2000 Issue 10 The science fiction world, wandering the earth, finally bears fruit

If my youth started from watching the world of science fiction, then my mediocrity started from not watching the world of science fiction.

——Inscription

On the second day of the Lunar New Year, I sat in the county cinema and watched The Wandering Earth with Brother Kai. The two of them were filled with emotion. I am almost thirty now, and I have spent almost half my life like this.

I started reading Science Fiction World and Fantasy World in junior high school. I wanted to go to Chengdu every day to go to magazines and contribute articles to Science Fiction World. Finally, I went after the college entrance examination. In my sophomore year, I also went to intern at a magazine. When I arrived at each place, I met Liu Cixin and many authors.

But after I graduated from college, I didn’t say that I would try my best to get into a magazine and pursue my dream of writing.

I went to take the postgraduate entrance examination and entered the liberal arts college of a prestigious university, but I missed the opportunity. I missed it by a hair and failed.

I have been living a mediocre life like this since then. Mediocrity has begun. After working for five years, I am still mediocre. I am far away from who I was back then and further and further away from my dream.

The novel "The Wandering Earth" is very short, only 20,000 words, but the film was really shocking. I understood all the details, plots, scenes, and the story shot by director Guo Fan. Over and over again, how hard it is for Guo Fan and how persistent he is, how generous Wu Jing is and how good his vision is, the young actor’s acting skills are not bad, how surprised Wu Mengda is, and how proud he is later, and Chinese science fiction, It finally became something for mass consumption.

Ten years of Trisolaris, ten years of science fiction. Anyone on the street can know about Trisolaris. After knowing Yun Tianming, Ye Wenjie, logic, there are endless jokes about the Trisolaris galaxy Proxima Centauri on the Internet. The Wandering Earth is gone, and the Three-Body Problem is here. I asked where is the Earth?

Not just the Internet, but also this era. I dare say that the era of Liu is here, the era of Ning Hao, the era of Wu Jing, and the era of Shen Teng.

Why do the movies shown during the Spring Festival make me so emotional? I have also been watching Han Han since junior high school. Now that I have transformed from a writer to a director, I have already felt the onset of a mid-life crisis.

Next, wandering the earth.

Weibo and Douban already have many excellent reviews and details about this movie. What I sigh most about is the movie itself.

In the five years I have been working, although I have read less books, I have not missed a single foreign blockbuster. I have watched every Marvel movie. The production level and storytelling ability of American blockbusters are outstanding. Director, Cameron’s latest movie, Alita, will be released soon, I’m really looking forward to it. It was only by watching Cameron's movies that Guo Fan was inspired to become a director.

For me, after seeing The Wandering Earth, I was still shocked by the movie. Underground city, doomsday, Chinese elements, Chinese slogans, and impeccable visual effects. I really wanted to cry while watching it. I was so moved that we finally have our own science fiction blockbuster, such a romantic wandering earth. The novels written by Liu are darker and more rational, but he is always so romantic. Yun Tianming gave his beloved a star, a planet. Although Da Liu himself is a spaceship sect, the earth sect is indeed more romantic, and he only wrote such novels when he was writing.

There is also Crazy Alien, which is also adapted from Da Liu’s novel Village Teacher, which is also a 20,000-word novella. Da Liu is always familiar with it, but of course the writing style of Three-Body Problem is still more familiar. What Liu writes is romantic, black humor and absurd, and his imagination really makes me admire him.

I don’t like reading science fiction novels, because they are too hardcore and difficult to understand. But hard-core science fiction movies are indeed so cool. Among the foreign blockbusters, Star-Lord’s Guardians of the Galaxy is my favorite in Marvel because this series has the most scenes about the outer space galaxy among all Marvel movies. I really like to see the outside world, it’s so novel.

Do you think the big eye of Jupiter is scary? It is a big storm that has been rotating for 300 years. This storm is three times the size of the Earth. How scary it is and how it makes you feel so powerful. Tiny, gaseous planet Jupiter, as well as various laws and principles of the universe. Next to the solar system is the Proxima Centauri galaxy. This is the closest galaxy, 42,000 light-years away! The entire Milky Way is like a rotating windmill. On other rotating films, it is a more distant place. There are so many galaxies that make up the Milky Way, and there are more such big windmills outside the Milky Way that make up the universe.

So if you really have nothing to do, don’t just look up at the stars. I remembered that at night in Lugu Lake, Yunnan, I took pictures of the Milky Way in the universe. The stars were really brilliant.

Gao Xiaosong interviewed Liu. Gao always believed that only those who live in small cities can become great writers, like Liu and many well-known foreign writers. But Liu said that no matter where he was, he was confident in writing these books and it would not interfere with him. Later, Gao interviewed Han Han again. Xiao said that it was Han Han who came up with the name of the show, but Han Han believed that only by experiencing it himself can he write better realistic novels.

Da Liu is a novelist whose subject matter is science fiction, but his observations of human beings and humanistic feelings make him really a great writer. Han Han is a literary writer who writes about reality, and his approach is completely different from that of Liu. As for Jin Yong, Jin Yong relied on his own imagination to construct the world and became a martial arts novelist. Zhang Ailing is a realistic writer, and the urban life she writes about is based on her observation of reality.

In the interview, the world we live in is compared to a basement. Realistic novelists write about things in the basement, but Liu sees the world outside the basement, and he always wants to go out and take a look. Yes, but he distinguishes them very clearly, and he will not confuse these two worlds. Jin Yong writes about history and the past. I always think that fantasy things are about the past and history. Look at A Song of Ice and Fire, which is historical imagination and fantasy. There is also the recent hit Do You Know? It is also history, but it is realistic. Although the idea comes from the three sisters who wrote Wuthering Heights, Emily Jane Eyre, a good book is a good book if it is realistic, and a good book is a good book if it is a genre novel. All of these require imagination and conception. It needs to be written word by word.

A new book I bought recently, Ming Dynasty under the Microscope, shows that Ma Boyong, a genius, is also going further and further on the road of mining history to find inspiration for novels.

Jiang Nan’s Shanghai Fortress will also be made into a science fiction film. I am not optimistic about it because Jiang Nan has always got rid of his creative ideas and mentality as a teenager here, and he will never be able to catch up with girls. Shanghai The Fortress is, and the Dragon Clan is. The male protagonist is a loser, and the female protagonist is awesome. In this Jiangnan, it is still wonderful to write about the Dragon Clan. It is indeed written into our youth, but it is not good for me to write science fiction. The movie, of course, does not have the epic spirit of Da Liu.

I have a lot of emotions and the writing is a bit messy. Please forgive me.