To Hold Up the Sky
Cixin Liu's To Hold Up The Sky is a 1974 Chevy van with icy moons and swirling nebulae painted on the side that you saw for sale by the side of the road in a snowstorm. It is a copy of Heavy Metal you found stuck in the back of the rack at Empire Comics when you were looking for old Savage Sword of Conan issues to read on a long road trip with your parents. It is the torn cover of a faded sci-fi paperback you found at the thrift store and spent the afternoon reading in the car while you waited for a girl to get off work and let you into her apartment for which you didn't yet have a key. It is magic, this collection of short stories Liu wrote and published ten, 20, 30 years ago. It is a time machine; a split-vision tunnel that lets you go back in time while staring forward ... To Hold Up The Sky gives us a window that looks out over a different sci-fi landscape than we've seen in decades.
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Liu’s stories are generally part allegory, part hard science. Think Aesop collaborating with Robert A. Heinlein. A common theme running through his work is that science can both solve and cause problems; art is occasionally given a status equal to science. Liu is also not above giving a story an unexpected twist or turn ... To Hold Up the Sky does what a collection such as this is supposed to do, which is to give readers already familiar with the author's work something else to read while providing newcomers with a necessary introduction. I was in the latter camp and am now reading Supernova Era, which was published in China in 2003 but made its first appearance in the U.S. last year.
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This volume gives us a chance to read Liu when handled by many different expert translators who are not named Ken Liu, a fellow who has ably shouldered more than his share of such duties. All kudos to them for some excellent renderings, every one of which seems miraculously to converge on what I presume is Liu’s actual voice ... The first item, 'The Village Teacher', is a perfect fulfillment ...The story is Simakian in its deep moral simplicity and emotional impact ... 'Time Migration'...pays off in layers of wonder ... '2018-04-01', short yet potent, is almost cyberpunk ... Despite its one-note gimmicky core, 'Contraction' is an effectively mind-bending tale dealing with the unforeseen fallout from cosmological reversals of interstellar expansion ... underneath any flavorful cultural trappings lies the essential core of a science fiction, identical to that found in SF from the West: engagement with the universe on the universe’s own terms of harsh and unrelenting physics, math and biology, without denying the specialness of homo sapiens and the human heart.
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