by Cixin Liu
Before migrating here, I lived beside the railroad tracks, and every night I was tormented by nightmares in which I was running through the wilderness in the dark surrounded by terrifying noises—floods, earthquakes, the howls of hordes of giant beasts, the thunder of nuclear bombs. And then one night, I awoke with a start from that nightmare and dashed to the window. No stars, no moon, only the Rose Nebula shining over the land, and a night train making its slow passage. Can one do research at a theoretic level in such a state? No, we lack the dispassionate detachment that theoretic research requires. It will need to wait until there’s enough distance between the early Supernova Era and the researchers, which may leave it in the hands of the next generation. All our generation can do is descriptive writing, giving our descendants records of the period from the perspective of eyewitnesses and of historians. That is all that superhistory can do for the time being, in my opinion.
But even this isn’t easy. My initial approach was to write from the perspective of an ordinary individual, making the book feel more like a novel, and deal with high-level national and world developments by incorporating quotations from source documents. But I am a historian, not a litterateur, and have not a drop of literary talent in a huge ocean. And so I went the other way, depicting the national leadership directly and incorporating details about the experiences of ordinary people as quotations. Most of the child leaders from that time are no longer in their posts, giving them plenty of time to take my interviews, and as a result I have written what Liu Jing calls an “unclassifiable” book.
*
“Daddy Daddy, come quick! It’s going to get cold outside soon!” Jingjing shouts, rapping on the window. His face is pressed up against the glass, squishing his nose to one side. In the distance the strange, isolated peaks cast long shadows across the red sands. The sun is going down. Of course it’s going to get cold.
*
But I am, after all, a historian, and I can’t help but do my job. The study of superhistory is currently concentrated in a debate over a few key questions, a debate that has spilled over into the media, where it has only become more sensationalized. However, far fewer serious superhistorians than laypeople have put forth opinions, and so I will take this opportunity to explain my position on a few of the hottest topics.
Dating the start of the Supernova Era. There are two extreme positions on this question, one holding that the era began with the supernova blast, reasoning that a universal symbol carries the most authority for the start of an era. This clearly is untenable, since while human calendars may be tied to cosmic symbols, eras are only marked in history. The second position holds that the era did not begin until the start of the Great Migration, which doesn’t hold up because prior to the migration, or even prior to the Supernova War, history had already progressed away from the Common Era model. The starting point I find most appropriate is the extinguishing of the Epoch Clock. Although critics may point out that the Common Era model still held then, there is an inertia to history, and you can’t, say, argue that the whole world became Christian at the birth of Jesus. In both historical and philosophical significance, the Epoch Clock is inarguably a highly meaningful symbol.
The success or failure of the use at the close of the Common Era of country simulations as a means of selecting child leaders, and in particular whether this was legal. I don’t want to comment too much on this issue, since those who believe this method to be unacceptable have not to this day come up with any better solution, much less in those grim days when every country was on the verge of extinction. There are many self-opinionated people in the field of history these days, and the best way to clue them in is to make them walk a train rail set between two tall buildings.
Whether the goal of the world war games was play or a fight for Antarctica. It’s hard to answer this question now with an adult mind. In Presupernova war, politics, economics, nationalism, and religion blended into one and are hard to tease apart; so too with the Antarctic Games. In the children’s world, play and national politics were inseparable, two sides of the same coin. This ties into the next issue:
The strategies of the Chinese and American children in the Supernova War. It has been proposed that the substantial military advantage commanded by the American children meant they would have easily occupied Antarctica in a conventional war. In such a war, the American children could have used their navy to break the enemies’ sea transport lines, making it impossible for any other country to send troops to the continent. This notion displays a basic ignorance of world politics and considers the Supernova Era world from a shallow, Common Era geopolitical view. Its proponents fail to understand a fundamental rule of world politics: the balance of power principle. In such a situation, the other countries would have immediately set up alliances, and any group counting China, Russia, the EU, and Japan among its members would be powerful enough to stand against the US. The resulting world order would be little different from that of the war games, except that countries would be exchanged for alliances, and politics would have a slightly more Common Era feel to them.
