Invisible Planets: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese SF in Translation

by Ken Liu

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. All we can do is just follow the gridlines in accordance with the rules of the game: Cannon on eighth file to fifth file; Horse on second file to third file. As for the meaning behind these moves, and when the great hand that hangs over us will plunge down to pluck one of us off, nobody knows.

I am so confused by this story. What really happened?

The biggest fear is for someone else to understand what you really fear.

For the Chinese, what reason could be more compelling than “for my child”?

Pretending that the fake is real only makes the real seem fake.

living with an awareness of the closeness of death is nothing to be afraid of.

Feeling like you are dead while alive is a much worse fate.

The real key isn’t about whether what I say is true, but whether you believe it. From start to end, the direction of narrative is not guided by the tongue, but by the ear.

Do you understand? When I am done telling you these stories, when you’re done listening to these stories, I am no longer I, and you are no longer you. In this afternoon we briefly merged into one. After this, you will always carry a bit of me, and I will always carry a bit of you, even if we both forget this conversation.

“First, you must get off this rock!” God spread out his arms toward space. His white robe danced in the autumn wind like a sail. “Where will we go?” Qiusheng’s father asked in confusion. “Begin by flying to the other planets in the solar system, then to other stars. Don’t ask why, but use all your energy toward the goal of flying away, the farther the better. In that process, you will spend a lot of money, and many people will die, but you must get away from here. Any civilization that stays on her birth world is committing suicide! You must go into the universe and find new worlds, new homes, and spread your descendants across the galaxy like drops of spring rain.”

A civilization’s survival depends on the effort of every individual. Even the common people like you have a role to play.

“In this universe, as long as you’re patient, you can make any wish come true. Even though the possibility is minuscule, it is not nonexistent.

Contemporary science fiction reflects much suspicion and anxiety about technological progress, and the futures portrayed in these works are dark and uncertain. Even if a bright future appears occasionally, it comes only after much suffering and a tortuous path.

As this collection exemplifies but why?

As the story continued to develop, it was impossible to root the third volume in present realities, and I had to describe distant futures and distant corners of the cosmos—and by consensus, Chinese readers were not interested in such things. My publisher and I reached the conclusion that since it was impossible for the third volume to succeed in the market, maybe it was best to give up trying to attract readers who were not already science fiction fans. Instead, I would write a “pure” science fiction novel, which I found comforting, as I considered myself a hard-core fan. And so I wrote the third volume for myself and filled it with multidimensional and two-dimensional universes, artificial black holes and mini-universes, and I extended the time line to the heat death of the universe. And to our utter surprise, it was this third volume, written only for science fiction fans, which led to the popularity of the series as a whole.

Interesting - the third volume was perhaps my favorite, though that ending! (Cixin Liu talking about his Three Body Problem series.)

As modernization accelerated its pace, the new generation of readers no longer confined their thoughts to the narrow present as their parents did, but were interested in the future and the wide-open cosmos. The China of the present is a bit like America during science fiction’s Golden Age, when science and technology filled the future with wonder, presenting both great crises and grand opportunities. This is rich soil for the growth and flourishing of science fiction.