The car moves forward, the writer Liu Cixin, 60, is sitting in the back seat, outside you can see the landscape of a tropical island in southern China where he has come to try to unblock his creative block.
He says that years ago, when he was invited to Barcelona to present his best-known novel,
The Three-Body Problem,
they installed him in a hotel inspired by
2001: A Space Odyssey
.
It is one of his favorite movies.
In the recent
Barbie,
he adds by surprise, there is a reinterpretation of the scene of the primates and the monolith, that stone of extraterrestrial origin that appears in the key moments of humanity and marks an evolutionary leap: it gives the apes human intelligence, one clan prevails over another thanks to a bone—the first weapon—and the hominid throws it into the air and it merges, millions of years later, with a spaceship that sails through space while Richard Strauss's symphonic poem plays
. Zarathustra spoke.
Life, one could argue, is made up of similar leaps, sparks of innovation that accelerate existence.
In Liu Cixin's, this monolith appeared in the early eighties of the last century.
He was around 20 years old when the first translations of Arthur C. Clarke arrived in China, including
2001…,
the novel that inspired Stanley Kubrick's film.
For years, science fiction had been persecuted, but after the death of Mao Zedong a period of opening began, the excesses and intellectual persecutions of the Cultural Revolution were left behind and the genre landed on a giant that began its own odyssey.
That night in the eighties, when he finished reading the book, he left the house and looked at the stars.
“For the first time in my life, I was amazed by the magnitude and mystery of our universe,” Liu said in 2018, in his acceptance speech for the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Foundation award for imagination in the service of society, in Washington.
By then, his fame was already global.
Thanks to the English translation of
The Three-Body Problem,
the first volume of the
Remembrance of the Earth's Past trilogy,
in 2015 he became the first Asian to win the Hugo Prize, considered the Nobel Prize for science fiction.
He had begun publishing it in installments in 2006. He arrived in the United States in 2014 and among his admirers were people of the stature of Barack Obama — “Wildly imaginative,” the former president told The
New York Times
—.
In 2018, a tough battle broke out to acquire the rights to the adaptation of his work, which Liu had divested in 2010 for a small sum.
The struggle has been of such caliber that it includes the alleged murder by poisoning in Shanghai of the Chinese tycoon who acquired the intellectual property years ago.
The Financial Times
assured that Amazon was willing to pay about $1 billion to turn his trilogy into a series.
It was Netflix that managed to close an agreement for an amount that has not been revealed.
This past March 21, the platform premiered the series
The Three-Body Problem
,
whose version is by the creators of
Game of Thrones
and is one of the probable global fiction phenomena of the coming years, which will project even more to the author of a work that has sold more than 11 million copies in the world (7 million in China) and has been translated into more than 30 languages.
Liu Cixin at the World Science Fiction Convention in October 2023 in Chengdu.Wang Lei (China News Service / G
And yet, what worries Liu is this creative drought that has gripped him for years.
He has not published anything new since he finished the third part of
The Three Bodies in 2011,
he says, already sitting on an outdoor terrace, enveloped in the smell of grilled fish and seafood.
From the table you can see a row of palm trees backlit and the golden sunset mirrors over the waters.
It's Wednesday, January 31 in Sanya, a resort city on the island of Hainan.
The Chinese New Year is approaching, it's vacation time, a lively giggle reigns.
Steaming plates arrive at the table, which he will insist on paying for.
At night, someone will light a flare next to the shore, while a woman livens up the evening with Chinese folk songs.
—Aren't you writing anything right now?
—Lately, writing is incredibly difficult for me.
Several books I have started have ended up abandoned halfway through.
For me originality is crucial.
It's one of the most significant joys of my writing process: creating new and unexpected ideas.
But, in this day and age, having original ideas is increasingly difficult.
With rapid dissemination through the Internet, a brilliant concept can become known quickly.
This makes writing science fiction novels like mine quite a challenge.
Liu conceives writing as that great single idea around which a story is articulated.
Often, the genesis starts from abstract concepts or scientific theories.
He studied at the Department of Hydropower Engineering at North China University of Water Resources and Electric Power and worked until 2010 as a computer engineer at a power plant in Yangquan, mining province of Shanxi.
