First impressions reviews: To Hold Up The Sky, by Cixin Liu

             I enjoyed ‘The Three Body Problem’, which I was planning on re-reading later this year, so I was really expecting to like this short-story collection. However, while it had it's moments, it mostly didn’t work for me either from a science fiction perspective or a character perspective. I will try to explain why below.

            There are some interesting themes here. One is the recurring appearance of alien artists – which show up in ‘Ode to Joy’ and ‘Sea of Dreams’ - or at least aliens who are trying to understand human art, as in ‘Cloud of Poems’. I like the concept of art being universal, but the specific manifestations of it sometimes being hard to comprehend…especially if the alien artist involved cares more about their art than about the life of other species. The concept in ‘Mirror’ of a string-theory-based computer that can simulate the universe down to the finest details, and therefore be a form of perfect surveillance (and the exploration of what that might do to society) was cool and creepy, even if I don’t think it very likely.

            However, the “science” in this science fiction – at least where it falls into areas where I have something between moderate knowledge and expertise – often feels very weak. In ‘The Time Migration’, the people moving forward in time first encounter an age where the whole world looks like a gleaming lobby. Then at a further future date, there are trees and fish and whatnot again. How? Did the future people save up their DNA and replicate them? I find that question distracting because, although nature has a remarkable ability to regenerate, if you paved the whole damn world and then let it go "back to nature" you wouldn’t get recognizable trout or oak trees back even if evolution did recreate multicellular organisms again. In ‘Fire in the Earth’, the main character has a plan to gasify coal by setting fire to it underground, a plan that of course goes wrong. The whole time I was going: What the hell are you doing? You could buy so many solar panels for the cost of this plan. You aren’t saving the miners’ jobs along with their lives; they are going to be fired anyway because they aren't needed anymore. So just get some goddamn solar panels. And then somehow the idiot is vindicated in the end! To be fair, that story was published twenty years ago, when renewable energy tech was less developed…but still! In ‘The Village Teacher’, which I otherwise quite liked, the aliens come off as really dumb because they are scanning for intelligent life by grabbing random individuals, including children, and asking them questions about physics and math. After the kids are able to answer thanks to their teacher, the aliens do a wider scan and are like “Oh, shit, this planet has cities!” How the hell did they miss that? The whole dark side of the earth - which you know is the side they are looking at because it is night in the village - is lit up like a Christmas tree with city lights!

The worst offender is ‘Sea of Dreams’. In this story, the alien known as the Low Temperature Artist has drained the world’s seas to create his artwork, and humans spend something between 5 and 19 years getting the water back (I was a little hazy on the timeline). Theoretically the story does a good job building tension around this…except it didn’t quite work for me, because my brain kept going: Too late. Everyone is dead.  First we get repeated tidal waves as the ice blocks are lifted out of the sea. The majority of humans live somewhere near a coast; between tidal waves with no warning and the loss of fisheries, at least 30% of them would die. Then there’s the fact that algae in the oceans produce a good percentage of our oxygen, and that ocean currents distribute heat around the planet. So the high latitudes would be freezing and everyone would be suffocating. Then it says there has been no rain in 3 years anywhere. That’s the Amazon and most terrestrial ecosystems dead…and thus the rest of our oxygen. So everyone, or nearly everyone, would be dead before the ice was returned. And then the story says the ice falling like comets kicks up dust and causes a new ice age. It tries to end on an encouraging note about overcoming obstacles – but that’s too many obstacles!

            There were a few characters I connected with, or at least felt something for. The titular village teacher of the first story is literally killing himself to try to make a safe place for his students and to show them something beyond the narrow confines of their everyday lives. And I kind of liked the very long-amplitude relationship between the doctor and the astronomer lady in ‘The Thinker’, even if I couldn’t help thinking: If you like each other…you can just go get coffee, you know. You don’t HAVE to wait for an astronomical event! But most of them I felt nothing for - especially the rare female characters, who didn’t feel very real. For instance, a Russian soldier in ‘Full-spectrum Barrage Jamming’ is playing dead in a foxhole and is seen by an American solider: “’Oh, god!’ Kalina heard him exclaim. She didn’t know if it was for the beauty of this woman with a major’s star on her shoulder, or for the terrible sight of her bloody, dirty face; maybe it was both.” I’m sorry, but that’s just not a situation where “maybe he’s surprised because I’m so pretty” would come to mind! I know I would feel exceedingly gross if I thought about my appearance at all, and would - correctly - assume the other soldier was having a "Shit, I killed a woman and so feel like an asshole" moment.

Perhaps the best overall story is the one that descends into utter glorious madness. In ‘Cloud of Poems’, the characters are still unrelatable and the science makes no sense. But who cares, what with the alien dinosaurs enslaving humanity, the humans being weirdly OK with being eaten, the even more advanced godlike alien consciousness that becomes obsessed with Chinese classical poetry, and the inside-out-earth!

 

Overall recommendation:

If you either like your sci-fi consistently “hard” and technically realistic – especially in the biology/ecology realm - or if you need really active characters to connect to, this is probably not the book for you. However, almost all the tales have a haunting sense of melancholy beauty, so if that sort of atmosphere is your jam you’d probably enjoy it. There are some creative non-humanoid aliens, and moments of humorous absurdity as well; I could have done with much more of both! This collection honestly made me a little anxious about re-reading 'The Three Body Problem' - because maybe it isn't as good as I remember - but I'm definitely going to read it and its sequel anyway.