What are the flaws in Liu's works?

Author: Li Gang, who is full of people and gods.

Source: Zhihu.

Copyright belongs to the author. Please contact the author for authorization.

The answer to this question is undoubtedly better for the author himself. First list Liu's views on the serious injury of wandering earth:

Regarding the escape of human beings in the novel, I am a 100% spaceship faction from the perspective of science fiction and science, because most of the energy that drives the earth is consumed in useless loads, that is, the materials inside the crust that make up the planet. The greatest significance of these substances is to produce gravity, but gravity can also be simulated by the rotation of the spacecraft. However, from the literary point of view, the aesthetic core of this work is the image of science promoting the world to wander in the universe, while the escape of the spaceship has produced a completely different image of escaping from the world, and its sci-fi aesthetic feeling is far lower than the former.

However, a later experience almost aborted the novel. It was my first business trip by plane. When I look at the earth from a height of ten thousand meters, I still can't detect the curvature of the earth at all. The surface of this planet is still an endless horizontal plane. Promoting such a world is crazy! But after I went back, I still insisted on writing novels. At first, it was only half as long as it was when it was published, and later it was doubled at the request of the editor. Teacher Wang Jinkang saw an article at the pen meeting and said it should be 300,000 words, but she didn't have a chance to publish a long article at that time.

There are many aspects of The Wandering Earth that have to compromise with the rigor of science fiction, such as helium flash, which is just an activity of stars in their early years. After a long period of repeated appearance, the star can enter the state of red giant. In addition, there was no experience at that time, but the specific parameters of the earth engine were listed in detail, so detailed that the acceleration obtained by the earth could be directly calculated. The result of calculation is that the engine can only give the earth zero (n zeros), not to mention sailing and orbit change.

-Selected from Wandering Earth: A Journey to Find Home (Special Commemoration of 30th Anniversary of Science Fiction World Supplement)

Simply put, Earth School is a more realistic choice from a scientific point of view, but from a literary point of view, the symbolic significance of Earth School makes it a science fiction novel with great aesthetic value-in fact, many people think that The Wandering Earth is Liu's best work before Three-body.

In the choice between science and literature, Liu chose the latter-a die-hard science fiction author can't publish any works.

Knowing this, let's take a systematic look at Liu's views on the harm of science fiction. Liu believes that scientific and technological injuries in science fiction can be roughly divided into four categories:

1. Neglect and serious injury: This kind of serious injury is caused by the author's carelessness. For example, in The Country Teacher, the number of planetary civilization tests, the earth in The Wandering Earth revolves around the sun without day or night, and in The Postman, Europe knows the war situation in Asia the next day. This kind of injury is not worth discussing and should not appear, which reflects the author's careless attitude in writing.

Second, knowledge damage: this is the most common type of damage in science fiction works, which is caused by the author's knowledge level. The most typical example is that whales have teeth in Song of Whales, which is unbearable, but I really didn't know it when I wrote it, so there is nothing I can do.

The knowledge structure needed to create science fiction literature is strange and indomitable. Sky means that the author needs to have a thorough understanding of the most advanced, profound and abstract knowledge core, and the site requires the author to have a vivid feeling of the most complicated technical details at the bottom, but not much for the intermediate knowledge that science and engineering majors have learned the most at present.

Taking computers as an example, in order to write good works, science fiction writers are required to understand the philosophical meaning of artificial intelligence, the profound connotation of machine consciousness and the far-reaching influence this connotation will have on human civilization from a philosophical level. He wants to dabble in things that are not involved in general computer majors, such as Godel's law in the Chinese room of Turing machine; On the other hand, he also needs to know what UPS sounds like when the main computer room is cut off. How will the screen react when coffee is spilled on the keyboard ... and the most meaningful C and JAVA programming in my practical work is not very important.

Third, the background is hard: the author knows this kind of hard injury when writing a novel, but he can only write it hard, because this kind of hard injury is the condition on which the story depends, otherwise the novel will not be written. Such serious injuries can be found everywhere in Chinese and foreign science fiction.

A typical example is invisible in a transparent way. Anyone with a little common sense can think that even if its refractive index is the same as that of air, it is impossible to be invisible in the real environment, not to mention the visual problems of invisible people. Wells must have thought of this, but he still wrote the novel, which has now become a classic. In the comments he can see about the invisible man, he rarely mentions some serious injuries, but now he has an "invisible man". Although critics say it is rubbish, it has nothing to do with serious injuries, and this aspect is rarely mentioned.

This kind of harm can be regarded as an agreement between the author and reader of science fiction. For myth, it's all an agreement. You can read the author's books only if you agree with all his books unconditionally. In science fiction, this agreement is only part of it, in order to set the stage for those things that are really science fiction. If we have to dig deeper, it is meaningless.

Fourth, soul injury: This is the most important injury of science fiction, and what is important is that it is the soul of science fiction. This involves a question: only in the sense of science fiction, what is the most advanced science fiction?

Let's peel off the onion of science fiction: the outermost layer is martial arts and romance with science fiction as the coat; Then there is the story produced by applying the existing technology one step ahead; Further inside is the possible technology and world; The above three categories are the most common science fiction novels at present, and their similarity lies in that the world they describe runs under the known laws of the universe. The Heart of the Onion is a kind of science fiction: it fantasizes about the laws of the universe and builds a new world on this basis.

This is the highest realm of science fiction, because there is no more pure scientific fantasy than the fantasy of the laws of the universe itself; It is also the most difficult science fiction to write. For example, if the relationship between gravity and distance is changed to linear or cubic, what will the universe become? I can't think of it after racking my brains. Throughout the history of science fiction in the world, there are very few such works, and even fewer have become classics. At present, there are two works with rave reviews in science fiction, Heavy Ice and Gambling World, both of which are made by Americans. The former describes the consequences that the proportion of ice suddenly becomes greater than that of water will have on the world (comrades, can you think about the consequences? Ha ha. ), the latter describes a society based on gambling, but the natural and social laws changed by the above works are not very basic. Babel also has this shadow. Clement has written some similar novels, which have a deep foundation in public science and few mistakes, but those novels are not easy to read, and it is more difficult to read than reading The First Push. The most fundamental difference between this kind of science fiction and myth is that it makes the world self-consistent under the laws of the universe created by itself. This is the most difficult ideological gymnastics when writing science fiction, and it is the work of the creator.

Hard injury has become the soul of this kind of science fiction, which is itself science fiction. The idea of this kind of science fiction is to examine what the universe looks like when it is injured, which can only be done by science fiction.

To sum up: if there is negligence or serious injury, shoot; Knowledge is difficult to learn, so point it out and give the author a chance to learn (although I am afraid that further study will not improve much); The background is bruised and pretends not to see it; Your soul is badly hurt. You are lucky. This is the best science fiction!

-Excerpted from Helpless and Beautiful Mistakes-An Introduction to Science Fiction

To sum up, most of the answers in this question and answer belong to the third category, and a few belong to the second and fourth categories. The second category is inevitable, the third category is for the needs of science fiction setting, without these flaws, the readability of the novel will drop a lot, and the fourth category is just different scientific opinions on the unknown, which is a useful and harmless flaw.