Many of his stories, which he began publishing in the late 1990s, were conceived while working;
He ordered them mentally and then wrote them down at the end of the day.
The three-body problem
arises from an unsolved enigma in physics: how to determine the position of three bodies subjected to mutual gravitational attraction?
He wondered what would happen if these three objects were three suns: it would give rise to an unstable civilization in need of constant technological leaps to survive.
This is the other key leg that supports his stories: the survival drive.
In the Netflix adaptation, the plot of 'The Three Body Problem' has been moved to the United Kingdom.Wei Liang (China News Service /
This cocktail generates a plot that exceeds 1,600 pages in the Spanish translation (published by the Nova publishing house) and covers a timeline of millions of years.
Liu places humanity under the threat of an alien invasion and poses the classic clash between civilizations.
The extraterrestrial, called Trisolaris, seeks to flee an uninhabitable planet and conquer ours.
But her journey to Earth is long, it will take about 450 years, which gives the Earthling civilization, which knows her plans, a chance to prepare.
At the center is the scientific race of our species to develop in time a weapon capable of deterring the aggressor, as technologically superior as a human can be compared to an ant.
Meanwhile, Trisolaris will try to contain scientific advances by sending microscopic-sized supercomputers to Earth.
In the novels there are nanomaterials, travel at the speed of light, folds of dimensions and battles in the stars, but there is always a geostrategic chess between the lines inspired by the theory of mutual assured destruction that governed the planet in times of the Cold War. .
Reading it also awakens parallels with the great geopolitical struggle of our era, that of China and the United States.
At times, the novel's context is strikingly similar to this world in a phase of deglobalization, in which Beijing tries to catch up with the United States, while Washington imposes restrictions on China's access to technology and tools critical for the manufacture of cutting-edge semiconductors to avoid their use in advanced weapons systems…
Liu assures that any resemblance to reality is mere coincidence.
He considers himself a “pure” science fiction author, interested in “creating an imagined world that no one else has invented.”
He does not seek to draw allegories or criticize reality.
How his writings are interpreted is something he cannot control, he says.
The series lands in any case in a 2024 marked by global tensions.
Liu slips that he has seen some episodes;
the adaptation is “very interesting”;
the special effects, “impressive”.
But he is convinced that he will not be liked in China.
Along the way, the “strong Chinese cultural atmosphere” of his books has been dropped, the action has been moved to the United Kingdom, and the protagonists are not Chinese either.
Netflix has designed the product for a global audience, but without counting on the People's Republic, where it has no business.
The series will not be seen in this country, unless one jumps over the great wall of the Internet using illegal technological tools.
Viewers in the country will have to settle for the Chinese version of the series, released in 2023.
The author also does not plan to travel to the United States for any promotional events and finds it difficult to accept interviews with Western media because, he says, it is a “sensitive” topic.
In 2020, a group of US senators demanded that Netflix cancel production due to the opinions that the author had expressed, in an interview, about Xinjiang, a region of China where the UN considers that Beijing could be committing crimes against humanity against humanity. Uyghur minority.
Liu justified Beijing's position and defended the current state in terms of freedoms: “If the country were to loosen up a little, the consequences would be terrifying,” he said in
The New Yorker.
He adds on the terrace: “If China did not have the current government organization, it would be in a more chaotic situation.”
And he believes that “in terms of democratic civilization, China has progressed a lot,” compared to his youth, when “a single word could endanger lives.”
As he sees it: “After the pandemic, the world situation has become more divided and confrontational between countries and between East and West, unlike the previous era of globalization.
This environment has made several aspects become more sensitive.
Young people often ask me if the world is going backwards.
Actually, I think it's back to a normal state.
Most of my life, from childhood to adulthood, has passed in this normal state.
Instead, I feel that the last 30 years were abnormal.
It was abnormal for things to go in a positive direction.
Now, I really feel like we're back to the kind of state I experienced until my 20s or 30s.”
Liu often talks about those hard times.
The Cold War, tensions with the Soviet Union and the nuclear threat were joined by hunger and intellectual persecution.
