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定义刘慈欣——中国文化与人类进步
约书亚·罗斯曼 《纽约客》编辑
时间：2015-03-10
上周，北京大学的天文学家宣布发现了质量为120亿个太阳的黑洞。该黑洞在宇宙大爆炸9亿年后形成，在距离地球128亿光年的类星体中，其光度(即发光能力)为太阳的420万亿倍，可以在地球上通过望远镜观测看到。“在如此年轻的宇宙中怎么会有如此巨大的黑洞？”研究团队的负责人吴学兵教授在《自然》杂志上问到。“我们目前还没有一个令人满意的理论来解释。”
看到了这些科学新发现，我联想到了刘慈欣，他是中国最受欢迎的科幻作家。他现年51岁，已经发表了13部著作。不久之前，他还是山西娘子关电厂的软件工程师。他在中国的知名度相当于美国之威廉·吉布森(美国著名科幻作家)；他被人比作亚瑟·克拉克(英国著名科幻作家、发明家)，刘慈欣受到了亚瑟·克拉克的影响。他最著名的小说《三体》，已经被美国科幻作家Ken Liu翻译成了英文。中国的《三体》电影已经开拍。刘慈欣的写作唤起了探索的刺激和宏观的美景。“在我的想象中，光年表达使抽象的宇宙距离和直径变得具体形象，激发敬畏”。在小说中，比太阳重120亿倍的黑洞可能是由中国工程师建造的。他们已经建造了10亿年，随后中国宇宙飞船飞遍了宇宙。
刘慈欣屡获中国科幻界最高奖项银河奖，图为2013年颁奖现场照片
美国科幻小说着重描写美国文化，当然包括独立战争、西部狂野、悲观主义、六十年致幻剂等等，人类想象的未来多少有些像美国的过去。作为一名美国读者，在阅读刘慈欣的小说时，乐趣之一就是他用于故事刻画的资源完全不同。
小说《三体》的大部分背景处于文化大革命年代。在《赡养人类》一书中，来自太空的访客要求地球财富再分配，并解释说失控的资本主义几乎摧毁了他们的文明。在《赡养上帝》一书中，十亿年前创造生命的超先进的外星人，再次登陆地球，柱着拐杖的白胡子小老头从太空飞船中走出来。“我们希望你们会孝顺和尊重你们的创造者”他们说道。我怀疑没有任何西方科幻作家会如此深入探讨关于孝敬的主题。
并非文化差异造就了刘写作的与众不同。他的故事是人类进步的寓言——抽象而又是具体的想象，甚至像是寓言故事。
在他的短篇《中国太阳》里，主角一个是来自干旱贫困乡村的小伙子阿全(Ah Quan)。在前三章节，阿全走出乡村在矿上找到了工作；他又来到了一个大城市，他在那里学会了擦皮鞋，而后又来到北京，当摩天大厦的外墙玻璃清洗工。然后故事出现了大转变。
我们发现这是在未来：中国已经在太空构建了一面非常巨大的镜子，被称作“中国太阳”，用它来调节气候。阿全得到了一个清洗中国太阳表面的工作。原来斯蒂芬·霍金正生活在轨道上，微重力可以延长他的生命；霍金和阿全成为了好朋友，还一起太空行走。(霍金坐在电子轮椅车上穿着安装有微电机的宇航服，可以像正常人一样活动，”刘写到。)物理学家向工人传授了物理定律，讲述了宇宙的浩瀚，而阿全开始为人类的命运而思考：我们应该去探索星球，还是在地球上生存和死亡？不久之后，他告别亲友，开始了探索星际的单程之旅。在故事的最后，阿全的进步是代表全人类的。他已经走过了巨大的社会和物质距离，但与未来的旅程相比是相形见绌的。
刘的故事并不总是这么温柔。在人类的想象里，他的甜蜜浪漫是与残酷现实相制约的。在《流浪地球》中，科学家发现太阳即将膨胀成一颗红巨星。作为回应，他们建造了巨大的引擎将整个地球推向另一个恒星——“大迁移”将持续上百代，期间地表的一切将被全部摧毁。看着致命的太阳衰落并转化成一颗星星，领导人大声疾呼，“地球，我的流浪地球！”这个故事提示了一个离谱的项目——我们要确保人类的长期生存。
“在遥远的未来，人类通过宇宙生存并传播文明，人类必须创建超大尺度技术奇迹，”刘告诉我。
我相信科学技术能带来光明的未来，旅程一定充满艰难险阻，必然会付出高昂的代价。其中一些艰难险阻和代价会非常恐怖可怕，但在最后，我们的地球将会到达阳光明媚的彼岸。让我们援引中国著名诗人徐志摩上世纪初游历苏联后所写的一首诗，“他们相信天堂是有的，可以实现的，但在现世界与那天堂的中间隔着一座海，一座血污海。人类泅得过这血海，才能登彼岸，他们决定先实现那血海。”
但终点在哪里？人类无法保存一切；《三体》三部曲的最后一部，部分剧情设定在宇宙的热死亡阶段。刘的故事从两个视角观察，从为生存的强烈挣扎到有限的局限调整。
在他的作品中，我最喜欢的是《山》——短篇小说集《流浪地球》中的一篇，现在已有英文版。文中以登山来隐喻这个矛盾。“攀登是智慧生命的本质，”跨维度的外星探索者解释道。但宇宙是如此神秘，“我们总是在山脚下”，我们永远不可能登顶。在另一个故事里，一个角色“吞噬者”问道：“什么是文明？文明就是吞噬，不停地吞噬，无穷地延伸。”但你不能永远延伸；另一个角色建议，去建立一个“自给自足的内在文明”，也许这会更好些。
《三体》三部曲封面
刘的感悟的核心，简要地说，是对有关限制问题的哲学兴趣。我们如何应对固有生活的局限性？我们应该与之抗争还是默许？
