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A View from the Stars, by Cixin Liu
All, this was another book passed onto me by our local bookseller to gather my thoughts. So here they are in this forum too. A View from the Stars is slightly unusual in that it's a mixture of (over half) essays and (under half) short story fiction. The essays are a mix of informal blog articles and more structured interviews or formal articles. The whole thing is intended to showcase Cixin Liu's changing thoughts and ideas over the course of his writing career.
Oddly, I found the articles more varied and far more interesting than the short stories, and IMHO the book would have benefited by making it more purely an ideas forum. The stories were too short to really go anywhere, and tended to be heavy-handed and pedantic rather than creative and provocative in the way that say Three Body Problem is. I don't think this is just a translation issue as a fair number of different people were involved in translation. So I'll ignore those.
So the interest value of the articles was partly as a window into his own thinking, and also one into broader Chinese thought and social pressure. (I don't personally agree with all his points, but they are fascinating to read and well argued). He repeats several times how during his life Chinese SF has twice come close to extinction, and only survived as a kind of undercover interest until things changed again. The second of these low points (in the late 70s and early 80s) was at a time when Chinese SF had broadened to include a lot of fantasy elements, and these in particular attracted high-profile criticism, to the extent of being called "spiritual pollution".
A couple of specific opinions
At one stage he argues that "classic literature" - by which he doesn't just mean written-some-time-ago but rather, written in the classical mode - has an entirely different aesthetic from science fiction, and one shouldn't attempt to make comparisons. Both can have a quality he calls "poeticness" but it arises from different kinds of interactions within the stories, and he considers it extremely hard to blend the two.. He also reckons that all SF is inherently transient and any particular story will cease to have relevance in only a few years, whereas classic literature has a chance of being timeless.
A direct quote: "of all the unexpected things that might interrupt Chinese science fiction's development, social unrest has to be the most worrying... science fiction is the product of leisurely and carefree minds... Only when our lives are stable and quiet can we allow the universe's catastrophes to fascinate and awe us. If we already live in an environment full of danger, then science fiction won't interest us." Again, I'm not sure I agree as regards the West, but it did (obviously) make me wonder on the impact on SF and speculative fiction in general of the current world conditions.
He describes his own trajectory as going "from paranoia to tolerance, from fanaticism to sobriety", and also being willing to enlarge his own view of what SF can offer. He personally is very committed to hard SF and the acceptance of the limitations of physical laws (so eg no faster-than-light travel) and in his early days, so far as he was concerned, that was the whole of SF. Over the years he has come to accept and appreciate the inclusion of other branches of SF, though I don't think he'll be writing that way himself. So far as I can tell, his own conviction is that SF is fundamentally about relationships between people and the universe, rather than people and people, and (I suspect) this is why fantasy has faced more rejection in China... it's easier to pass SF off as supportive of scientific and technological progress (even if in fact a particularly book challenges this) as opposed to fantasy which is much more easily seen as escapist and critical of present society.
All in all an interesting and unusual book which I'm vey glad to have read
Comments
I'm sure there is scope for that - he casually mentions in one article that a magazine, Science Fiction World,
Regarding your comment
I think that's fair - he read Jules Verne at an early age, quotes from classics such as Asimov, Clarke and Bradbury, and alludes to other media productions such as Star Wars and Star Trek, but I haven't spotted any references to recent SF writers in the west. It's not clear to me that he travels much (or wants to travel) outside China, but then with such variety of scenery and audience within the country maybe there's little motive to?
And also
Again, fair - and my impression would be that he doesn't do so. For example, I think most of Ursula LeGuin's SF books, like the Hainish Cycle, would make his cut (as it were) as there's enough sciency stuff in them for his taste, but I don't think Always Coming Home would. He seems quite strict and quite literal in his understanding of what SF "ought to be".
Another great point - Liu didn't tackle this in the nonfiction parts of this book. However, my impression from his fiction is that while he would accept that scientific advance can result in problems, the answer is better science and social change to accommodate this. So for example in Three Body Problem the superior science of the Trisolarans is a problem for Earth, but only because our own scientific advance has been a) blocked by the Trisolarans and b) hampered by social / religious changes that encourage Earth's population to just give up on the effort.
So I guess for him, science is part of the environment/context and hence couldn't be considered the villain, and (again a guess) he would find it difficult to relate to readers actively turning away from a positive view of science.
> (Quote)
> ... my impression from his fiction is that while he would accept that scientific advance can result in problems, the answer is better science and social change to accommodate this. So for example in Three Body Problem the superior science of the Trisolarans is a problem for Earth, but only because our own scientific advance has been a) blocked by the Trisolarans and b) hampered by social / religious changes that encourage Earth's population to just give up on the effort.
>
So he kind of thinks of science like followers of Abraham's tradition think of God: He can be the cause of problems, e.g. book of Job, but the solution is more God.
I guess I should try to read this.
Edit: Fixed some formatting with the quote, added last sentence.
Can't fix quote problem.
Picked this up from the library this weekend and will give it a read.
I enjoyed this book as well, and @RichardAbbott you did a good job hitting on many of the main points that were of interest to me.
While I felt like his discussion on other SF works were a little "surface level", it's really hard to be too critical of that since he would have need to have found readily accessible translated works for anything he was going to read.
I thought the weakest part of the book was his futurism chapter where he was quick to lead out with how unlikely his ideas were (using the Olympics as a way to wage wars, as opposed to actual wars for example) but then he said at the end that these ideas WILL happen if technology progresses as it is - which I found an odd bookend to his earlier statements.
His statement that "modernity can produce only fairy tales, and never myths" is one that I have to think more on.
Overall I felt like his short stories summed up well my feelings on his writing. Strong on ideas but weak on writing. As mentioned earlier, I am unsure it can be entirely placed on translation either.
The best story I read was actually a different story by Ken Liu that he referenced, called 'Mono no aware" which I thought was brilliant. I can see why Cixin speaks highly of his writing.