{"id":3897,"date":"2024-02-29T16:42:40","date_gmt":"2024-02-29T16:42:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3897"},"modified":"2024-03-03T16:55:19","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T16:55:19","slug":"we-cannot-save-ourselves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3897","title":{"rendered":"\u201cWe cannot save ourselves\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Interviewing Cixin Liu for The Telegraph, 29 February 2024<\/a><\/p>\n

Chinese writer Cixin Liu steeps his science fiction in disaster and misfortune, even as he insists he\u2019s just playing around with ideas. His seven novels and a clutch of short stories and articles (soon to be collected in a new English translation, A View from the Stars) have made him world-famous. His most well-known novel The Three-Body Problem won the Hugo, the nearest thing science fiction has to a heavy-hitting prize, in 2015. Closer to home, he\u2019s won the Galaxy Award, China\u2019s most prestigious literary science-fiction award, nine times. A 2019 film adaptation of his novella \u201cThe Wandering Earth\u201d (in which we have to propel the planet clear of a swelling sun) earned nearly half a billion dollars in the first 10 days of its release. Meanwhile The Three-Body Problem and its two sequels have sold more than eight million copies worldwide. Now they\u2019re being adapted for the screen, and not for the first time: the first two adaptations were domestic Chinese efforts. A 2015 film was suspended during production (\u201cNo-one here had experience of productions of this scale,\u201d says Liu, speaking over a video link from a room piled with books.) The more recent TV effort is, from what I\u2019ve seen of it, jolly good, though it only scratches the surface of the first book.<\/p>\n

Now streaming service Netflix is bringing Liu\u2019s whole trilogy to a global audience. Clean behind your sofa, because you\u2019re going to need somewhere to hide from an alien visitation quite unlike any other.<\/p>\n

For some of us, that invasion will come almost as a relief. So many English-speaking sf writers these days spend their time bending over backwards, offering \u201cdesign solutions\u201d to real-life planetary crises, and especially to climate change. They would have you believe that science fiction is good for you.<\/p>\n

Liu, a bona fide computer engineer in his mid-fifties, is immune to such virtue signalling. \u201cFrom a technical perspective, sf cannot really help the world,\u201d he says. \u201cScience fiction is ephemeral, because we build it on ideas in science and technology that are always changing and improving. I suppose we might inspire people a little.\u201d<\/p>\n

Western media outlets tend to cast Liu — a domestic celebrity with a global reputation and a fantastic US sales record — as a put-upon and presumably reluctant spokesperson for the Chinese Communist Party. The Liu I\u2019m speaking to is garrulous, well-read, iconoclastic, and eager. (It\u2019s his idea that we end up speaking for nearly an hour more than scheduled.) He\u2019s hard-headed about human frailty and global Realpolitik, and he likes shocking his audience. He believes in progress, in technology, and, yes — get ready to clutch your pearls — he believes in his country. But we\u2019ll get to that.<\/p>\n

We promised you disaster and misfortune. In The Three-Body Problem, the great Trisolaran Fleet has already set sail from its impossibly inhospitable homeworld orbiting three suns. (What does not kill you makes you stronger, and their madly unpredictable environment has made the Trisolarans very strong indeed.) They\u2019ll arrive in 450 years or so — more than enough time, you would think, for us to develop technology advanced enough to repel them. That is why the Trisolarans have sent two super-intelligent proton-sized super-computers at near-light speed to Earth, to mess with our minds, muddle our reality, and drive us into self-hatred and despair. Only science can save us. Maybe.
\nThe forthcoming Netflix adaptation is produced by Game of Thrones\u2019s David Benioff and D.B. Weiss and True Blood\u2019s Alexander Woo. In covering all three books, it will need to wrap itself around a conflict that lasts millennia, and realistically its characters won\u2019t be able to live long enough to witness more than fragments of the action. The parallel with the downright deathy Game of Thrones is clear: \u201cI watched Game of Thrones before agreeing to the adaptation,\u201d says Liu. \u201cI found it overwhelming — quite shocking, but in a positive way.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the end of its run, Game of Thrones had become as solemn as an owl, and that approach won\u2019t work for The Three-Body Problem, which leavens its cosmic pessimism (a universe full of silent, hostile aliens, stalking their prey among the stars) with long, delightful episodes of sheer goofiness — including one about a miles-wide Trisolaran computer chip made up entirely of people in uniform, marching about, galloping up and down, frantically waving flags…<\/p>\n

