Chapters (20)

Translated by John Chu

Originally published as 梦之海 in 2017 by Asimov’s Science Fiction in New York.

“Cloud of Poems”

Translated by Carmen Yiling Yan

Originally published as 诗云 in 2003 by Science Fiction World in Chengdu.

“The Thinker”

Translated by John Chu

Originally published as 思想者 in 2003 by Science Fiction World in Chengdu.

By Cixin Liu

Title Page

Foreword

1. The Village Teacher

2. The Time Migration

3. 2018-04-01

4. Fire in the Earth

5. Contraction

6. Mirror

7. Ode to Joy

8. Full-Spectrum Barrage Jamming

9. Sea of Dreams

10. Cloud of Poems

11. The Thinker

About the Author

An Invitation from the Publisher

FOREWORD

TRANSLATED BY ADAM LANPHIER

This anthology includes more than ten of my short stories, most of which were published more than a decade ago. At that time, sci-fi was still a very marginal pursuit in China. The genre had few readers and was largely overlooked. In China, science fiction is seen as something foreign; its fundamental elements have never been a part of Chinese culture. Life has passed steadily, with few changes, from generation to generation over the course of China’s long history, so people unconsciously believe that life will be ever thus. Historically, the term “future” itself appeared mostly in Buddhist texts, which are also foreign; people have seldom thought about or paid attention to the future in their daily lives.

But in recent years, things have changed drastically. China has entered wholesale into a process of rapid modernization, and every day, all around us, there are stupefying changes. Suddenly, the future stands before us in vivid detail, and it exerts a huge appeal. Old China has suddenly become a nation with an extremely keen sense of the future. It is understandable why people, under such circumstances, would pay unprecedented attention to science fiction.

In Europe and the US, the question I’m asked most often is: “What makes Chinese science fiction Chinese?” For my part, I have never consciously or deliberately tried to make my sci-fi more Chinese. The stories in this anthology touch on a variety of sci-fi themes, but they all have something in common: They are about things that concern all of humanity, and the challenges and crises they depict are all things humanity faces together. In fact, when you read or make science fiction, your sympathy automatically moves away from ideas of ethnicity and nation and toward a higher idea of humanity as a whole; from this vantage, humanity naturally becomes a collective unit, rather than an assembly of different parts divided by ethnicity and nation. Even if the sci-fi you read or write tells a distinctly trivial, mundane, or personal story, you’ll still have this feeling. I believe this is one of the most valuable features of science fiction.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREWORD