In China, the new generation’s way of thinking is changing dramatically. They are gradually turning their eyes away from the reality of their immediate environment and the mundanities of life toward the distant, starry sky and the future. More and more, they are beginning to see themselves as members of humankind, not merely as Chinese people. They are also beginning to care about those ultimate questions that their forebears seldom considered: where humans and the universe came from, and where they’re going. This change in their thinking will profoundly affect China’s future and even the future of humanity. The science fiction stories in this book are a vivid expression of this new way of thinking.

Yet I am also Chinese, and, whether by design or not, these stories will inevitably have a strong Chinese flavor, imbued with the culture, history, and present reality of China.

In creating sci-fi, I always try hard to imagine and describe the relationship between the Great and the Small.

“The Small” refers here to human smallness. As individuals, we are small indeed, and collectively, humanity is small, too. Imagine a concert attended by all of humanity. How big a venue would you need? Not as big as I’d imagined—a space about as large as Shanghai’s Pudong District would suffice. Here’s another perverse thought experiment: If you were to make a meatball out of humankind, its diameter would be less than a kilometer.

“The Great” refers, of course, to the universe. Every person has a deep sense of its enormity. The most distant light we see was sent out over ten billion years ago. If you shrank the solar system to the size of a dinner plate, the diameter of a correspondingly shrunken Milky Way would still be one hundred thousand kilometers.

In my sci-fi, I challenge myself to imagine the relationship between Small people and the Great universe—not in the metaphysical sense of philosophy, nor as when someone looks up at the starry sky and feels such sentiment and pathos that their views on human life and the universe change. Stories about such relationships between people and the universe are not science fiction; they are realism. In my sci-fi, I work to imagine the direct, tangible relationship between people and the universe. In this relationship, the evolution and metamorphoses of the universe are inseparable from human life and human fate.