By way of small talk, I asked him about the film adaptation of The Three-Body Problem. This past summer, I traveled to China to visit its new observatory, but first I met up with Liu in Beijing. “It looks like something out of science fiction,” Liu said. Liu is reluctant to make connections between his books and the real world, but he did tell me that his work is influenced by the history of Earth’s civilizations, “especially the encounters between more technologically advanced civilizations and the original settlers of a place.” One such encounter occurred during the 19th century, when the “Middle Kingdom” of China, around which all of Asia had once revolved, looked out to sea and saw the ships of Europe’s seafaring empires, whose ensuing invasion triggered a loss in status for China comparable to the fall of Rome. Isaac Asimov based his Foundation series on classical Rome, and Frank Herbert’s Dune borrows plot points from the past of the Bedouin Arabs. S cience fiction is sometimes described as a literature of the future, but historical allegory is one of its dominant modes. En route to our planet, the extraterrestrial civilization disrupts our particle accelerators to prevent us from making advancements in the physics of warfare, such as the one that brought the atomic bomb into being less than a century after the invention of the repeating rifle. The civilization that receives it embarks on a centuries-long mission to invade Earth, but she doesn’t care the Red Guard’s grisly excesses have convinced her that humans no longer deserve to survive. Liu’s trilogy begins in the late 1960s, during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when a young Chinese woman sends a message to a nearby star system. This grim cosmic outlook is called “dark-forest theory,” because it conceives of every civilization in the universe as a hunter hiding in a moonless woodland, listening for the first rustlings of a rival. ![]() Any other civilization that learns of its existence will perceive it as a threat to expand-as all civilizations do, eliminating their competitors until they encounter one with superior technology and are themselves eliminated. No civilization should ever announce its presence to the cosmos, he says. Liu told me that Obama’s staff asked him for an advance copy of the third volume.Īt the end of the second volume, one of the main characters lays out the trilogy’s animating philosophy. Barack Obama told The New York Times that the book-the first in a trilogy- gave him cosmic perspective during the frenzy of his presidency. In 2015, his novel The Three-Body Problem became the first work in translation to win the Hugo Award, science fiction’s most prestigious prize. In recent years, Liu has joined the ranks of the global literati. “But perhaps tomorrow we’ll wake up and find an alien spaceship the size of the Moon parked in orbit.”Ĭhina’s new radio dish was custom-built to listen for an extraterrestrial message. “Perhaps in ten thousand years, the starry sky that humankind gazes upon will remain empty and silent,” he writes in the postscript to one of his books. He has warned that the “appearance of this Other” might be imminent, and that it might result in our extinction. ![]() He has written a great deal about the risks of first contact. In years past, the academy’s engineers sent Liu illustrated updates on the dish’s construction, along with notes saying how he’d inspired their work.īut in other ways Liu is a strange choice to visit the dish. ![]() Other Chinese writers I met attached the honorific Da, meaning “Big,” to his surname. Liu is the patriarch of the country’s science-fiction scene. He has an outsize voice on cosmic affairs in China, and the government’s aerospace agency sometimes asks him to consult on science missions. In some ways, it’s no surprise that Liu was invited to see the dish. To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.
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