During the Spring Festival in 2023, the movie "The Wandering Earth 2" will be screened in theaters across the country. At the same time, the TV series "Three-Body Problem" will also be broadcast on platforms such as China Central Radio and Television's TV drama channel. As the original author of these two sci-fi film and television works, Liu Cixin has once again attracted public attention.

Liu Cixin: Every text author hopes to turn his work into film and television. For science fiction art, the power of images is much greater than that of words.

"It's not like a sci-fi movie made by the Chinese"

Liu Cixin went to the cinema to watch "The Wandering Earth 2" twice. He wrote on his personal Weibo: "If it is said that the first Chinese science fiction film started a magnificent voyage, then this one is its resounding debut on the world stage. Honk."

Liu Cixin: After watching "The Wandering Earth 2", my first impression is that I don't think it is a movie made by the Chinese. It really shortens the distance between China's sci-fi blockbusters and the world. What makes us who engage in science fiction feel deeply.

Four years ago, "The Wandering Earth" won nearly 4.7 billion in box office revenue during the Spring Festival in 2019, which is considered to have opened the first year of Chinese science fiction movies. After four years, local sci-fi has moved from niche literature to mass entertainment, and the market is full of expectations for sci-fi film and television dramas. As the author of the original work, but also an audience member, Liu Cixin expressed his surprise without hesitation.

Liu Cixin: Like the TV series "Three-Body Problem", it is very faithful to the original work, and its characters are also very consistent with those I wrote in the work, but "The Wandering Earth 2" is different. "The Wandering Earth 2" has nothing to do with my original novel. It is completely an original work by the film creative team, which is very encouraging. Where is this encouragement? In the past, it was said that Chinese sci-fi movies are keen on adapting, but this is actually somewhat helpless, because the original strength of sci-fi scripts is still relatively weak in China. But "The Wandering Earth 2" has really changed my opinion. I think if we work hard to create original sci-fi movies of this kind, if we don't adapt novel IPs, we will now have a considerable level of ability.

The advancement of multiple clues and the relationship between multiple groups of characters, magnificent scenes, high-level presentation of props and special effects, brought a strong visual impact to the audience, and made people lament the rapid progress of the Chinese film industry.

Liu Cixin: Actually, in my opinion, really well-made sci-fi movies look like historical movies. They all have a sense of heaviness, heaviness, and vicissitudes of history. "The Wandering Earth 2" does a good job in this regard. If you take a closer look at its special industry, its design is full of that kind of industrial roughness, that kind of vicissitudes and tough things, not like the kind of toys that have just been unpacked, brand new, a little unreal at first glance. feeling. But there is one thing inside that may be a small loophole. Its space elevator is launched by rockets, four rockets. The purpose of building a space elevator is to eliminate the use of rockets. If you build a space elevator and use rockets to lift it up, then what is the significance of it? Of course, this may be due to the consideration of visual effects, and I think it is not a big problem. Theoretically speaking, the space elevator has no suspense. If it is really established, the last space flight may be cheaper than taking a civil aviation plane.

Liu Cixin's world

As the first Asian to win the Hugo Award, an international sci-fi award, Liu Cixin has been dubbed "the number one person in Chinese sci-fi" by many sci-fi fans and literary critics. His representative works "The Three-Body Problem" trilogy, "Supernova Era", "Ball Lightning", "The Wandering Earth", "Rural Teacher", etc., have built a distinctive "Liu Cixin Universe".

Liu Cixin: I am the first generation of science fiction fans in China, why do I say that? Because Chinese science fiction actually existed in the late Qing Dynasty, including the well-known Mr. Liang Qichao who wrote science fiction. In such a long period of more than a century, countless people have been working hard, creating and working hard on the land of Chinese science fiction literature, but I may finally step on the pyramid built by them and reach the top of the comparison. A little bit of a person, but your foundation is still on the basis of all the previous ones, including the hard work of these sci-fi people who are present and absent.

Liu Cixin, who is not science fiction, has been living in a small town in Yangquan, Shanxi. When he was in junior high school, he was already a fan of science fiction, and he needed to find an outlet for his boundless fantasies. In 1979, at the age of 16, Liu Cixin began to try writing.

Liu Cixin: I started writing science fiction novels in middle school. After I wrote it, I submitted two manuscripts but were rejected, so I stopped writing. Of course, the college entrance examination is also busy. Finally, when I got to college, I had some time and started writing again. Even if I wrote it, I couldn’t publish it, so I didn’t write it again.

