Liu Cixin’s Alien Encounter SF as Postcolonial Fantasy

Mengtian Sun. "Liu Cixin’s Alien Encounter SF as Postcolonial Fantasy." Symposium: Proceedings of the SFRA 2019 Conference. Conveniently published on line in SFRA Review #330 (Fall 2019): pp. 150-55.[1]

Argues that "Liu’s alien encounter stories often reflect an anxiety of the alien’s definition of civilization based solely on technological level. For example, in the short story 'The Village Schoolteacher,' the life and death of a whole planet depends on the aliens’ verdict of whether human civilization is standard" — developed to at least plane geometry and Newton's laws of motion — "in terms of science and technology" (p. 151).

The "Schoolteacher" story has what we might call techno-questioning relatives in Liu's canon:

Another story that manifests this anxiety towards technology more explicitly is “The Poetry Cloud.” In the story, the aliens divide levels of civilization based on the number of dimensions that they can enter. Only those which can enter six dimensions or more are qualified to be called civilizations. The alien that can enter eleven dimensions is called “God” by the alien that can only enter four dimensions. In the story, “God” is passing by the solar system, and met the human character Yiyi. The former calls humans “foul worms,” for humans’ not-so-long history is filled with filth and atrocity (59), and humans can only enter three dimensions, thus are not considered a civilization at all.

Well, four, actually (with time).

As can be seen, humans are dehumanized in this encounter with the aliens. However, this ideology is questioned in the story by pitting the omnipotence of technology as believed by the alien against poetry. The aliens believe that technology can transcend anything. Yiyi does not believe that and argues that the best poems written by ancient Chinese poets can’t be transcended. Thus, god [sic: lower-case "g"] will write poems that transcend those, to prove the omnipotence of technology to the “ignorant” humans. The rest of the story revolves around the suspense of whether the technology of “God” can transcend the arts of human.

This conflict between alien technology and native art is reflective of a recurrent theme in Chinese science fiction since the late Qing period [...]. “The Poetry Cloud” plays out this contradiction by representing “indigenous tradition” with traditional Chinese poetry and “foreign modernity” with alien technology. (Mengtian Sun, pp. 152-53)

RDE, finishing, 19Oct21