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4.03 AVERAGE
4.03 AVERAGE
However, it is very unfortunate it is only a short novel. The author could expand the story even more. Keep the pace slow, so we can explore the unimaginable world.
这时木星已占满了整个天空，地球仿佛是浮在木星沸腾的暗红色云海上的一只气球！而木星的大红斑就处在天空正中，如一只红色的巨眼盯着我们的世界，大地笼罩在它那阴森的红光中……
这时，谁都无法相信小小的地球能逃出这巨大怪物的引力场，从地面上看，地球甚至连成为木星的卫星都不可能，我们就要掉进那无边云海覆盖着的地狱中去了！
Jupiter now filled the entire sky. Earth seemed to be no more than a balloon, bobbing on Jupiter's boiling ocean of dim red clouds! Even worse, Jupiter's giant red spot had come to occupy the middle of our new heaven, like a titanic red eye staring at our world. All of Earth was shrouded in its ghastly red light; in that moment it was impossible for anyone to believe that our tiny Earth could escape the gravitational pull of that enormous monster. For us, it was not even imaginable that Earth could become Jupiter's satellite; we would certainly plummet straight into the inferno concealed beneath that boundless ocean of clouds!
I have always maintained that the difference between sci-fi and fantasy as genres is not the difference between science and magic, but rather the difference in what kinds of stories are told. Fantasy stories tend to tell heroes' journeys: transformations of individual peoples. In contrast, science fiction tends to tell stories about what it means to be human; the technology is merely a tool for exploring the human condition. This is clearly evident when you compare stories told in Star Wars and stories told in Star Trek.
So when people get caught up with the implausibility of the main premise of The Wandering Earth, I feel a little unhappy. After all, many science fiction stories have implausible premises, such as The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells, or The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. But the implausibility isn't the point. The point of these stories is really how our characters (and humanity as a whole) react to the premise, and how it reveals the values and mindsets of our characters (and humanity as a whole).
Many other critics have already pointed out that the premise of The Wandering Earth is distinctly Chinese; the homeland is cherished to the point where bringing the Earth and moving the planet is preferable to abandoning the Earth. The movie doesn't depict this conflict, but in the short story, there are two factions amongst the population: the Spaceship Faction and the Earth Faction. The Spaceship Faction wants to create giant spaceships that will become the home of the entire population of Earth, whereas the Earth Faction wants to move the entirety of the Earth as a whole. Somehow, the Earth faction wins out, and every government on Earth fuses together to form a Unity Government (if we want to talk about unrealistic premises, this is something that I personally find even more unrealistic than the science. If humanity were put in a position where all humans had to work together and make a quick decision or perish, then it's my own bleak personal opinion that humanity would just perish. Except, perhaps, for the rich, who would build their own spaceships and leave the rest of the population to die. Yay, capitalism!).
The fact that The Wandering Earth is so distinctly Chinese makes it interesting to compare it to similar Western science fiction stories (others have compared it to Armageddon or Independence Day, neither of which have I seen, because honestly this kind of doomsday story isn't really the kind of film that I watch). Accented Cinema already did an amazing video on how The Wandering Earth is culturally very Chinese. I read a comment complaining about this kind of ethnocentrism (claiming that this commenter also complained about Western ethnocentrism in science fiction stories). While I do believe that this is a valid complaint (see complaints about the Western ethnocentrism of Star Trek) (as well as the questions of 'Why are the Doctor's companions always female British humans?') in much of fiction, I am personally just very interested in what Chinese-centric fiction looks like. If I hadn't watched The Wandering Earth, I might not even have been aware that certain aspects of Western science fiction is distinctly Western.
That being said, I think both the short story and the movie ultimately fail at being really ground-breaking science fiction. The premise is wild enough that it captures people's attention and imagination, but the story both works tell are frankly underwhelming. The short story, for example, barely has a plot (although this doesn't appear to be unusual for Liu Cixin's short stories, having read a number of them). The majority of the short story is used to set up the premise, but very little of it actually explores how this premise changes humanity's culture. We see small glimpses, but none of it is explored.
在这个时代，人们在看四个世纪以前的电影和小说时都莫名其妙，他们不明白，前太阳时代的人怎么会在不关生死的事情上倾注那么多的感情。当看到男女主人公为爱情而痛苦或哭泣时，他们的惊奇是难以言表的。在这个时代，死亡的威胁和逃生的欲望压倒了一切，除了当前太阳的状态和地球的位置，没有什么能真正引起他们的注意并打动他们了。这种注意力高度集中的关注，渐渐从本质上改变了人类的心理状态和精神生活，对于爱情这类东西，他们只是用余光瞥一下而已，就像赌徒在盯着轮盘的间隙抓住几秒钟喝口水一样。
Back then we were baffled when we watched films and read stories from the Pre-Solar Age. We just could not understand why people should invest so much emotion into matters that had nothing to do with survival. Watching a protagonist despair or cry over love was strange beyond words to us. In those days, the imminent threat of death and the desire to escape alive overwhelmed all else. The daily updates on the condition of the Sun and position of the Earth all but devoured our attention and ruled our emotions. This all-consuming focus gradually changed the essence of human psychology and spirituality. Love and all its foibles became mere distractions, just like a quick swig of a drink was for a gambler who cannot take his eyes off the spinning wheel.
But despite this huge change in human psychology, humans still mate in pairs; humans still get married, want children, form families. Further in the story, the main character marries a Japanese woman and celebrates when they're given the permission to have a child by the Unity Government. And how does "the imminent threat of death and the desire to escape alive [that] overwhelmed all else" feed into humanity's newfound ability to cooperate despite vast cultural differences? In humanity's past, this kind of fear and desperation for life more often lead to destruction than creation. Nonetheless, in The Wandering Earth, humanity manages. Somehow. But none of this is explored.
Couldn't it be possible that this kind of feeling is what fed into the rebellion that happens in the third chapter? Although the movie lightly hints at some dissatisfaction and opposition (with posters on walls and a quite literally looked-over protest at the end of the movie) (which has been suggested to form the basis of a sequel), in the short story, the rebellion pretty much only happens because of new observations of the Sun. "Several months later the terrible theory began spreading across the entire world like a wildfire," implying that the theory hadn't spread across the world before. It's never even mentioned as a background conspiracy theory before this chapter.
In many ways, the movie does a better job of telling a human story. I would go so far to say that the short story doesn't even attempt it. But the movie tells a fairly average story about