“一切都结束了，”刘在他的电邮中说道，“对‘什么是必然’的阐述，不应被视作一种悲观形式。以浪漫故事为例：‘恋人们从此过上了幸福生活’被认为是喜剧故事。但当你加上了一个结尾，‘百年之后，他们都死了’，这就变成了悲剧？只有科幻小说可以描写‘百年之后’的浩瀚宇宙。”
（原载于《纽约客》，煎蛋网“人一”译，部分文字转载时有改动）
MARCH 6, 2015
China’s Arthur C. Clarke
BY JOSHUA ROTHMAN
In Liu Cixin’s novels, a black hole with the mass of twelve billion suns is the sort of thing that Chinese engineers might build.CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY NASA VIA GETTY
Last week, a team of astronomers at Peking University announced the discovery of a gigantic black hole with a mass equivalent to twelve billion suns. The black hole formed near the beginning of time, just nine hundred million years after the Big Bang. It’s twelve billion light years away, but, because the quasar surrounding it glows four hundred and twenty trillion times brighter than the sun, it’s still visible to telescopes on Earth. “How could we have this massive black hole when the universe was so young?” Xue-Bing Wu, the lead astronomer, asked, in a paper published in Nature. “We don’t currently have a satisfactory theory to explain it.”
Reading about these developments, I thought of Liu Cixin, China’s most popular science-fiction writer. Liu is fifty-one years old and has written thirteen books. Until very recently, he worked as a software engineer at a power plant in Shanxi. In China, he is about as famous as William Gibson in the United States; he’s often compared to Arthur C. Clarke, whom he cites as an influence. His most popular book, “The Three-Body Problem,” has just been translatedinto English by the American sci-fi writer Ken Liu, and in China it’s being made into a movie, along with its sequels. (If you Google it, beware: there are some big plot twists that you don’t want spoiled.) Liu Cixin’s writing evokes the thrill of exploration and the beauty of scale. “In my imagination,” he told me, in an e-mail translated by Ken Liu, “abstract concepts like the distance marked by a light-year or the diameter of the universe become concrete images that inspire awe.” In his novels, a black hole with the mass of twelve billion suns is the sort of thing that Chinese engineers might build. They’d do it a billion years from now, after China’s spaceships have spread throughout the universe.
