Words matter. These are the best Liu Cixin Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
In my youth, when I tried to plan for the future, I had wished to be an engineer so I could get work with technology while writing sci-fi after hours. I figured that if I got lucky, I could then turn into a full-time writer.
For about 30 years, I stayed in the same department and worked the same job, which was rare among people of my age. I chose this path because it allowed me to work on my fiction.
The earth’s crust is very thin but the planet can act as a spaceship if a force or energy powerful enough was exerted on it, to eject it from the solar system. But its mantle and core may leak due to inertia, causing the planet to disintegrate.
A bright future may be what humanity aspires to achieve but it’s far easier to talk about conflicts that play out in dark and pessimistic settings.
I did not begin writing for love of literature. I did so for love of science.
Science fiction stories reflect major issues that concern humanity.
To be honest, before the American publication of ‘The Three-Body Problem’, I prepared myself for the possibility of uniformly negative reviews.
My own family went through its own difficulties in the Cultural Revolution, perhaps in a milder form than many other people.
In the century-long history of Chinese science fiction, apocalyptic themes were mostly absent. This was especially true in the period before the 1990s, when Chinese science fiction, isolated from the influence of the West, developed on its own.
I am a conventional science fiction author. But that said, once your work is published, it no longer belongs to you. It belongs to the readers and they will derive all sorts of interpretations.
Like most genres of literary expression, science fiction in China was subject to instrumentalist impulses and had to serve practical goals.
The main difficulty is finding an idea that really excites me. We live in an age when miracles are no longer miracles, and science and the future are losing their sense of mystery. For science fiction, or at least the type of science fiction I write, this development is almost fatal, but I’m still giving it all I’ve got.
In the Chinese subconscious, the universe exists on a timeline that extends into the future without end, and also without change.
Science fiction is not a genre that has much respect in China. Critics have long been discouraged from paying attention to the category, dismissed as a branch of juvenile literature.
I’m absolutely positive about human survival. We will continue to develop our civilisation and expand not just on Earth, but also across the solar system, the galaxy, even the entire universe.
Sci-fi novels are concerned with problems faced by all of humanity. Crises in sci-fi mostly threaten humanity as a whole. This is a unique and treasurable trait inherent in the genre – that the human race is perceived as a single entity, undivided.
After the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, science fiction became a tool for popularizing scientific knowledge, and its main intended readers were children.
As a science fiction fan, the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award mean a lot to me.
I do think that science fiction ideas are best expressed through visual media like film and TV. Realist literature depicts things that we have seen in life, but science fiction is different: what it depicts exists only in the author’s imagination. When it comes to science fiction, the written word is inadequate.
I’m a writer. I don’t begin with some conceit in mind. I’m just trying to tell a good story.
There’s nothing special or memorable about me. I always blend into any crowd.
China lacks good science fiction, but not mediocre science fiction. Even so, the gap between Chinese and American sci-fi is still very large and it is most apparent in quality of the works.
In high school and college, I started to read more and write science fiction myself. I was fully engaged in writing in the 1990s.
Humans are selfish, and because of our innate selfishness, I’m very confident that we can overcome any amount of environmental destruction.
It’s not hard to read parallels between the Trisolarans and imperialist designs on China, driven by hunger for resources and fear of being wiped out.
