TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE
TRANSLATED BY ADAM LANPHIER
Written September 21, 2015, in Yangquan, Shanxi
First published by Sichuan Science and Technology Press in January 2016 as a preface to The Worst of All Possible Universes and the Best of All Possible Earths: Liu Cixin’s Sci-Fi Reviews and Essays
It was a sweltering evening more than forty years ago. My family and I lived in a bungalow without electric fans, and it would be more than ten years before anyone had an air conditioner or television set—those may as well have been sci-fi technology. The adults were all outside, fanning themselves and chatting; I was alone in the house, sweating and reading. The book was the first work of sci-fi I’d ever read: Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. My rapture was interrupted when someone snatched the book from my hands. It was my father. I was a bit nervous, because a few days before that he’d caught me reading Red Crag. He had scolded me and confiscated the book. (It’s hard for people to imagine today, but back then, even red, revolutionary literature like Red Crag and Song of Youth was forbidden.) This time, however, my father said nothing. He just silently handed the book back to me. As I was impatiently preparing to reenter Verne’s world, my father, who, last I’d checked, had been leaving the room, stopped at the door, turned his head, and said, “It’s called science fiction.”
That was the first time I heard the term that would shape my life. (It would be ten years before the abbreviation “sci-fi” appeared.) I can clearly recall my surprise—I’d thought it was a true story! Verne’s writing was so realistic, and a significant portion of the many editions of Journey to the Center of the Earth that were published in China before the Cultural Revolution weren’t labeled as science fiction on the cover, including the copy I was reading.
“This is all fantasy?” I asked.
“Yes, but it’s based in science.”
That simple, three-line exchange established the core concept that would later guide me as a writer of sci-fi.
I’ve previously named 1999, the year I had my first work published, as the year I began writing sci-fi. In truth, my creative journey began two decades before that. I wrote my first work of sci-fi in 1978. It was a short story about aliens visiting Earth. At the end, the aliens give the main character a gift: a little, squishy blob of some sort of membrane, small enough to hold in one hand. They tell him it’s a balloon. He takes it home and blows it up, first with his mouth, then with a bicycle pump, then with a high-powered blower, and it expands into an enormous city, bigger than Beijing. I sent the manuscript to New Port, a literary publication based in Tianjin, and I may as well have thrown it into the old port, as I never heard back.
I wrote intermittently in the twenty years before “Whale Song” was published, with long breaks between my active periods. The traditional conception of sci-fi, as embodied in that three-line conversation with my father, had come under scrutiny as early as the beginning of the eighties and then was abandoned soon thereafter. The following decade, especially, saw a huge influx of new ideas, and Chinese sci-fi soaked them up like a sponge. And yet I felt as if I were standing solitary guard over a forlorn frontier, wandering in an empty wilderness, happening occasionally upon an overgrown ruin. To this day, that feeling of isolation is fresh in my mind. When things got hardest, I started to think strategically about my work. I wrote China 2185 and Supernova Era hoping I could win publication with these, but deep down, I was still standing guard over that frontier. I subsequently gave up on long-form novels, returning instead to short stories and my own notion of what science fiction should be.
After I began publishing my work in Science Fiction World, I was delighted to discover that the frontier wasn’t as barren as I’d thought. There were other people there, too, and the only reason we hadn’t encountered each other was that I hadn’t been perseverant enough in calling out to them. I went on to discover that there were no small number of people there. They appeared in droves, and, as I came to learn, they weren’t only in China, but were in the US, too—a legion that together holds up a piece of sci-fi’s sky, and held up my writing for the fifteen years that followed.
Sci-fi literature occupies an unusual position in China. As a genre, it is, by far, the subject of more theoretical thought, the target of deeper research and analysis, and the bearer of more new ideas and concepts than any other form of literature. Some topics have remained under debate for thirty or forty years, while new topics and issues constantly emerge and are subjected to research and discussion. No one cares more about theories and ideas than we do, and no one is more afraid of falling behind the vanguard of the times. And something strange has happened as a result.
In the month since I won the Hugo Award, I’ve had chances to talk sci-fi with people from all walks of life: the vice president of China, the mayor of my city, high school teachers, my daughter’s classmates, traffic police, delivery boys, my neighborhood butcher with his pig heads … and in doing so, I’ve come to feel this strange thing more keenly.
What we in the community and in academia mean when we say “sci-fi” and what laypeople mean when they say it are more or less two different things.
On the one side, there are the hundreds of us in the sci-fi community; on the other, there are the pig head sellers, delivery boys, traffic police, daughters’ classmates, high school teachers, mayors, and vice presidents, who number roughly 1.3 billion. Which side is wrong? I’ll be honest—I really don’t think it’s us, though faced with such numbers, it’s hard to say so with much confidence.
A famous author once said that classic literature, as represented by Tolstoy and Balzac, is a wall, built brick by brick, while modern and postmodern literature are a ladder that goes straight to the top.
This aptly describes the mindset of the sci-fi community, as well. We’re always thinking about how to vault over the last thing, such that we forget that some things can’t be skipped. They must be experienced. Our childhoods and youths, for instance—it’s impossible to skip these parts of our lives and go straight to adulthood. As for sci-fi literature, we need that wall of bricks; without it, we’ll have nowhere to prop up our ladders.
This collection* contains most of my nonfiction essays from the latter fifteen of my thirty-odd years as a writer of sci-fi. I wrote no essays about the genre in the twenty years before that, and there’s not even a passing mention of it in my diaries from that time.
A trajectory emerges from these essays, taken together—a shift from paranoia to tolerance, from fanaticism to sobriety. I came to realize that there are many kinds of sci-fi, and I learned that a work of sci-fi might contain no science. Sci-fi can turn its gaze from outer space and the future toward mundane reality; it can even focus solely on one’s own interior life. Each kind of sci-fi exists for a reason, and a classic of the genre might come from any of them.
Even so, the concept underlying that short exchange with my father is a boulder in my heart. I still believe it to be the basis for sci-fi literature’s existence. This, too, is what all these essays are trying to express.
Though it’s been afoot for a hundred years, Chinese science fiction is just getting started. The years ahead beckon to us. There’s time enough for love.
Copyright © 2024 by 刘慈欣 (Cixin Liu)
