Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 54

by John Joseph Adams

  “What did everything you talked about in there have to do with the military?”

  “War has everything to do with the army.”

  Wang looked around in the spring sun, baffled. “But where is this war? This is probably the most peaceful period in history.”

  Chang gave him an inscrutable smile. “You will know more soon. Everyone will know. Professor Wang, have you ever had anything happen to you that changed your life completely? Some event where afterward the world became a totally different place for you?”

  “No.”

  “Then your life has been fortunate. The world is full of unpredictable factors, yet you have never faced a crisis.”

  Wang turned over the words in his mind, still not understanding. “I think that’s true of most lives.”

  “Then most people have lived fortunately.”

  “But … many generations have lived in this plain manner.”

  “All fortunate.”

  Wang laughed, shaking his head. “I have to confess that I’m not feeling very sharp today. Are you suggesting that—”

  “Yes, the entire history of humankind has been fortunate. From the Stone Age till now, no real crisis has occurred. We’ve been very lucky. But if it’s all luck, then it has to end one day. Let me tell you: It’s ended. Prepare for the worst.”

  Wang wanted to ask more, but Chang shook his head and said goodbye, preventing any more questions.

  After Wang got into the car, the driver asked for his address. Wang gave it and asked, “Oh, were you the one who took me here? I thought it was the same type of car.”

  “No, it wasn’t me. I took Dr. Ding here.”

  Wang had a new idea. He asked the driver to take him to Ding’s address instead.

  Translation © 2014 by Cixin Liu and Ken Liu.

  Excerpted from The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu.

  Published by permission of Tor Books.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from Tor Books.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Cixin Liu is the most prolific and popular science fiction writer in the People’s Republic of China. Liu is an eight-time winner of the Galaxy Award (the Chinese Hugo) and a winner of the Nebula Award. Prior to becoming a writer, he worked as an engineer in a power plant in Yangquan, Shanxi.

  Ken Liu (translator) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He has won a Nebula, two Hugos, a World Fantasy Award, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award, and been nominated for the Sturgeon and the Locus Awards. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts. Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a fantasy series, will be published by Simon & Schuster’s new genre fiction imprint in 2015, along with a collection of short stories.

  NONFICTION

  Interview: Nick Harkaway

  The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

  Nick Harkaway is the author of The Gone-Away World and Angelmaker. His latest book, Tigerman, presents an unusual take on the idea of a costumed superhero.

  This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by David Barr Kirtley. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the host and his guests discuss various geeky topics.

  Your new book is called Tigerman. What’s it about?

  It’s about a lot of things. The plot is about a guy on an island who’s been sent there very specifically to relax and is told not to see any of the bad things that are happening there. He finds a friendship with a local kid who just wants him to see everything bad that’s happening there, so he has an immediate problem. His way of resolving this ultimately is to put on an ad hoc superhero suit and try to do something about it in a way that can’t be traced back to him. But it’s not ultimately just a story about a guy putting on a suit. It’s also about the friendship, and basically, it’s about fatherhood. I was becoming a dad when I was writing this book.

  When you say there are bad things, what sort of bad things are happening?

  What we’ve got is an island in the middle of the sea where the international community has decided there’s a kind of legal gap, and the island, in legal terms, doesn’t really exist. So all around has gathered a fleet of off-the-book shipping, which I call the Black Fleet, which involves data haven deniable port-centered interrogation rooms, and the kind of hospitals where you can get a kidney replaced, no questions asked, and you can even bring your own. It’s just full of all kinds of the worst things you could imagine. In fact, the thing I keep saying about it is [like] Mos Eisley—nowhere will you find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

  You mentioned the story concerns the friendship between this man, Lester Ferris, and the character who is referred to as “the boy.” Tell us a bit more about the boy.

  He’s a local kid. He’s apparently an orphan, or at least no one can put a hand on his parents, and he’s extremely bright. He’s obsessed with comic books and internet stuff. His English reflects that. He speaks exactly the kind of mixture that you get if you spend a few hours surfing.

  On the one hand, you’re reading a piece by Lawrence Lessig, and on the other hand, if you’re playing World of Warcraft at the same time, you can easily end up talking to a kid in Shanghai whose English is not great but who is incredibly enthusiastic and has picked up a raft of unusual idioms from different movies and comic books. That’s the boy. He’s got this extraordinary mixture of English, which I loved writing. I got incredibly enthusiastic about it. He’s one of the people I really enjoyed writing.

  Could you give us an example of the sort of things he would say?

  The thing that people keep quoting back to me is “full of win.” He uses “full of win” all the time. He uses a lot of leetspeak, which is kind of hard to do out loud; you can see it on the page. He talks about getting “pwned.” He sees everything in terms of movies and comics. Obviously, I’ve already referenced Star Wars, but part of his daily wear is a t-shirt that proclaims that Han shot first, which is a reference to the updated Star Wars movies where they fudge that slightly.