Whether the Great Migration was a historical inevitability. This is a profound question. After the exchange of Chinese and American territory, children from other countries joined in the game—Russia swapping with the countries of South America, and Japan with the Middle East—and then it swept the globe as the main driver of postwar world history, essentially performing a hard reformat of global geopolitics. Regrettably, this extremely worthy subject has not yet been studied in any depth; interest remains focused on the outcome of the migration. And no wonder: people are always more interested in the unexpected, which the consequences of the Great Migration certainly were. Before it began, children came up with various possible outcomes, sometimes from the minds of great thinkers and strategists like Vaughn and Specs, but more often from ordinary people. But time proved all of these predictions incorrect. The actual outcome took everyone by surprise, and was beyond the boldest imagination of any of the children of that period . . .
“Daddy Daddy, come out! Didn’t you promise to look at the blue planet with us? It’s about to come up!”
With a sigh I put down my pen, realizing that once again I’ve unconsciously started into a futile theoretical discussion. And so I decide to end it here. I stand up and go out onto the lawn. The sun is almost below the horizon, and the Rose Nebula is getting light.
“God, the sky’s clean!” I exclaim. The motionless, filthy clouds you used to see every time you went out have vanished, and the sky is a pure, pale red.
“You just noticed? It’s been a week already!” Verené says, tugging at Jingjing.
“Didn’t the government say it couldn’t afford to clean the safety dome?”
“It was volunteers! I went too. I cleaned four hundred square meters!” Jingjing says proudly.
I look up at the top of the dome two thousand meters high, where people are scrubbing away the last of the dirt, looking like so many black dots against the bright blue backdrop of the nebula.
It’s gotten cold, and it’s starting to snow. The verdant grass underfoot, the red sands outside the bubble, the glittering Rose Nebula out in space, and the swirling white snowflakes paint an intoxicatingly gorgeous picture.
“They never get the right adjustments to the climate-control system,” Verené says.
“It’ll get better. Everything’s going to get better . . .” I say from my heart.
“Come up! Come up!” Jingjing cries.
Over the eastern horizon a blue planet rises like a sapphire set into the pale red veil of the sky.
“Dad, is that where we came from?” Jingjing asks.
I nod. “That’s right.”
“And our grandparents still live there?”
“Yes. They’ve always lived there.”
“Is that Earth?”
Looking at the Earth is like staring into my mother’s pupil, and tears swim in my eyes as I choke out, “That’s right, my child. That�
��s Earth.”
Afterword
My home lies more than six hundred miles from Beijing, and for at least three decades the journey by train took over seven hours. One day a few years ago, however, I bought a ticket on a futuristic, streamlined high-speed train that had a top speed of 300 kilometers per hour, and I gaped in wonder at the unfamiliar scenery flying by, since the train was traveling a brand new route. The whole trip ended in Beijing just two hours later. A high-speed rail line had appeared on the outskirts of my city, but as for when ground had been broken, and when construction had been completed, I was totally unaware. It was as if it had come into being overnight. Along its journey the train had passed through a tunnel, spending a full ten minutes at nearly two hundred kilometers per hour in what I later learned was the country’s longest rail tunnel. I can remember back to my childhood, and how the digging of the country’s longest rail tunnel (probably not even a tenth the length of this new one) was a huge national news story. Now it doesn’t even make an impression.
That’s how fast China is changing.
