Cixin Liu
HOLD UP THE SKY
FOREWORD
This anthology includes more than ten of my short stories, most of which were published more than a decade ago. At that time, sci-fi was still a very marginal pursuit in China. The genre had few readers and was largely overlooked. In China, science fiction is seen as something foreign; its fundamental elements have never been a part of Chinese culture. Life has passed steadily, with few changes, from generation to generation over the course of China’s long history, so people unconsciously believe that life will be ever thus. Historically, the term “future” itself appeared mostly in Buddhist texts, which are also foreign; people have seldom thought about or paid attention to the future in their daily lives.
But in recent years, things have changed drastically. China has entered wholesale into a process of rapid modernization, and every day, all around us, there are stupefying changes. Suddenly, the future stands before us in vivid detail, and it exerts a huge appeal. Old China has suddenly become a nation with an extremely keen sense of the future. It is understandable why people, under such circumstances, would pay unprecedented attention to science fiction.
In Europe and the US, the question I’m asked most often is: “What makes Chinese science fiction Chinese?” For my part, I have never consciously or deliberately tried to make my sci-fi more Chinese. The stories in this anthology touch on a variety of sci-fi themes, but they all have something in common: 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. 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.
In China, the new generation’s way of thinking is changing dramatically. They are gradually turning their eyes away from the reality of their immediate environment and the mundanities of life toward the distant, starry sky and the future. More and more, they are beginning to see themselves as members of humankind, not merely as Chinese people. They are also beginning to care about those ultimate questions that their forebears seldom considered: where humans and the universe came from, and where they’re going. This change in their thinking will profoundly affect China’s future and even the future of humanity. The science fiction stories in this book are a vivid expression of this new way of thinking.
Yet I am also Chinese, and, whether by design or not, these stories will inevitably have a strong Chinese flavor, imbued with the culture, history, and present reality of China.
In creating sci-fi, I always try hard to imagine and describe the relationship between the Great and the Small.
“The Small” refers here to human smallness. As individuals, we are small indeed, and collectively, humanity is small, too. Imagine a concert attended by all of humanity. How big a venue would you need? Not as big as I’d imagined—a space about as large as Shanghai’s Pudong District would suffice. Here’s another perverse thought experiment: If you were to make a meatball out of humankind, its diameter would be less than a kilometer.
“The Great” refers, of course, to the universe. Every person has a deep sense of its enormity. The most distant light we see was sent out over ten billion years ago. If you shrank the solar system to the size of a dinner plate, the diameter of a correspondingly shrunken Milky Way would still be one hundred thousand kilometers.
In my sci-fi, I challenge myself to imagine the relationship between Small people and the Great universe—not in the metaphysical sense of philosophy, nor as when someone looks up at the starry sky and feels such sentiment and pathos that their views on human life and the universe change. Stories about such relationships between people and the universe are not science fiction; they are realism. 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.
It’s very difficult work, and it’s the greatest challenge I face when writing science fiction. Common sense tells us that there is no such relationship. Whether the universe is expanding or contracting, or whether a star ten billion light-years away has gone supernova, truly has nothing to do with the mundane, insignificant events of my life. Yet I firmly believe that there is a relationship between humanity and the universe. When it was born, the universe was smaller than an atom, and everything within it was intermixed as a single whole; the natural connection between the universe’s small parts and its great entirety was thus determined. Though the universe has expanded to whatever its current size, this connection still exists, and if we can’t see it now, that doesn’t mean we won’t be able to in the future. I work hard to imagine all sorts of possibilities in the relationship between people and the universe, and I try to turn what I imagine into thrilling fiction. This anthology, just as its title suggests, contains a portion of my efforts.
Thank you all!
THE VILLAGE TEACHER
He knew he’d have to teach his final lesson early.
He felt another shot of pain in his liver, so strong he almost fainted. He didn’t have the strength to get out of bed, and, with great difficulty, he pulled himself closer to the bedside window, whose paper panes glowed in the moonlight. The little window looked like a doorway leading into another world, one where everything shone with silver light, a diorama of silver and frostless snow. He shakily lifted his head and looked out through a hole in the paper window, and his fantasy of a silver world receded. He found himself looking into the distance, at the village where he had spent his life.
The village lay serenely in the moonlight, and it looked as if it had been abandoned for a hundred years. The small flat-roofed houses were almost indistinguishable from the mounds of soil surrounding them. In the muted colors of moonlight, it was as if the entire place had dissolved back into the hills. Only the old locust tree could be seen clearly, a few black crows’ nests scattered among its withered branches, like stark drops of black ink on a silver page.
The village had its good times, like the harvest. When young men and women, who had left the village in droves to find work, came back, and the place was bustling and full of laughter. Ears of corn glistened on the rooftops, and children did somersaults in the piles of stalks on the floor of the threshing ground. The Spring Festival was another cheerful time, when the threshing ground was lit with gas lamps and decorated with red lanterns. The villagers gathered there to parade lucky paper boats and do lion dances. Now, only the clattering wooden frames of the lions’ heads were left, stripped of paint. The village had no money to buy new trains for the heads, so they had been using bedsheets as the lions’ bodies, which worked in a pinch. But as soon as the Spring Festival ended, all the youths of the village left again to look for work, and the place fell back into torpor.
At dusk every day, as thin wisps of smoke rose from the chimneys of the houses, one or two elderly villagers, their faces grooved like walnuts, would stand and gaze down the road that led beyond the mountains, until the last ray of gloaming light got caught in the locust tree and disappeared. People turned their lamps off and went to bed early in the village. Electricity was expensive, at ¥1.8 per kilowatt hour.