American science fiction draws heavily on American culture, of course—the war for independence, the Wild West, film noir, sixties psychedelia—and so humanity’s imagined future often looks a lot like America’s past. For an American reader, one of the pleasures of reading Liu is that his stories draw on entirely different resources. Much of “The Three-Body Problem” is set during the Cultural Revolution. In “The Wages of Humanity,” visitors from space demand the redistribution of Earth’s wealth, and explain that runaway capitalism almost destroyed their civilization. In “Taking Care of Gods,” the hyper-advanced aliens who, billions of years ago, engineered life on Earth descend from their spaceships; they turn out to be little old men with canes and long, white beards. “We hope that you will feel a sense of filial duty towards your creators and take us in,” they say. I doubt that any Western sci-fi writer has so thoroughly explored the theme of filial piety.
But it’s not cultural difference that makes Liu’s writing extraordinary. His stories are fables about human progress—concretely imagined but abstract, even parable-like, in their sweep. Take the novella “Sun of China,” which follows Ah Quan, a young man from a rural village that has been impoverished by drought. In the first three chapters, Ah Quan sets out from the village and finds work in a mine; he travels to a regional city, where he learns to shine shoes, and moves to Beijing, where he works as a skyscraper-scaling window-washer. Then the story takes a turn. We discover that it’s the future: China has constructed a huge mirror in space called the China Sun, and is using it to engineer the climate. Ah Quan gets a job cleaning the reflective surface of the China Sun. It turns out that Stephen Hawking is living in orbit, where the low gravity has helped to prolong his life; Hawking and Ah Quan become friends and go on space walks together. (“It was probably his experience operating an electric wheelchair that allowed him to control the miniature engine of his spacesuit as well as anyone,” Liu writes.) The physicist teaches the worker about the laws of physics and about the vastness of the universe, and Ah Quan’s mind begins to dwell on the question of humanity’s fate: Will we explore the stars, or live and die on Earth? Soon afterward, he is saying goodbye to his parents and setting out on a one-way mission to explore interstellar space. By the end of the story, Ah Quan’s progress is representative of humanity’s. He has traversed an enormous social and material distance, but it pales in comparison to the journey ahead.
Liu’s stories aren’t always so tender; in imagining the human future, his romantic sweetness is balanced with harsh objectivity. In “The Wandering Earth,” scientists discover that the sun is about to swell into a red giant. In response, they build enormous engines capable of pushing the entire planet toward another star—an “exodus” that will last a hundred generations, during which everything on the surface will be destroyed. Watching the deadly sun recede and transform into a star like any other, the protagonist cries out, “Earth, oh my wandering Earth!” And yet the story suggests that this is just the sort of outrageous project we’ll need in order to insure humanity’s long-term survival.
heat-death of the universe. Liu’s stories see life from two angles, as both a titanic struggle for survival and as a circumscribed exercise in finitude. In my favorite of his stories, “The Mountain”—it’s available in English in a short-fiction collection called “The Wandering Earth”—mountain climbing is proposed as a metaphor for this contradiction. “It is the nature of intelligent life to climb mountains,” interdimensional alien explorers explain. But the universe is so unknowable that “we are all always at the foot,” and will never reach the peak. In another story, “The Devourer,” a character asks, “What is civilization? Civilization is devouring, ceaselessly eating, endlessly expanding.” But you can’t expand forever; perhaps it would be better, another character suggests, to establish a “self-sufficient, introspective civilization.” At the core of Liu’s sensibility, in short, is a philosophical interest in the problem of limits. How should we react to the inherent limitations of life? Should we push against them or acquiesce?
“Everything ends,” Liu said, in his e-mail, “and describing what is inevitable should not be viewed as a form of pessimism. Take the example of a romantic tale: ‘The lovers lived happily ever after’ would clearly be viewed as an optimistic story. But if you add a coda—‘A hundred years later, they were both dead’—does that turn the story pessimistic? Only science fiction can go as far as ‘a hundred years later’ at the scale of the universe.”
