La science fiction purest of our days is borne by liu cixin. Because This Chinese author presents us with a transformative narrative, projected into new worlds in which to blend in through a complete exercise of imaginative and even moral readjustment.
Ever since science has looked to the sky in search of some other form of life, writers of this genre have worked hard to always try to be at the forefront in what is strictly due to fiction in its scientific aspect.
Based on solid scientific assumptions (or at least appear so), the authors of books and films about a contact with extraterrestrial life have lavished on alleged encounters, on possible exchanges with these other life forms.
And the most curious thing of all is that, for now, science has no choice but to be carried away by some of the best approaches of the imagination. Because to think that we could be close to another civilization, the only option we have is precisely that, the imagination.
So Liu Cixin, with his ideas projected to the future, or perhaps better to a plane in which humans could finally communicate with other inhabitants of space, is marking the path of the possible, a path that, in astronomy, always it must be considered as an alternative as potentially real as the most sophisticated assumption of reason and its technological derivative.
In Spain, while waiting for some other works to arrive, his trilogy of the three bodies has been released to us. More than enough material to wait for new installments of other individual novels that the Chinese genius wrote even before this trilogy with which he conquered the current science fiction world.
Top 3 recommended novels by Liu Cixin
The dark forest
It is always fair to recognize the value of that first work that passes through your hands and that brings you closer to an author. When I decide to read science fiction, I already know that landing on the first page is going to be an exercise in reading transformation.
Fantasy and CiFi is what you have, any foresight, any preconceived idea that you can extract from the cover or from the synopsis always falls apart as soon as you get into the story. And I have always said it, science fiction is the most fertile of all literary spaces. Authors like Asimov or Philip K. Dick , prolific to the point of exhaustion, they show it.
The truth is that I did not know anything about CixinLiu, the Chinese writer, and the book The dark forest It was presented to me as an intriguing delivery to the CiFi of the Asian giant. But the truth is that I was immediately captivated. I had not read the first part The problem of the three bodies (I found out that there was the first part after I started, the person who had left the book told me), but I don't think you need any prior to immerse yourself in a fantastic novel like is.
The Trisolaris are aliens who are preparing to invade Earth. In their invasive strategy they have counted on earthlings who provide them with all the necessary information for a fruitful attack that, counting on the distance / time that separates them from us, will take place after four centuries of planet Earth time have elapsed.
But humans, also aware of the arrival of aliens and the collaboration provided by the planet's traitors, are looking for alternatives for a drastic defeat that would have a frank world upon the arrival of these trisolaris. The mind is the only refuge, the only space that can offer battle, an impregnable space for any agent from the outside world.
What can those 4 centuries give so that the human being can stand up to the invader? Can you force a better evolutionary 400 years from now? Human science and technology must work shoulder to shoulder to find the only way to victory, hidden between neurons, imagination and memories ... The mind as a dark forest to which not even the human being has an easy entrance and exit.
The end of death
After the intergalactic conflicts previously narrated in The Dark Forest or in the first installment The problem of the three bodies, a true alliance of civilizations has developed on the ancient planet Earth. Under the protection of the new wisdom brought from the other side of the cosmos, the earthlings evolve in a gigantic leap of civilization.
Human science tries to assume the new paradigms, opening itself up to unfathomable possibilities up to now and that approach eternity, immortality, instantaneous communication. The world known up to that moment seems an obsolete space whose still next notion seems to appear to the earthlings to a prehistory suddenly defeated.
Of course, not all the inhabitants of the Earth agree with this coalition of interests with the Trisolaris. A new xenophobic ideology considers aliens as a danger ... They, the Trisolaris show a will for their integration into the host planet.
But nothing is always that easy. Human mistrust always awakens with the fatalistic idea that every benefit always hides a naughty underlying interest. In this new installment, the engineer Cheng Xin acquires absolute prominence when she returns from her cryogenization since the XNUMXth century, she brings a different perspective on how events are developing.
Sometimes the obvious, the evidence that could awaken consciences from the screeching noise of the half-truth is put off in favor of imminent profit. The arrival of Cheng Xin in the future will end up spurring misgivings.
His consciousness is linked to a remote time in which the most avant-garde science of the moment was immersed in very transcendental discoveries and projects. Only those ideas brought from the past and represented in the scientific itself put at risk that Orwellian and apparently profitable relationship between civilizations ...
The renowned American science fiction magazine Locus, awarded the first literary award that bears his name to this novel, a finishing touch for a futuristic trilogy that ends up connecting with the eternal debates of power, the corruption over the most transcendental dilemmas that concern the human civilization on our planet Earth.
The three-body problem
It's never a bad thing to finish at the beginning, as strange as it sounds. When you read the first novel of a trilogy last, there are things that seem to you already seen, like in a deja vu, or you know yourself in knowledge of details that have not yet occurred, depending on how linked the later novels are.
Perhaps that is why I place this novel in its third position. And that, certainly, this novel is very interesting to discover a planet Earth in an initial state prior to the invasion or the approach, depending on how it looks.
Because the arrival of the aliens to our planet, after a message from our part, worries some and disturbs others, awakening very different spirits in some humans who are very close to domination by that superior intelligence, a priori.
The political portrait of our world is interesting because of its greater similarity with our reality, and from there you can always extrapolate ideas very close to our governments and their great secrets.
Other recommended books by Cixin Liu…
About ants and dinosaurs
Intelligence is a fleeting flash in the long night of cosmic history. That not one but two intelligent species populate the earth at the same time calls into question any calculation of probabilities. The fact that these two species, as different as they are complementary, forge an alliance that in turn ignites a civilization defies all logic.
The alliance between ants and dinosaurs had humble beginnings, but from it came writing, mathematics, computers and even space travel. A true Age of Wonders that will, however, exact a heavy price from Earth's biosphere and those who depend on it.
Despite everything, the dinosaurs will refuse to listen to the ants' warning of impending ecological collapse, and in doing so will leave the Formic Federation faced with a single dilemma: destroy the dinosaurs, annihilate a civilization... or die alongside them? ?
Hold the sky
En Hold the sky, Cixin Liu takes us through time and space. From a rural community in the mountains, where students have to resort to physics to prevent an alien invasion, to the coal mines of northern China, where new technology could potentially save lives or start a fire. that will burn for centuries. From a time very similar to ours, in which superstring computers predict our every move, to ten thousand years from now, when humanity has finally managed to start from scratch. And also until the very end of the universe.
These stories, written between 1999 and 2017 and now published in Spanish, saw the light during decades of great changes in China and will take readers through time and space, from the hand of the most visionary writer of science fiction of the XXI century.
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