But if one were to evaluate the place of Earth civilization in this universe, humanity seems far closer to the indigenous peoples of the Canadian territories before the arrival of European colonists than the Canada of the present. More than five hundred years ago, hundreds of distinct peoples speaking languages representing more than ten language families populated the land from Newfoundland to Vancouver Island. Their experience with contact with an alien civilization seems far closer to the portrayal in Three-Body. The description of this history in the essay “Canadian History: An Aboriginal Perspective,” by Georges Erasmus and Joe Saunders, is unforgettable.
I wrote about the worst of all possible universes in Three-Body in the hope that we can strive for the best of all possible Earths.
THE TORN GENERATION: CHINESE SCIENCE FICTION IN A CULTURE IN TRANSITION
by Chen Qiufan
This past March, I attended the Huadi Literary Awards in Guangzhou, where my debut novel, The Waste Tide, was honored with the top distinction for genre (SF) fiction. Published in the capital of China’s most developed province, Huadi is the magazine supplement for the Yangcheng Evening News, one of the largest newspapers in the world by circulation (in excess of one million). This was also the second literary award my novel has received (after a Chinese Nebula). As a former Googler, I want to invoke the button that rarely gets pressed: “I’m feeling lucky!”
The Huadi Awards was a joint effort by the local government and media, and as one might expect, it was suffused with the trappings of officialdom. Even the ceremony itself was held in a government auditorium. 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.’”
I gazed at the reflections of the profusion of neon lights and pondered these eight words. The short voyage was soon over, and the river’s surface disappeared in darkness. I thought there was much wisdom in his words, though the somewhat cynical values they advocated were at odds with the spirit of the “Chinese Dream” promoted by the government.
In the eyes of Han Song, a Chinese science fiction writer born in the 1960s, the Chinese born after 1978 belong to a “Torn Generation.” Han Song’s perspective is interesting. While he is a member of China’s most powerful state-run news agency, Xinhua, he is also the author of extraordinary novels such as Subway and Bullet Train. In these surrealist novels, the order of nature on speeding trains is subverted by events such as accelerated evolution, incest, cannibalism, and so on. Critics have suggested that “the world on the subway reflects a society’s explosive transformation and is a metaphor for the reality of China’s hyper-accelerated development.”
In a widely distributed recent essay, Han Song wrote, “The younger generation is torn to a far greater degree than our own. The China of our youth was one of averages, but in this era, when a new breed of humanity is coming into being, China is being ripped apart at an accelerated pace. The elite and the lowly alike must face this fact. Everything, from spiritual dreams to the reality of life, is torn.”
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.
Take myself as an example. I was born in a tiny city in Southern China (population: a million-plus). In the year of my birth, the city was designated one of the four “special economic zones” under Deng Xiaoping, and began to benefit from all the special government policies promoting development. My childhood was thus spent in relative material comfort and an environment with improved education approaches and a growing openness of information. I got to see Star Wars and Star Trek and read many science fiction classics. I became a fan of Arthur C. Clarke, H. G. Wells, and Jules Verne. Inspired by them, I published my first story when I was sixteen.
Not even seventy kilometers from where I lived, though, was another small town—administratively, it was under the jurisdiction of the same city government—where a completely different way of life held sway. In this town of fewer than two hundred thousand people, more than 3,200 businesses, many of them nothing more than family workshops, formed a center for e-waste recycling. Highly toxic electronic junk from around the world, mostly the developed world, was shipped here—often illegally—and workers without any training or protection processed them manually to extract recyclable metals. Since the late 1980s, this industry has managed to create multiple millionaires but also turned the town into one of the most polluted areas in all of Guangdong Province.
It was this experience in contrasts and social rips that led me to write The Waste Tide. The novel imagines a near future in the third decade of this century. On Silicon Isle, an island in Southern China built on the foundation of e-waste recycling, pollution has made the place almost uninhabitable. A fierce struggle follows in which powerful native clans, migrant workers from other parts of China, and the elites representing international capitalism vie for dominance. Mimi, a young migrant worker and “waste girl,” turns into a posthuman after much suffering and leads the oppressed migrant workers in rebellion.