约书亚·罗斯曼 《纽约客》编辑
时间：2015-03-10
上周，北京大学的天文学家宣布发现了质量为120亿个太阳的黑洞。该黑洞在宇宙大爆炸9亿年后形成，在距离地球128亿光年的类星体中，其光度(即发光能力)为太阳的420万亿倍，可以在地球上通过望远镜观测看到。“在如此年轻的宇宙中怎么会有如此巨大的黑洞？”研究团队的负责人吴学兵教授在《自然》杂志上问到。“我们目前还没有一个令人满意的理论来解释。”
看到了这些科学新发现，我联想到了刘慈欣，他是中国最受欢迎的科幻作家。他现年51岁，已经发表了13部著作。不久之前，他还是山西娘子关电厂的软件工程师。他在中国的知名度相当于美国之威廉·吉布森(美国著名科幻作家)；他被人比作亚瑟·克拉克(英国著名科幻作家、发明家)，刘慈欣受到了亚瑟·克拉克的影响。他最著名的小说《三体》，已经被美国科幻作家Ken Liu翻译成了英文。中国的《三体》电影已经开拍。刘慈欣的写作唤起了探索的刺激和宏观的美景。“在我的想象中，光年表达使抽象的宇宙距离和直径变得具体形象，激发敬畏”。在小说中，比太阳重120亿倍的黑洞可能是由中国工程师建造的。他们已经建造了10亿年，随后中国宇宙飞船飞遍了宇宙。
刘慈欣屡获中国科幻界最高奖项银河奖，图为2013年颁奖现场照片
美国科幻小说着重描写美国文化，当然包括独立战争、西部狂野、悲观主义、六十年致幻剂等等，人类想象的未来多少有些像美国的过去。作为一名美国读者，在阅读刘慈欣的小说时，乐趣之一就是他用于故事刻画的资源完全不同。
小说《三体》的大部分背景处于文化大革命年代。在《赡养人类》一书中，来自太空的访客要求地球财富再分配，并解释说失控的资本主义几乎摧毁了他们的文明。在《赡养上帝》一书中，十亿年前创造生命的超先进的外星人，再次登陆地球，柱着拐杖的白胡子小老头从太空飞船中走出来。“我们希望你们会孝顺和尊重你们的创造者”他们说道。我怀疑没有任何西方科幻作家会如此深入探讨关于孝敬的主题。
并非文化差异造就了刘写作的与众不同。他的故事是人类进步的寓言——抽象而又是具体的想象，甚至像是寓言故事。
在他的短篇《中国太阳》里，主角一个是来自干旱贫困乡村的小伙子阿全(Ah Quan)。在前三章节，阿全走出乡村在矿上找到了工作；他又来到了一个大城市，他在那里学会了擦皮鞋，而后又来到北京，当摩天大厦的外墙玻璃清洗工。然后故事出现了大转变。
我们发现这是在未来：中国已经在太空构建了一面非常巨大的镜子，被称作“中国太阳”，用它来调节气候。阿全得到了一个清洗中国太阳表面的工作。原来斯蒂芬·霍金正生活在轨道上，微重力可以延长他的生命；霍金和阿全成为了好朋友，还一起太空行走。(霍金坐在电子轮椅车上穿着安装有微电机的宇航服，可以像正常人一样活动，”刘写到。)物理学家向工人传授了物理定律，讲述了宇宙的浩瀚，而阿全开始为人类的命运而思考：我们应该去探索星球，还是在地球上生存和死亡？不久之后，他告别亲友，开始了探索星际的单程之旅。在故事的最后，阿全的进步是代表全人类的。他已经走过了巨大的社会和物质距离，但与未来的旅程相比是相形见绌的。
刘的故事并不总是这么温柔。在人类的想象里，他的甜蜜浪漫是与残酷现实相制约的。在《流浪地球》中，科学家发现太阳即将膨胀成一颗红巨星。作为回应，他们建造了巨大的引擎将整个地球推向另一个恒星——“大迁移”将持续上百代，期间地表的一切将被全部摧毁。看着致命的太阳衰落并转化成一颗星星，领导人大声疾呼，“地球，我的流浪地球！”这个故事提示了一个离谱的项目——我们要确保人类的长期生存。
“在遥远的未来，人类通过宇宙生存并传播文明，人类必须创建超大尺度技术奇迹，”刘告诉我。
我相信科学技术能带来光明的未来，旅程一定充满艰难险阻，必然会付出高昂的代价。其中一些艰难险阻和代价会非常恐怖可怕，但在最后，我们的地球将会到达阳光明媚的彼岸。让我们援引中国著名诗人徐志摩上世纪初游历苏联后所写的一首诗，“他们相信天堂是有的，可以实现的，但在现世界与那天堂的中间隔着一座海，一座血污海。人类泅得过这血海，才能登彼岸，他们决定先实现那血海。”
但终点在哪里？人类无法保存一切；《三体》三部曲的最后一部，部分剧情设定在宇宙的热死亡阶段。刘的故事从两个视角观察，从为生存的强烈挣扎到有限的局限调整。
在他的作品中，我最喜欢的是《山》——短篇小说集《流浪地球》中的一篇，现在已有英文版。文中以登山来隐喻这个矛盾。“攀登是智慧生命的本质，”跨维度的外星探索者解释道。但宇宙是如此神秘，“我们总是在山脚下”，我们永远不可能登顶。在另一个故事里，一个角色“吞噬者”问道：“什么是文明？文明就是吞噬，不停地吞噬，无穷地延伸。”但你不能永远延伸；另一个角色建议，去建立一个“自给自足的内在文明”，也许这会更好些。
《三体》三部曲封面
刘的感悟的核心，简要地说，是对有关限制问题的哲学兴趣。我们如何应对固有生活的局限性？我们应该与之抗争还是默许？
“一切都结束了，”刘在他的电邮中说道，“对‘什么是必然’的阐述，不应被视作一种悲观形式。以浪漫故事为例：‘恋人们从此过上了幸福生活’被认为是喜剧故事。但当你加上了一个结尾，‘百年之后，他们都死了’，这就变成了悲剧？只有科幻小说可以描写‘百年之后’的浩瀚宇宙。”
