P.E.’s Reviews > Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation > Status Update

'At this critical historic moment, I am even firmer in my faith that reforming reality requires not only science and technology, but also the belief by all of us that life should be better—and can be made better—if we possess imagination, courage, initiative, unity, love, and hopr as well as a bit of understanding and empathy for strangers. [...]'

[5]


["What Makes Chinese Science Fiction Chinese? – Xia Jia]

'The development of civilization is driven by the curiosity that comoeks us to cross this frontier, to subvert prejudices and stereotypes, and in the process, complete our self-knowledge and growth.

[4]

'Science fiction—to borrow the words of Gilles Deleuze—is a literature always in the state of becoming, a literature that is born on the frontier—the frontier between the known and unknown, magic and science, dream and reality, self and other, present and future, East and West—and renews itself as the frontier shifts and migrates.

[3]

'[...] the Chinese science fiction of the era dating from the 1990s to the present can be read as a national allegory in the age of globalization'

[2]

'Paradoxically, as China actually modernized with the reforms of the Deng Xiaoping era, these enthusiastic dreams of the future gradually disappeared from Chinese science fiction. Readers and writers seem to fall out of romantic, idealistic utopias and back into reality.

[1]

'Paradoxically, as China actually modernized with the reforms of the Deng Xiaoping era, these enthusiastic dreams of the future gradually disappeared from Chinese science fiction. Readers and writers seem to fall out of romantic, idealistic utopias and back into reality.

[1]

'More than a hundred years, the problems facing us are far more complicated and likely not amenable to scientific solutions, but I still believe that science fiction is capable of wedging open small possibilities: to mend the torn generation, to allow different visions and imagined future Chinas to coexist in peace, to listen to one another [and proceed together].'


["The Torn Generation [...]" – Chen Qiufan]

'Three-Body caused science fiction writers and critics to reevaluate Chinese science fiction and China. They realized they had been ignoring changes in the thinking patterns of the Chinese readers. As modernization accelerated its pace, the new generation of readers no longer confined their thoughts to the narrow present as their parents did, but were interested in the future and the wide-open cosmos'

[Liu Cixin]

[...] Three million soldiers can form a million of these gates I've just demonstrated, and these gates can be put together into a whole formation capable of any complex calculation. I call my invention a calculating formation.'

[2/2]

["The Circle" – Liu Cixin]

' "I don't know your names," Jing Ke said, tapping the shoulders of two of the soldiers. "The two of you will be responsible for number input, so I'll call you 'Input One' and 'Input Two'." He pointed to the last soldier. "You will be responsible for number output, so I'll call you 'Output'." He shoved the soldiers to where he wanted them to stand.

[1]