Fiction Reviews
Cixin Liu
The Collected Short Stories(2025) Cixin Liu, Head of Zeus, £25, hrdbk, 945pp, ISBN 978-1-035-90393-1
Playing with Big Ideas is one of the defining characteristics of Cixin Liu’s writings, as is evident from his Hugo Award winning The Three Body Problem. The present collection of thirty-two ‘short’ stories - some of them well within novelette territory - covers Liu’s explorations of a diverse array of such Big Ideas, although many are grounded in a particular human endeavour which is then extrapolated to an extreme and sometimes absurd degree.
So, ‘Mountain’, for example, opens with a former mountaineer explaining to a ship’s captain why he never ventures ashore wherever the ship happens to put into port. When an alien spacecraft arrives and creates a literal mountain of sea-water through the gravitational force exerted by its mass, the mountaineer feels compelled to swim up to the top. Upon reaching the aquatic summit - and Liu explains in detail how he is able to physically achieve such a feat - he enters into a conversation with the aliens who proceed to tell him their history. And right there we are presented with one of the major flaws of a number of these stories.
A fundamental issue that any purveyor of Big Ideas science fiction must deal with is how to convey those ideas to a lay readership. At one end of the spectrum is the straightforward infodump, of course, while towards the other lies such approaches as gradually revealing the Big Idea over the course of the narrative, or interweaving it throughout with the hope that the reader is able to at least get the gist. Liu very much tends toward the former and as fascinating as such a Big Idea may be, presenting it this way doesn’t necessarily make for an enjoyable reading experience (at least, not when repeated as it is here).
Another well-known potential flaw of this kind of story-telling is that the human characters may find themselves overshadowed by the Idea itself, just as our mountaineering friend is by the alien spaceship. And that is again very much the case in a number of these stories, especially the longer ones. As a result, I found the shorter pieces to be more satisfying overall. Indeed, my favourite story in the collection is ‘The Thinker’, at only seventeen pages long. This still offers up a mind-bending astrophysical idea but situates it within what amounts to a decades-spanning, but still reflective, love story.
Similarly, in ‘With Her Eyes’, an astroengineer on leave agrees to take along a pair of ‘eyes’ (actually a set of multi-sensory glasses) so a young woman, physically constrained within her capsule, can also enjoy the visual experience. However, the narrator comes to realises that she is not travelling far off reaches of space, but is burrowing deep within the Earth itself. This is another entrancing tale, with an ending that delivers a real punch to the gut. The ‘terranaut’ also has a walk-on role in ‘Cannonball’ which speculates as to what would happen if someone drilled a hole from China to Australia - the answer is, sadly but unsurprisingly, nothing good. Here, however, the overall approach is very much in ‘telling rather than showing’ mode, which left me feeling as if I’d just sat through a lecture on tunnelling techniques!
This sort of approach perhaps works better when the context involves imagining the past rather than trying to gaze into the future. So, ‘The Circle’ is set in 227BC when China was divided into several warring states and postulates an alternative history of computation in which vast bodies of obedient soldiers are used to form AND gates and so forth - to no good effect as far as the relevant King who agrees to this exercise is concerned. ‘Of Ants and Dinosaurs’ does something similar but as the title suggests, takes us back in time even further to the Late Cretaceous. However, what begins as a neat idea, about the possibility of competing Formicidae and saurian civilisations, soon becomes rather belaboured.
A similarly militaristic tone is also prevalent in such stories as ‘Full-Spectrum Barrage Jamming’ in which a Russian general’s son makes the ultimate sacrifice to stave off a NATO invasion. Originally published in 2020, after the Russian annexation of Crimea, this could leave an unpleasant taste in the mouth for many readers. In similar vein, ‘Butterfly’ begins with the bombing of Belgrade by the Allied Air Force and explores the possible weaponisation of chaos theory as a response.
Nevertheless, it should not come as a surprise that many of these pieces offer alternative perspectives to those often encountered in Anglophone science fiction. Perhaps the best example is ‘Sun of China’ in which a young man walks out of his impoverished village in rural China and ends up literally sailing away into the cosmos. For me this is more effective than Liu’s more well-known pieces, such as ‘The Wandering Earth’, in that whilst exploring yet another Big Idea it remains grounded in the nitty-gritty details of a relatable human being. It’s that combination that makes for the outstanding story-telling that Liu is so clearly capable of but which becomes diluted in an all-encompassing volume such as this. One to be dipped into, then, rather than ploughed through.
Steven French
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