（原载于《纽约客》，煎蛋网“人一”译，部分文字转载时有改动）
MARCH 6, 2015
China’s Arthur C. Clarke
BY JOSHUA ROTHMAN
In Liu Cixin’s novels, a black hole with the mass of twelve billion suns is the sort of thing that Chinese engineers might build.CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY NASA VIA GETTY
Last week, a team of astronomers at Peking University announced the discovery of a gigantic black hole with a mass equivalent to twelve billion suns. The black hole formed near the beginning of time, just nine hundred million years after the Big Bang. It’s twelve billion light years away, but, because the quasar surrounding it glows four hundred and twenty trillion times brighter than the sun, it’s still visible to telescopes on Earth. “How could we have this massive black hole when the universe was so young?” Xue-Bing Wu, the lead astronomer, asked, in a paper published in Nature. “We don’t currently have a satisfactory theory to explain it.”
Reading about these developments, I thought of Liu Cixin, China’s most popular science-fiction writer. Liu is fifty-one years old and has written thirteen books. Until very recently, he worked as a software engineer at a power plant in Shanxi. In China, he is about as famous as William Gibson in the United States; he’s often compared to Arthur C. Clarke, whom he cites as an influence. His most popular book, “The Three-Body Problem,” has just been translatedinto English by the American sci-fi writer Ken Liu, and in China it’s being made into a movie, along with its sequels. (If you Google it, beware: there are some big plot twists that you don’t want spoiled.) Liu Cixin’s writing evokes the thrill of exploration and the beauty of scale. “In my imagination,” he told me, in an e-mail translated by Ken Liu, “abstract concepts like the distance marked by a light-year or the diameter of the universe become concrete images that inspire awe.” In his novels, a black hole with the mass of twelve billion suns is the sort of thing that Chinese engineers might build. They’d do it a billion years from now, after China’s spaceships have spread throughout the universe.
