(Note: In China, individuals use their family name prior to their given name, so while “Liu Cixin” is the culturally-appropriate order for the author’s name, Westernized versions will flip the order to the more familiar “Cixin Liu”.
That said, I personally find Liu’s position that he is not trying to make any statements about humanity in his novels to be a bit suspect, but it does provide a nice bit of cover for him with his own government. While I personally disagree wholeheartedly with the Chinese treatment of the Uighur population, this conundrum begs the question: Can a Chinese writer honestly state his perspectives and have his work published and his personal safety (and that of his wife and daughter) maintained? Does Liu actually believe these things or is this a go-along-to-get-along strategy? No one except Liu himself can ever know the answer to that, and his visible support of the government in this regard has a real, negative impact regardless of any private thoughts. While turning his trilogy into film has been in the works for a period of time and the rights are currently owned by Netflix, some individuals are encouraging Netflix to table the effort in light of Liu’s statements (read an article from The Guardian on this here). He has recently (September 2020) received some negative press based on statements in support of the Chinese policy against the Uighur Muslim population. At first read, a reader may wonder how Liu’s story is received in China, which is known for censoring works not aligned with government messaging however, Liu has vocally shared his alignment to Chinese government policies and ideas. Liu has won several coveted awards for his science fiction and has produced several works beyond this trilogy. It is hard, though, for a reader to not see parallels between the world Liu describes and warnings for our collective future. Liu is more enamored with the imagination of telling a beautiful story based in and of science, bringing it to life for people through a novel. He writes that while the genre is often used to provide lessons to humanity via alternative reality scenarios, he doesn’t believe in approaching science fiction from that perspective. In his own afterward in The Three-Body Problem, Liu describes his views on science fiction. Liu Cixin was born in China in 1963, on the cusp of the Cultural Revolution, which ended when he was about 13 years old.
He also describes consulting with the author about places to add more historical detail and context for English-language readers who would not have the same familiarity as those reading the novel in Chinese.Īs the trilogy progresses, the setting shifts from China out into the skies and stars, endless unexplored territory! He purposefully made the decision to translate portions of the book into styles more familiar to English-language readers and at other times maintained the integrity of the original style for affect. The commentary, details, and perspectives offered about that time period are interesting and are told through the eyes of the author, who lived his formative years during this experience.Īs translator Ken Liu describes in the afterward of the initial book in the trilogy, one of the challenges he was confronted with in translating this novel from Chinese to English is the different cultural ways of presenting a novel. This trilogy begins against the backdrop of the real-life Cultural Revolution in China, which occurred from approximately 1966 to 1976. Chinese history * Literary Science Fiction * Physics * Futuristic Ideas TRAVEL INSPIRATION
0 kommentar(er)
