Liu Cixin

Eleven short stories from China's greatest SF writer. Cixin Liu is China's bestselling science fiction author and one of the most important voices in world SF. His novel, The Three-Body Problem, was the first translated work of SF ever to win the Hugo Award. Here is the first collection of his short fiction: eleven stories, including five Chinese Galaxy Award-winners, form a blazingly original ode to planet earth, its pasts and its futures.

The Wandering Earth

Cixin Liu is China’s bestselling science fiction author and one of the most important voices in world SF. His novel, The Three-Body Problem, was the first translated work of SF ever to win the Hugo Award. Here is the first collection of his short fiction: eleven stories, including five Chinese Galaxy Award-winners, form a blazingly original ode to planet earth, its pasts and its futures.

Adam

I enjoyed it but am left feeling robbed of a full novel. Lots of shirt stories with no real endings, would be good if he turned each one into actual books.

Katie Chua

probably would've been more enjoyed if i separated them more but alas, i had nothing else with me in vancouver so i got through this one. as always, incredibly imaginative and fascinating...some stories stronger than others either in terms of ideas/science-fiction premises or even more literary reasons like character development or prose (could be the different translators too)

priya

3.5 stars overall.

As usual with a collection of short stories, some of the stories were amazing, some were good and some were boring. So I’m rating and reviewing each story separately.

The Wandering Earth 5 stars
Mind blowing. Incredible. This story set up my really high expectations for the rest of the book. I’m not going to spoil anything -it’s best to go in knowing nothing, just waiting to be amazed by how smart Liu is. I’m so glad this was the first story because it’s so imaginative!

Mountain 5 stars
Another super creative story. I really love this one because a l i e n s. It’s quite different to the first story and almost as good.

Sun of China 4 stars
This story was alright. It’s not very original, but it’s written in an epic style. I think it’s pretty wild that the Sun of China was written before China’s artificial moon was announced.

For the Benefit of Mankind 3 stars
This story was very strange. I can’t say I understood what was going on but all the different characters and cultures were entertaining!

Curse 5.0 4 stars
At the expense of sounding like a t3rrori$t, I think this story is hilarious! Liu inserts himself as a sci-fi writer who’s friends with another sci-fi author, Pan Dajiao. Pan writes in lighter style than Liu, but they’re both homeless. The technological advancement of the city is pretty generic/accepted, which makes the plot of Curse 5.0 really funny.

The Micro-Era 3 stars
As the name indicates, humanity lives in the micro-era in this story. Everything is at the microscopic scale, including humans, spaceships and units of measurement. The Micro-Era is told from the perspective of a normal-sized or macro-era human. I found it a bit boring honestly. 

Devourer 2 stars
This story made no sense to me. The passage of time, aliens, the devourer, dirt?? none of that worked. I don’t really know anything except it’s a pre-apocalypse and post-apocalypse kind of story.

Taking Care of God 4 stars
The title pretty much tells you what this story is about. It’s fantastical and sad.

With Her Eyes 3 stars
This story isn’t very unique. It’s a cool concept that normalises space travel, but it’s been done before.

Cannonball 1 star
I skimmed through this one. It was mindnumbingly boring. The concept was honestly really cool, except it was written really badly. It was pretty much was an info dump of engineering that gave you no opportunity to actually understand the world or the character’s interests.

Bradford Fults

This book made me feel frustrated and a bit ill.

Super weird, for sure, and as with other Liu works, it tests concepts far beyond what nearly all other authors would even dare. But my subjective experience reading this book wasn't great—it felt…wrong—probably for exactly the reasons that it's challenging and unique fiction. Being human in this world would be very…different, if we're avoiding spoilers.

Shantesh Patil

One of the best collections of scifi stories I have ever read. A triumph of imagination and creativity, as well a brilliant portrayal of how humanity could be affected by the future.

Dani

** spoiler alert **
           Super recommended, haven’t read this sci-fi in a while, a lot of destruction, as the author himself notices, but many messages of hope all around.

