The universe we live in is also one of countless possibilities. For humanity, some universes are better than others, and Three-Body shows the worst of all possible universes, a universe in which existence is as dark and harsh as one can imagine.

I wrote about the worst of all possible universes in Three-Body in the hope that we can strive for the best of all possible Earths.

Between the feeling of individual failure and the conspicuous display of national prosperity lies an unbridgeable chasm. The result is a division of the population into two extremes: one side rebels against the government reflexively (sometimes without knowing what its “cause” is) and trusts nothing it says; the other side retreats into nationalism to give itself the sense of mastering its own fate.

Contemporary China is a society in the transition stage when old illusions have collapsed but new illusions have not yet taken their place; this is the fundamental cause of the rips and divisions, the confusion and the chaos.

this feels like america too

The simultaneous presence of crisis and prosperity guarantees a range of attitudes toward humanity’s future among the writers:

Science fiction—to borrow the words of Gilles Deleuze—is a literature always in the state of becoming, a literature that is born on the frontier