Countless tall buildings, hypermarkets, and factories spring up like magic all around you. But the biggest changes are invisible: a wired China is expanding rapidly, and people spend at least half, if not more, of their personal lives online. They interact socially, purchase practically every good imaginable from Taobao up to and including hamsters, and huge groups of them can make their opinions and requests known directly online for events large and small, forming a powerful force of public opinion that is overwhelming traditional media and is rapidly becoming a major determiner of China’s future. The scene in Supernova Era where the internet and a quantum computer facilitate a national dialogue has already basically come to pass in China. The other day I went to Xiong’an New Area in Baoding and visited a brand new city under construction where the supermarkets have no attendants, the hotels are unstaffed, and the vast majority of the cars on the streets are driverless. AI has replaced humanity.
China used to have no sense of the future. In our subconscious, today was the same as yesterday, and tomorrow was going to be the same as today. The future as a concept doesn’t really appear in traditional Chinese culture.
But today, “futuristic” is the most salient impression one gets from China. With everything changing at a blinding pace, a breathtaking future rises like the sun from the horizon, fully compelling, yet suffused with terrifying uncertainty and danger. This provides fertile ground to science fiction, which has been thrust suddenly into the spotlight from its former position on the margins in China; today even a non-governmental science fiction convention can boast the attendance of a national vice president.
The first draft of Supernova Era was written thirty years ago. One night that year when I was in Beijing on a work trip, I had a dream: a limitless expanse of snow, whipped up by the wind into a ground blizzard, and an object—perhaps the sun or a star—glowing with a blinding blue light that painted the sky an eerie color between purple and green. And beneath that dim glow, a formation of children advanced across the snowy ground, white scarves wrapped around their heads, rifles fitted with gleaming bayonets, singing some unrecognizable song as they moved forward in unison. . . . When I recall the horror of that grim scene it still gives me palpitations. I awoke in a cold sweat and couldn’t get back to sleep, and that’s when the germ of the idea for Supernova Era first took shape.
Back then, if someone had predicted China as it is today, thirty years later, even I, a science fiction writer, would have found it hard to believe.
Nevertheless, the novel accurately depicts the reaction of Chinese people today in the face of a world that’s brand-new and getting newer every day, the reaction to a time when old faiths and supports collapsed before new ones could be erected: utter confusion. Or more correctly, this is the reaction of the middle-aged and elderly—people like myself. China’s new generation is wholly integrated into this new world as native inhabitants of the information age. They are deft users of the internet with no need for instruction, and have quickly adopted it as an inseparable external organ. To them, this is the way the world ought to be, and change is a matter of course; put them in the world of the novel, and they’d adapt to reality even more readily once the adults depart.
Fear of abandonment is an eternal human constant. In the dark, you advance slowly in a particular direction holding hands with your mom and dad, and even though you can’t see them, those two hands keep your soul firmly anchored. All of a sudden they let go, and you grope helplessly around for them in the darkness, and you scream in desperation, but the infinite blackness swallows up your voice. . . . It’s a dream that everyone probably had in their childhood, something every child fears.
And it is also the greatest fear of humanity as a whole, a terror deeply rooted in human civilization, one that occupies a key place in our spiritual life. Staring into the endless darkness of the cosmos, humanity futilely grasps for a pair of nonexistent hands, but we have so far been unable to find any signs of other intelligent civilizations from our vantage point on a planet that’s no more than a speck of dust in outer space, even as the gods of religion grow ever harder to make out. And therefore our world today is already that of the children in the novel: humanity is an orphan unable to find its parents’ hands, its mind full of terror and confusion even as sparks of naivete and unruliness flicker into flame. . . . We may not even be as lucky as those children, since in our course of study there is no one to instruct us.
With that in mind, the story told in this novel is a fairly unremarkable one.
About the Authors
CIXIN LIU is China’s #1 SF writer and author of The Three-Body Problem – the first ever translated novel to win a Hugo Award. Prior to becoming a writer, Liu worked as an engineer in a power plant in Yangquan.
JOEL MARTINSEN is the translator of The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu and (with Alice Xin Liu) of The Problem With Me, a collection of essays by Han Han. His translations of short fiction have appeared in Pathlight, Chutzpah, and Words Without Borders. He lives in Beijing.
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