  For me, that’s a religious discussion. I remember seeing the movie and quite clearly Han Solo shoots Greedo under the table. That’s completely straightforward and then they fudged it later. He has this vocabulary and this concept set that comes from comic books and movies and games. He sees the world in those terms.

  As a big science fiction fan, I really enjoyed this idea that even in the most remote place on earth, you would be able to find a kid who knows what a Voight-Kampff test is.

  Exactly that. Someone for whom it is completely inconceivable, that someone wouldn’t know what a Voight-Kampff test is, like obviously everyone in the universe knows that.

  Did you have to do any research at all or were you just emptying your brain?

  No, I don’t think I did anything at all for that. I just remembered it all and I treasure it. I’m constantly picking out bits of language and so on like that, which I really like. And the one that I didn’t get in was that beautiful thing “tiny grass is dreaming,” which I just think is one of the most poetic things I’ve ever seen. I’m not even sure if it’s real. It’s supposed to be a sign on the grass somewhere in the world that’s obviously intended to mean “stay off the grass” or “the grass is growing” or something. But as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter what it’s supposed to mean, it just matters that it’s beautiful. I wanted those things in there, but that one doesn’t have a place in the book, so I’ll carry that around for a while and use it somewhere else.

  I saw a video where you said that your initial title for this was Tigerman Make Famous Victory Full of Win, and you said that you were going to win this battle with your publisher
this time.

  And then I didn’t.

  Apparently.

  What happened with that was very straightforward. I was reading the book through and looking at the title, and I was suddenly just very uncomfortable that if you hadn’t read the book yet, it was potentially superficially mocking of people who don’t speak great English. I thought that this was already a post-colonial story, and it’s about the British empire’s tail end, of the consequences of empire and how badly we behaved. Actually, it’s potentially un-funny if you offend someone. You’re taking the mickey out of people from other countries, and it wasn’t a discussion I wanted to get into. I was like, “Actually, you know what, forget it. Let’s just go with Tigerman as the title and people can find the great stuff inside the book.”

  The thing is, I always have this problem with titles. I work with a book for however long it takes to write it and I always give it a title, like Angelmaker was called “Crazy Joe” for however many years. The Gone-Away World was called “The Wages of Gonzo Lubitsch,” and when it comes to it, nobody wants to use the title that I think is the only obvious title in the universe. They’re always right.

  On the one hand, I get very entrenched because I get very attached to these titles. I still, in my head, tend to think of Angelmaker slightly as “Crazy Joe,” because that was the central character, and it was his story. There’s a desire to hold on to that past part. Heaven knows what the new book is going to end up being called, the one I’m writing now, because I have this really great title on the front page of the manuscript, but it’s completely incomprehensible. My editor’s going to go nuts, and he’s going to turn around and say, “Are you kidding? We’ll call this something that people can actually understand the first time they see the book, as opposed to having to read however many hundred pages to find out what the title means.”

  It’s obvious you’ve been a lifelong fan of science fiction and comic books and video games. Did you always want to write science fiction or did that develop later?

  I always wanted to tell stories. I don’t really care what kind of stories I end up telling. This is why every time one of my books comes out there is a brief classification tussle. There’s the whole “is this properly science fiction or is it something else?” The absolute question for the majority of people who read science fiction—Is this the kind of thing that they read?—but there is a taxonomical debate to be had about whether it’s classically science fiction. io9 called it “existential pulp,” which I love. I thought that was one of the best things I’ve ever heard. So I’m very determined now that I’m an existential pulp writer.

  The thing is, I go where the story takes me, and yes, obviously all the stuff is in my head, so everything I write tends to be mildly nuts, but I don’t set out to fulfill a shelving category. I set out to tell a story and I see where it ends up. This time, I think Tigerman, and actually Angelmaker as well, got reviewed in the thriller section rather than science fiction section in several papers. People make their own determinations and I’m good with that.

  I agree with that, although your first novel, The Gone-Away World, is pretty clearly science fiction by my definition.

  I would agree with you, but then, I got in big trouble with a couple of very academic thinkers about science fiction who were just like, “Well, clearly this isn’t science fiction, it’s blah blah blah. It shouldn’t be considered in that category.” I have no stomach for that fight. I don’t want to crash the party for anybody. All I want to do is tell a story. There are people who read lots of science fiction who read my stuff and are delighted by it. There are people who read lots of science fiction who (and thankfully there are few of these) read my stuff and hate it. Then there are people who, generally speaking, refuse to read science fiction in any way, shape, or form, because they think it’s spaceship fiction, and they see in their mind’s eye when they hear those words pictures of women in bikinis with goldfish bowls on their heads, and that’s science fiction, so they don’t read any science fiction, but they read me.

  It really is a shelving convention and that’s very useful in the context of being a bookshop, but it’s also not useful in terms of talking about books. I’m very content to be stuck in the middle, although I think some of the time my publishers wish I would write something that was a little bit more overtly recognizable, because it’s sometimes harder to sell a book that is less easy to characterize.