His parents were sent to work in a mine in a region crossed by the fights between factions of the Cultural Revolution;
He was sent to the family village in a rural area, where electricity did not reach until 1980. He lived through episodes that marked him, such as the launch of the first Chinese satellite into space in 1970 or the floods of 1975, which left at least 150,000 dead.
He began writing science fiction in high school, continued doing so in college and then at work, without managing to publish anything for almost two decades.
But that changed at the end of the nineties, when he received a call from the magazine
El mundo de la Ciencia Fiction,
interested in his stories.
Filming of 'The Three Body Problem', new Netflix series.Netflix
The genre was experiencing a “vibrant atmosphere” at the end of the millennium, and this “prompted” the author “to resume writing,” recalls Yao Haijun, director of that publication, born in 1978 and today a reference for the genre in China.
Yao met Liu in 2000. He recalls his shyness and vast knowledge of him.
“His mind was filled with countless intriguing ideas.”
The magazine had already published two of his stories.
Reading them, Yao recalls, “was an overwhelming experience.”
“I was impressed by the grand, quirky worlds he imagined.”
“His work had a distinctive and dazzling quality that set him apart from other authors.”
He became its editor, and remains so today, many years later.
His stories began to win awards.
She published his first novels as the Asian giant recorded meteoric growth figures.
In 2006, she started the serial edition of
The Three-Body Problem
in the aforementioned magazine.
The rise of the genre and China ran in parallel.
According to Liu, it is no coincidence: “Science fiction literature can only produce influential works in rapidly developing countries,” she says.
“The genre was born in Great Britain, about 200 years ago;
When the British Empire declined and the United States rose, he moved to this country.
“In the same way, the attention that Chinese science fiction attracts today is related to the rapid process of social modernization.”
The degrees of censorship have also varied.
If science fiction was previously persecuted in China for being a source of “spiritual pollution,” today the Communist Party considers it a tool aligned with its interests.
The film
The Wandering Earth
(2019), based on a story by Liu, has been one of the highest grossing films in the country's history.
Once, a senior official confessed to the writer why the Government supported the genre: “Science fiction has a strong innovative character and is useful for China to consolidate itself as an innovative country.”
Even so, Liu's novels contain political and moral concepts whose reading takes on special force in his country.
The starting point of
The Three Bodies
takes place in the Cultural Revolution and narrates episodes of unusual violence (in the Chinese edition, these passages were placed in the center to avoid censorship).
Sometimes, it seems that the author expresses critical ideas through fiction.
In the second volume of the trilogy, during an interstellar flight, the military debate the type of system with which they should govern themselves.
Some opt for a dictatorship.
Another replies: “Historical facts […] demonstrate that a totalitarian system is the greatest barrier to human progress.”
They seem to be encrypted messages, which of course he denies, just as one of the protagonists does when the time comes: it is about a human who has been sent to live with the aliens.
He will earn your approval because he becomes a fabulous storyteller.
He publishes dozens of stories on that planet that delight the extraterrestrials.
They seem like harmless fantasies.
But these hide “double-layered” metaphors that escape alien censorship, and serve to alert humans of imminent dangers.
Liu meditates a lot on what he writes.
Read, investigate, make plans for it.
The act of putting words together is the least important thing.
Lately, he says, he studies the relationship between religion and technology.
There, he confesses, are the plots of the novel with which he hopes to end years of drought.
“What form will the religion of the future take, especially when artificial intelligence has been developed to a certain extent?
It's an interesting question."
The writer believes that AI will mean a much more profound change than the Industrial Revolution.
“It is replacing the most basic and fundamental capabilities of humans.”
It will focus on high and low-skilled jobs;
The writing job has “about five years left.”
It will require social adaptation and reform of the distribution system;
work could cease to be the necessary means to obtain vital resources and a social unrest could occur greater than the Luddite movement against the machines of the 18th century.
He then describes, through an allegory, the scenario of a higher-than-human AI: there are only a dozen adults left in the world, and these are governed by a much larger number of three-year-old children.
“Can the little ones govern and control those few adults?”
The children are us.
And he believes the answer is no.
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