Invisible Planets: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese SF in Translation

by Ken Liu

Humans may be gone, but the world goes on. Look at how lovely the moon is tonight.

Where shall I go? Should I go back? Back to where I started? Or maybe I should head in the opposite direction. The Earth is round. No matter where I want to go, as long as I keep going, I’ll get there.

“This is exactly what the appropriate authorities want to see. Then only the stupid will survive. A society full of stupid men is a stable one.”

“The author of 1984 predicted the progress of totalitarianism, but could not predict the progress of technology.”

Duras, Lancelot, and Wagner all burst into laughter. The only one who didn’t laugh was Arvardan. He was stuck on the last thing Lancelot had said: in the war between the people and the appropriate authorities, the final conclusion was the death of language. Then the Talking Club was nothing more than a chance to enjoy the final quiet moment that came from pulling shut the curtains on the windows of a train speeding toward the edge of a cliff.

knew that he was nothing more than a figure. He was but an ordinary person, one out of 51,280,000 others just like him. And if they didn’t need that much precision and spoke of only fifty million, he was but a rounding error, the same as if he had never existed.

The winners were led on a night tour of the Pearl River, and our hosts excitedly pointed out the splendor of the postmodern architecture on both shores. However, one of the winners, Chen Danqing, a noted liberal opinion leader and artist, reminisced about his childhood visit to Guangzhou in the midst of the Cultural Revolution. “From here to there,” he said, sweeping his arm across the night, “bodies dangled from every tree.” We looked at where he was pointing, and all we could see were lit-up commercial skyscrapers indistinguishable from those you’d find in Manhattan. “The young are always at the vanguard.” As the youngest winner among the group—I was the only one born after 1980—I played the role of the eager student seizing an opportunity to learn from respected elders. “Do you have any advice for us, the younger generation?” Chen Danqing puffed on his cigarette thoughtfully for a while, and then said, “I’ll give you eight words: ‘Stay on the sidelines; hope for the best.’”

As a journalist with Xinhua, Han Song has a broader perspective than most. He points out that the young people who have been grouped into one generation by the accident of their dates of birth have wildly divergent values and lifestyles, like fragments seen in a kaleidoscope. My generation includes the workers at Foxconn, who, day after day, repeat the same motions on the assembly line, indistinguishable from robots; but it also includes the sons and daughters of the wealthy and of important Communist officials, princelings who treat luxury as their birthright and have enjoyed every advantage in life. It includes entrepreneurs who are willing to leave behind millions in guaranteed salary to pursue a dream as well as hundreds of recent college graduates who compete ruthlessly for a single clerical position. It includes the “foreigners’ lackeys” who worship the American lifestyle so much that their only goal in life is to emigrate to the United States as well as the “fifty-cent party” who are xenophobic, denigrate democracy, and place all their hopes in a more powerful, rising China. It’s absurd to put all these people under the same label.

At this critical historic moment, I am even firmer in my faith that reforming reality requires not only science and technology, but also the belief by all of us that life should be better—and can be made better—if we possess imagination, courage, initiative, unity, love, and hope as well as a bit of understanding and empathy for strangers. Each of us is born with these precious qualities, and it is perhaps also the best gift that science fiction can bring us.