In 1985, Liu Cixin, who graduated from the Department of Hydropower Engineering, was assigned to Shanxi Yangquan Niangziguan Power Plant and worked as a computer programmer. Colleagues played cards and mahjong at night when they had nothing to do. As a result, once, Liu Cixin lost his entire month's salary. After regretting, he began to want to do something else. Science fiction writing was a door waiting for him to open again.

Liu Cixin: I have a strong sense of belonging to science fiction. I feel that it is a sustenance in my life, but I don’t say that I am so obsessed with it that I don’t care about everything. After all, you still have a job and a family.

When writing, Liu Cixin wants to build a science fiction world, but as an author, he deliberately maintains a sense of reality.

Liu Cixin: I create only when I can publish it. I can’t just keep writing like some truly obsessed people, regardless of whether they publish it or not. I won’t do that. Science fiction has its way of thinking, and life and work also have its way of thinking. The most taboo now is that if you mix these two ways of thinking, the result will be disastrous. I have been preventing this.

Since 1999, Liu Cixin's works have been published in magazines one after another, setting a record of winning the highest award of Chinese science fiction "Galaxy Award" for eight consecutive years. In Liu Cixin's science fiction world, some people are fascinated by the magnificent starry sky he has outlined, some are afraid of the darkness and cruelty of the universe he depicts, and some are amazed by the knowledge of physics, astronomy, even sociology and psychology that he reveals.

Liu Cixin: What is easily misunderstood? Science fiction may involve a lot of knowledge, and at the same time, the characters that often appear in it may be scientists, world leaders and other legendary people, so that readers think that science fiction writers are also scientists and scholars, but they are not. We can only come from the books and movies we are interested in, and from what we have seen from books on the news, the current trend of the development of world science and technology, the breakthrough of world science and technology. In fact, science fiction books only account for a part of my reading, and I read more about other books such as history, philosophy, and military affairs.

reality and future

After the "Three-Body Problem" became popular, books sold well and reports were frequent, and Chinese science fiction literature received unprecedented attention. Some even called "Three-Body Problem" the pinnacle of Chinese science fiction. Liu Cixin has always been cautious about this statement.

Liu Cixin: The final evaluation of a literary work does not depend on the evaluation of critics, nor does it rely on the evaluation of your readers, it is evaluated by time. There are more books in the history of science fiction that caused a bigger stir than this one and are long forgotten by now. The book "Three-Body Problem" has not passed the test of time, it is just you in the past few years. In front of the cold sieve of time, science fiction is different from mainstream literature, and it is more likely to become outdated. Because science is constantly moving forward, maybe you look back now and you will find Verne’s imagination very boring, some very primitive things, time will leave many classic things, but we also have to Wait for this time.

"The Three-Body Problem" and the Hugo Awards brought Liu Cixin success, glory, and fortune, but little has changed in his lifestyle. He still insists on reading and running, buys vegetables and cooks daily, takes care of his family, and refuses visits from the media as much as possible. In a small town in Shanxi, his mortal life was uneventful.

Liu Cixin: I shop for groceries every day, and I have never encountered anyone who came to bother you. I think the most ideal state of life for a writer should be that what he wants to express is also expressed in his works, and what he wants to say is expressed in his works Zhong also said that he should hide far behind his works. It is a good thing for your works to be popular and accepted, but personally, I don’t think it is necessary to go to the front. Let me tell you the truth, science fiction writers are ordinary people, we are not different from ordinary people, since you like to read my novels, it means that I am ordinary people. If I were a superman, would you understand what I wrote? If you can resonate with my work, it proves that I am an ordinary person.

In the sci-fi world created by Liu Cixin's imagination, the light years of the universe and the world of fireworks are perfectly combined. Whether it is the insight into human society or the exploration of cutting-edge physics, he uses his deep thinking to deduce it to the extreme, allowing readers to feel to a brutal reality. After "The Three-Body Problem", readers have greater expectations for Liu Cixin. As long as he appears in public, he will inevitably be asked, when will he wait for the next work?

Liu Cixin: I have been writing, and writing is slow and difficult. I can't write it in the near future, and it will take a while. And to be honest, the current appreciation of science fiction, the trend of readers' appreciation has gone a long way, compared to when I wrote "The Three-Body Problem" many years ago. Even if I have a new work, it may not necessarily satisfy the readers, but as an author, I still have to write.

(Reporter丨Wang Yuejun, Yue Xuhui, Li Rongrong, Cui Xiaoran, Pei Dawei, Kang Xiaoyu, Zhang Yujie)