NOW A #1 BLOCKBUSTING FILM. The Sun is dying. Earth will perish too, consumed by the star in its final death throes. But rather than abandon their planet, humanity builds 12,000 mountainous fusion engines to propel the Earth out of orbit and onto a centuries-long voyage to Proxima Centaurai... Cixin Liu is one of the most important voices in world Science Fiction. A bestseller in China, his novel, The Three-Body Problem, was the first translated work of SF ever to win the Hugo Award. Here is the first collection of his short fiction: ten stories, including five Chinese Galaxy Award-winners. This collection's title story, The Wandering Earth, is the biggest SF movie ever to come out of China – taking the world's #1 box office ranking in February 2019. Liu's writing takes the reader to the edge of the universe and the end of time, to meet stranger fates than we could have ever imagined. With a melancholic and keen understanding of human nature, Liu's stories show humanity's attempts to reason, navigate and, above all, survive in a desolate cosmos. 'Cixin's trilogy is SF in the grand style, a galaxy-spanning, ideas-rich narrative of invasion and war' GUARDIAN. 'Wildly imaginative, really interesting ... The scope of it was immense' BARACK OBAMA, 44th President of the United States.

Bryan Alexander

A delightful collection of imaginative science fiction. 

Each story in The Wandering Earth is a cascade of ideas. Liu Cixin starts each one with a concept, which then leads to another, and then a third, and on. He's not shy about yanking a narrative sideways into another world, then circling back to the start to ring changes. Most of the stories feature embedded stories.

The stories have a large emotional range, from joy to tragedy, civilizational disaster to triumph. Generically all are recognizable as science fiction, but touch on other genres and tones, including crime and satire. (For the latter, Cixin mocks himself as a character in one story.)

These are very political stories - not in the sense of urging a point of view upon the reader, but as studies of how humans act together, especially in the face of huge challenges and scientific developments. Well, I take that back. One story openly celebrates workers and ordinary people becoming heroes in space in terms of anti-elitism. 

Several topes run through the stories deeply, even to the point of being shared world tales. Cixin focuses on disaster coming from the skies, either through alien incursions or solar catastrophe. Balancing this is a focus on heading underground, even to (and through) the Earth's center. Several stories involve dinosaurs. And size is an issue, with arguments about the importance of smallness and the fragility yet awesomeness of gigantism.

I wish I could read Chinese, and also be more sensitive to details of current Chinese culture and politics, so that I could suss out some of the references and resonances. For example, in one story the Earth becomes a gigantic spacecraft, dotted with enormous rockets. At one point only the "eastern" and "Asian" rockets succeed. Should I read this as a nationalist statement? The aforementioned tale about ordinary workers becoming space heroes: does this fit squarely with the Communist Party line today, or is it satirical? One character is noted for his "proverbial Asian cool"; is that prideful or mocking? I can't tell the meaning of Chinese language names... and neither can I assess the translation's quality. Each story is quite readable.

One interesting note for the future of education: in "The Wages of Humanity" we learn of a planet that invents a way to teach people through direct brain stimulation. Interestingly, the process is so expensive that it remains the province of the elite.

Recommended for anyone interested in science fiction or contemporary China.

Ilja Panic

Erik Pavletic

Mehul Srivastava

Sang Park

Wei-Meng Lee

From New York Times bestselling author Cixin Liu, The Wandering Earth is a science fiction short story collection featuring the title tale--the basis for the blockbuster international film, now streaming on Netflix. These eleven stories, including five Chinese Galaxy Award-winners, are a blazingly original ode to planet Earth, its pasts, and its futures. Liu's fiction takes the reader to the edge of the universe and the end of time, to meet stranger fates than we could have ever imagined. With a melancholic and keen understanding of human nature, Liu's stories show humanity's attempts to reason, navigate, and above all, survive in a desolate cosmos.

The Wandering Earth

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