American science fiction draws heavily on American culture, of course—the war for independence, the Wild West, film noir, sixties psychedelia—and so humanity’s imagined future often looks a lot like America’s past. For an American reader, one of the pleasures of reading Liu is that his stories draw on entirely different resources. Much of “The Three-Body Problem” is set during the Cultural Revolution. In “The Wages of Humanity,” visitors from space demand the redistribution of Earth’s wealth, and explain that runaway capitalism almost destroyed their civilization. In “Taking Care of Gods,” the hyper-advanced aliens who, billions of years ago, engineered life on Earth descend from their spaceships; they turn out to be little old men with canes and long, white beards. “We hope that you will feel a sense of filial duty towards your creators and take us in,” they say. I doubt that any Western sci-fi writer has so thoroughly explored the theme of filial piety.
But it’s not cultural difference that makes Liu’s writing extraordinary. His stories are fables about human progress—concretely imagined but abstract, even parable-like, in their sweep. Take the novella “Sun of China,” which follows Ah Quan, a young man from a rural village that has been impoverished by drought. In the first three chapters, Ah Quan sets out from the village and finds work in a mine; he travels to a regional city, where he learns to shine shoes, and moves to Beijing, where he works as a skyscraper-scaling window-washer. Then the story takes a turn. We discover that it’s the future: China has constructed a huge mirror in space called the China Sun, and is using it to engineer the climate. Ah Quan gets a job cleaning the reflective surface of the China Sun. It turns out that Stephen Hawking is living in orbit, where the low gravity has helped to prolong his life; Hawking and Ah Quan become friends and go on space walks together. (“It was probably his experience operating an electric wheelchair that allowed him to control the miniature engine of his spacesuit as well as anyone,” Liu writes.) The physicist teaches the worker about the laws of physics and about the vastness of the universe, and Ah Quan’s mind begins to dwell on the question of humanity’s fate: Will we explore the stars, or live and die on Earth? Soon afterward, he is saying goodbye to his parents and setting out on a one-way mission to explore interstellar space. By the end of the story, Ah Quan’s progress is representative of humanity’s. He has traversed an enormous social and material distance, but it pales in comparison to the journey ahead.
Liu’s stories aren’t always so tender; in imagining the human future, his romantic sweetness is balanced with harsh objectivity. In “The Wandering Earth,” scientists discover that the sun is about to swell into a red giant. In response, they build enormous engines capable of pushing the entire planet toward another star—an “exodus” that will last a hundred generations, during which everything on the surface will be destroyed. Watching the deadly sun recede and transform into a star like any other, the protagonist cries out, “Earth, oh my wandering Earth!” And yet the story suggests that this is just the sort of outrageous project we’ll need in order to insure humanity’s long-term survival.
heat-death of the universe. Liu’s stories see life from two angles, as both a titanic struggle for survival and as a circumscribed exercise in finitude. In my favorite of his stories, “The Mountain”—it’s available in English in a short-fiction collection called “The Wandering Earth”—mountain climbing is proposed as a metaphor for this contradiction. “It is the nature of intelligent life to climb mountains,” interdimensional alien explorers explain. But the universe is so unknowable that “we are all always at the foot,” and will never reach the peak. In another story, “The Devourer,” a character asks, “What is civilization? Civilization is devouring, ceaselessly eating, endlessly expanding.” But you can’t expand forever; perhaps it would be better, another character suggests, to establish a “self-sufficient, introspective civilization.” At the core of Liu’s sensibility, in short, is a philosophical interest in the problem of limits. How should we react to the inherent limitations of life? Should we push against them or acquiesce?
“Everything ends,” Liu said, in his e-mail, “and describing what is inevitable should not be viewed as a form of pessimism. Take the example of a romantic tale: ‘The lovers lived happily ever after’ would clearly be viewed as an optimistic story. But if you add a coda—‘A hundred years later, they were both dead’—does that turn the story pessimistic? Only science fiction can go as far as ‘a hundred years later’ at the scale of the universe.”
