To Hold Up the Sky

by Liu Cixin

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. Even if the sci-fi you read or write tells a distinctly trivial, mundane, or personal story, you’ll still have this feeling. I believe this is one of the most valuable features of science fiction.

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