But it's not cultural difference that makes Liu's writing extraordinary. His stories are fables about human progress—concretely imagined but abstract. Take the novella "Sun of China," which follows Ah Quan, a young man from a rural village that has been impoverished by drought. In the first three chapters, Ah Quan sets out from the village and finds work in a mine; he travels to a regional city, where he learns to shine shoes, and moves to Beijing, where he works as a skyscraper-scaling window-washer. Then the story takes a turn.
刘慈欣作品的特别之处并非在于文化差异。他的故事都是一些有关人类发展的寓言——既是具体的想象,同时又是抽象的概念。在他的短篇小说《中国太阳》(Sun of China)中,主人公是个叫做阿全的年轻小伙子,他来自一个遭受旱灾的贫困乡村。在小说的前三章里,阿全离开了村子,到矿上找工作;接着他又到了一个地级市,在那里学会了擦皮鞋,之后辗转来到北京,当起了一名高楼外墙玻璃清洗工。后来,故事情节出现了一个转折。
We discover that it's the future: China has constructed a huge mirror in space called the China Sun, and is using it to engineer the climate. Ah Quan gets a job cleaning the reflective surface of the China Sun. It turns out that Stephen Hawking is living in orbit, where the low gravity has helped to prolong his life; Hawking and Ah Quan become friends and go on space walks together. The physicist teaches the worker about the laws of physics and about the vastness of the universe, and Ah Quan’s mind begins to dwell on the question of humanity’s fate: Will we explore the stars, or live and die on Earth? Soon afterward, he is saying goodbye to his parents and setting out on a one-way mission to explore interstellar space. By the end of the story, Ah Quan’s progress is representative of humanity’s. He has traversed an enormous social and material distance, but it pales in comparison to the journey ahead.
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2020-09-15
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