To Hold Up the Sky

by Liu Cixin

They are about things that concern all of humanity, and the challenges and crises they depict are all things humanity faces together. In fact, when you read or make science fiction, your sympathy automatically moves away from ideas of ethnicity and nation and toward a higher idea of humanity as a whole; from this vantage, humanity naturally becomes a collective unit, rather than an assembly of different parts divided by ethnicity and nation.

If you were to make a meatball out of humankind, its diameter would be less than a kilometer.

In my sci-fi, I work to imagine the direct, tangible relationship between people and the universe. In this relationship, the evolution and metamorphoses of the universe are inseparable from human life and human fate.

He fell into a deep sorrow—in this world or the next, he had no hope of finding peace.

“The most comprehensible thing about the universe is that it is incomprehensible,”

Here’s how two countries fight these days. First, they declare the type and quantity of all of their tactical and strategic weapons. Then a computer can determine the outcome of the war according to their mutual rates of destruction. Weapons are purely for deterrence and are never used. Warfare is a computer execution of a mathematical model, the results of which decide the victor and loser.”

When something appears in your imagination, it becomes reality.

When their contemplation of existence reached its highest point, they concluded that nonexistence was the most rational choice.”

In this total information age, what is wealth? Ultimately, it’s no more than strands of pulses and magnetic marks inside computer storage.

What is money? Money isn’t worth shit. Money is just a strand of electromagnetic marks even smaller than bacteria and pulses that disappear in a flash.

Although the universe is vast, we are inside it. Every change in the microscopic and macroscopic world affects everything.”

I had discovered that practically all the history we know is a lie. Of all the noble, vaunted heroes we hear about, at least half were contemptible liars and schemers who used their influence to claim achievements and write the histories, and managed to succeed. Of those who really did give everything for truth and justice, two-thirds choked to death horribly and quietly in the dust of history, forgotten by everyone, and the remaining one-third had their reputations smeared into eternal infamy, just like Song Cheng.

The only difference between those reporters and prostitutes is that they sell a different body part.