Chinese Science Fiction

Getting out of my usual reading habit: I just read a science fiction book from China -- The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu. This is not the type of science fiction that I really enjoy, and I don't read much of this genre anyway. This particular book is much too focused on long and detailed explanations of physics concepts, or more likely, crackpot ideas about physics. It's ok to be a crackpot if you put your speculative stuff inside a sci-fi book and I'm sure some people appreciate it. Not me.

The time frame of this novel spans 5 decades or more -- beginning during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and continuing to a slightly indefinite present or not-too-distant future. The novel was published in Chinese in 2006, in English in 2014, meaning that the present is around 15 years ago and the future is now.

The disastrous effects of the Cultural Revolution on scientists, urban people, intellectuals, and many other elites is well-known, and details in this book make for interesting historical reading. However, if I wanted a novel that created a vivid picture of this era, this wouldn't be my first choice.

I'm not extremely impressed with the author's skill at character development; I would say it's just not bad. The book is also not too bad at building suspense as the main characters try to understand mysterious signals from outer space. Quite a lot of action takes place inside an online computer game, whose significance becomes evident only at the end of the book. Although the final explanation is unifying, as I read I felt as if the narrative jumped around too much between many "worlds."

As always I looked for instances of food, which can be present when authors want to make characters more human. There's almost no mention of meals during most of the fast paced scenes in the novel -- the men, the heroes, couldn't be bothered to eat. Only in the portrayal of the one woman character, named Ye, are a couple of examples, and only at less-suspenseful times, indicating the earthy world in which peasants and women lived. Ye is in a way the villain of the book, but the author tries to generate sympathy for the reasons why she did what she did.

"She went back to her room, picked up her lunch box, and went to the cafeteria. Only mantou buns and pickles were left, and the cafeteria workers told her impatiently that they were closing. So she had no choice but to carry her lunch box outside and walk next to the lip of the cliff, where she sat down on the grass to chew the cold mantou." (p. 268).

"The guard saw that Ye was puzzled and explained that they had just received orders that Red Coast Base’s security rating had been reduced. The locals were allowed onto Radar Peak as long as they stayed outside the base. Several local peasants had already come yesterday to bring vegetables." (p. 289).

"The torches were held aloft by a crowd of children, their faces bright red from the cold, and icicles hung from their hats. When they came into her room, they seemed to bring the cold air in with them. Two of the boys, thinly dressed, had suffered the most. They had taken off their thick coats and wrapped them around something that they carried in their arms. Unwrapping the coats revealed a large pot, the fermented cabbage and pork dumplings inside still steaming hot. (p. 291). 

"Feng had the strong, solid frame of the women of the Northeast. She ate sorghum every day, and her large breasts were full of milk even though she was feeding two babies at the same time." (p. 293). 

I was very interested in a New York Times article discussing the publication of Cixin Liu's book, exploring the meaning of science fiction in China today, and explaining the way this novel is more like classic Western science fiction than more recent styles. To quote:

"For decades, science fiction was subject to the whims of Communist Party rule. The genre went from being a vehicle for popularizing science for socialist purposes to drawing criticism in 1983 from party newspapers for 'spreading pseudoscience and promoting decadent capitalist elements.' When the prestigious People’s Literature literary magazine published four of Mr. Liu’s short stories in 2012, it was a sign that the genre was back in official good graces. ... 

"Chinese science fiction serves another purpose in the eyes of Xia Jia, a science-fiction writer and professor at Xian Jiaotong University. 'Chinese science fiction, in a way, has borne the weight of the ‘Chinese dream’ since the genre first appeared in China in the late Qing dynasty,' she said, referring to the turn of the 20th century. 

"'The dream is about wanting to overtake the Western countries and become a very powerful modern China while still preserving these old elements,' she added. 'This is what we who write science fiction in China have to grapple with.'" (In a Topsy-Turvy World, China Warms to Sci-Fi, NYT, Nov. 10, 2014)

Why did I read this book? Well, it was on my amazon.com list because a friend recommended it a few years ago. Last Sunday amazon.com sent me a message saying it was only $2.99 to purchase it, if I did so right away. And I went for it, since I thought it would be good to read something unusual. I'm not sorry I read it, but I'm not that glad either.