  Well, talk about existential pulp. Why do you like that term so much?

  Just because it sounds awesome. I guess because, in a weird way, actually, it’s very apposite, because it’s a mash-up of this very serious notion of existentialism and this kind of playful, ridiculous writing form that was about churning out the largest number of words possible with garish, lurid images in it and so on. The two don’t really go together, except that if you chop them up and mash them around, of course they go together. Both Angelmaker and Gone-Away World were filled with ontological angst and existence angst. Whether it’s existential or not is another question.

  Tigerman is definitely full of a sense of worry about what it means to be a dad and how to be a good person and all the rest of it. So it belongs in that category, and then, at the same time, my pulp roots are showing. Here’s all the serious stuff about global geopolitics and the bad ways we behave overseas, and about being a father and trying to do the right thing. How do you become a new person when your old life has come to an end? The answer is: You put on a superhero suit and you go fight crime.

  The thing is, though, that actually I would do dumber things than that for my kid if that was what they needed me to do. I think we all would. I get into this thing about the definition of “real.” There’s a big sense in mainstream writing, and particularly literary writing, that you have to be portraying a “real truth,” and there has to be a sense of reality. Indeed, there’s a dogmatic thing and a filmmaking thing, where you’re not supposed to use any artificial special effects, and you’re not supposed to use any lighting or makeup. So it should just be raw and real, and that’s the way it is.

  The thing is, to me, that’s an illusion, particularly in writing, because crazy things happen all the time. Completely mad things happen to ordinary people every day, and everybody has some kind of crazy story about something that has happened to them. When you go out into the world, you meet more and more people to whom weird things have happened.

  There’s a woman who has lunch everyday down the road from me—actually, I haven’t seen her for a while—and she operated a listening post during the Second World War, and when I say a listening post, I don’t mean a signals and deception station. She sat in front of a giant concrete parabolic sound mirror, and she listened for the sound of aircraft coming in over the sea. That was her job, night after night. She was terrified that she would cough and miss the sound of a bombing raid, and hundreds of people would die.

  So this was the extraordinary life that she lived, night after night, which if you write that, people think that’s burlesque. If you thanked her, and there was other stuff going on in her life—I’m sure she fell in love, I’m sure stuff was happening. That was all going on.

  At the same time, it turns out that actually, all those people who were listening to those things, certainly if we moved later into the war, that it was redundant because we had radar, which we weren’t telling anyone. That was a secret. Then the question would be, this woman on the south coast says she’s heard planes which we already knew about, is that enough that we can plausibly intercept those planes? Or are we going to blow the existence of radar if we do that and we have to let the planes bomb some village somewhere? The idea that the ordinary mind or the ordinary day doesn’t experience completely crazy stuff drives me nuts.

  My standard rant on “realistic fiction” is that the most fundamental fact about reality is that our sun is one of a hundred billion stars in the galaxy that’s just one of a hundred billion galaxies in the universe. This is just the most fundamental thing about r
eality, and you would never know it from reading “realistic fiction.”

  It’s quite interesting; it shows up in all kinds of ways. Most people generally, in their daily lives, do not address the fact that, actually, the world is not Newtonian. Most of us live in a kind of billiard ball world. Of course, the world zooms around in much stranger ways and time varies depending on your relative speed. People generally don’t get their heads around that. So yes, exactly.

  The world is just very much stranger than it appears, and then on a much more prosaic level, there are quite a lot of writers, who, for example, do not like mobile telephones. Not as in they don’t use them, but as in they don’t like writing about mobile telephones because they mess up the plot.

  Quite a lot of the time, you’re talking about an artificially constructed 1993, except with everything else being now. For me, a lot of novels that people think of as being “real” are actually basically alternative reality fiction designed to be in an a-technological world in order to get to something that is supposed to be fundamental. The thing that’s supposed to be fundamental is the human condition and the human emotional state, and that also exists only in the interaction with the world, and the world contains this technology, so you can’t do it honestly without discussing, on some level, accounting for technology. That reticence makes me cranky.

  Why do you think so many writers are reluctant to take that on? Is it just that they don’t know technology?

  I think a lot of writers are reluctant because it messes with plot. If you read Here and Now, the Paul Auster and JM Coetzee dialogues, which they conducted by fax, there’s a section where they address this, and Coetzee says, “I don’t like mobile phones, they mess up plotting, they make things more difficult, and they short circuit plot, and they bring people together to communicate and communication resolves conflict.” Which is true.

  Conflict, as my schoolteacher told me, is the heart of drama. Communication absolutely can resolve it, so that is a problem. Auster, meanwhile, does use technology in his stuff, so there’s a whole discussion on that. But the thing is, we’re talking about something that happens. It’s real. As soon as you say “I’d like to tell this as a real human story, but I won’t use this technology because it gets in the way of telling a real human story,” you’re in a very weird place for me.