A computer chip the size of a town! A nine-dimensional supercomputer the size of a proton! How on Earth does Liu build engaging stories from such baubles? Well, says Liu, you need a particular kind of audience — one for whom anything seems possible.
\n\u201cChina\u2019s developing really fast, and people are confronting opportunities and challenges that make them think about the future in a wildly imaginative and speculative way,\u201d he explains. \u201cWhen China\u2019s pace of development slows, its science fiction will change. It\u2019ll become more about people and their everyday experiences. It\u2019ll become more about economics and politics, less about physics and astronomy. The same has already happened to western sf.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, it\u2019s a moot point whether anything at all will be written by then. Liu reckons that within a generation or two, artificial intelligence will take care of all our entertainment needs. \u201cThe writers in Hollywood didn\u2019t strike over nothing,\u201d he observes. \u201cAll machine-made entertainment requires, alongside a few likely breakthroughs, is ever more data about what people write and consume and enjoy.\u201d Liu, who claims to have retired and to have no skin in this game any more, points to a recent Chinese effort, the AI-authored novel Land of Memories, which won second prize in a regional sf competition. \u201cI think I’m the final generation of writers who will create novels based purely on their own thinking, without the aid of artificial intelligence,\u201d he says. \u201cThe next generation will use AI as an always-on assistant. The generation after that won’t write.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps he\u2019s being mischievous (a strong and ever-present possibility). He may just be spinning some grand-sounding principle out of his own charmingly modest self-estimate. \u201cI\u2019m glad people like my work,\u201d he says, \u201cbut I doubt I\u2019ll be remembered even ten years from now. I’ve not written very much. And the imagination I’ve been able to bring to bear on my work is not exceptional.\u201d His list of influences is long. His father bought him Wells and Verne in translation. Much else, including Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury, required translating word for word with a dictionary. \u201cAs an sf writer, I\u2019m optimistic about our future,\u201d Liu says. \u201cThe resources in our solar system alone can feed about 100,000 planet Earths. Our future is potentially limitless — even within our current neighbourhood.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wrapping our heads around the scales involved is tricky, though. \u201cThe efforts countries are taking now to get off-world are definitely meaningful,\u201d he says, \u201cbut they\u2019re not very realistic. We have big ideas, and Elon Musk has some exciting propulsion technology, but the economic base for space exploration just isn\u2019t there. And this matters, because visiting neighbouring planets is a huge endeavour, one that makes the Apollo missions of the Sixties and Seventies look like a fast train ride.\u201d<\/p>\n

Underneath such measured optimism lurks a pessimistic view of our future on Earth. \u201cMore and more people are getting to the point where they\u2019re happy with what they\u2019ve got,\u201d he complains. \u201cThey\u2019re comfortable. They don\u2019t want to make any more progress. They don\u2019t want to push any harder. And yet the Earth is pretty messed up. If we don\u2019t get into space, soon we’re not going to have anywhere to live at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

The trouble with writing science fiction is that everyone expects you have an instant answer to everything. Back in June 2019, a New Yorker interviewer asked him what he thought of the Uighurs (he replied: a bunch of terrorists) and their treatment at the hands of the Chinese government (he replied: firm but fair). The following year some Republican senators in the US tried to shame Netflix into cancelling The Three-Body Problem. Netflix pointed out (with some force) that the show was Benioff and Weiss and Woo\u2019s baby, not Liu\u2019s. A more precious writer might have taken offence, but Liu thinks Netflix\u2019s response was spot-on. \u201c\u201cNeither Netflix nor I wanted to think about these issues together,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

And it doesn\u2019t do much good to spin his expression of mainstream public opinion in China (however much we deplore it) into some specious \u201cparroting [of] dangerous CCP propaganda\u201d. The Chinese state is monolithic, but it\u2019s not that monolithic — witness the popular success of Liu\u2019s own The Three Body Problem, in which a girl sees her father beaten to death by a fourteen-year-old Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution, grows embittered during what she expects will be a lifetime\u2019s state imprisonment, and goes on to betray the entire human race, telling the alien invaders, \u201cWe cannot save ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Liu has learned to be ameliatory. In a nod to Steven Pinker\u2019s 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature, he points out that while wars continue around the globe, the bloodshed generated by warfare has been declining for decades. He imagines a world of ever-growing moderation — even the eventual melting away of the nation state.<\/p>\n

When needled, he goes so far as to be realistic: \u201cNo system suits all. Governments are shaped by history, culture, the economy — it\u2019s pointless to argue that one system is better than another. The best you can hope for is that they each moderate whatever excesses they throw up. People are not and never have been free to do anything they want, and people’s idea of what constitutes freedom changes, depending on what emergency they\u2019re having to handle.\u201d<\/p>\n

And our biggest emergency right now? Liu picks the rise of artificial intelligence, not because our prospects are so obviously dismal (though killer robots are a worry), but because mismanaging AI would be humanity\u2019s biggest own goal ever: destroyed by the very technology that could have taken us to the stars!<\/p>\n

Ungoverned AI could quite easily drive a generation to rebel against technology itself. \u201cAI has been taking over lots of peoples’ jobs, and these aren\u2019t simple jobs, these are what highly educated people expected to spend lifetimes getting good at. The employment rate in China isn\u2019t so good right now. Couple that with badly managed roll-outs of AI, and you\u2019ve got frustration and chaos and people wanting to destroy the machines, just as they did at the beginning of the industrial revolution.\u201d<\/p>\n

Once again we find ourselves in a dark place. But then, what did you expect from a science fiction writer? They sparkle best in the dark. And for those who don\u2019t yet know his work, Liu is pleased, so far, with Netflix\u2019s version of his signature tale of interstellar terror, even if its westernisation does baffle him at times.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll these characters of mine that were scientists and engineers,\u201d he sighs. \u201cThey\u2019re all politicians now. What\u2019s that about?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Interviewing Cixin Liu for The Telegraph, 29 February 2024 Chinese writer Cixin Liu steeps his science fiction in disaster and misfortune, even as he insists he\u2019s just playing around with ideas. His seven novels and a clutch of short stories … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617,78,620],"tags":[551,197,822,86,287],"class_list":["post-3897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-reviews-and-opinion","category-reviews-and-opinion","category-screen","tag-china","tag-interview","tag-netflix","tag-science-fiction","tag-telegraph"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3897"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3897\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3898,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3897\/revisions\/3898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}