Three-Body Problem 2: The Dark Forest

Chapter 1 Liu Cixin's 2018 Clarke Award Acceptance Speech
Good evening, gentlemen and ladies,

It is a great honor to receive the Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society Award.

This award is a reward for imagination, which is a human ability that seems to belong only to gods, and its significance is far beyond our imagination.Some historians have said that the reason why human beings can surpass other species on the earth to establish civilization is mainly because they can create things in their own brains that do not exist in reality.In the future, when artificial intelligences have more intelligence than humans, imagination may be the only advantage we have over them.

Science fiction is literature based on imagination, and it was Arthur. Clarke's work that impressed me the first time.Apart from Jules Verne and George Wells, Clarke's works are the first Western modern science fiction to enter China.In the early 80s, China published his "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Rendezvous With Rama".At that time, the Cultural Revolution had just ended, the old life and beliefs had collapsed, and the new one had not yet been established. Like other young people, I was at a loss.These two books stimulated my imagination for the first time, and my mind suddenly opened up a lot, with the feeling of a stream flowing into the sea.In the middle of the night when I finished reading "2001: A Space Odyssey", I walked out of the house and looked up at the starry sky. At that time, the sky in China was not too polluted, and I could see the Milky Way. In my eyes, the starry sky was completely different from the past. For the first time, I felt a sense of awe at the grandeur and mystery of the universe, which was a religious feeling.And the "Rendezvous With Rama" I read later also made me marvel at how a vivid imaginary world can be constructed with imagination.It was these feelings that Clarke brought to me that made me become a science fiction writer later.

Now, more than 30 years have passed, and I have gradually discovered that our generation, born in China in the 60s, is probably the luckiest person in human history, because there is no previous generation that has witnessed the world around us like we do. With such a huge change, the world we live in now is completely different from the world of our childhood, and this change is still accelerating.China is a country with a sense of the future. China's future may be full of challenges and crises, but it has never been as attractive as it is now. This provides fertile soil for science fiction, which has received unprecedented attention in China. , as a science fiction writer born in China in the 60s, he is the lucky one.

The purpose of my original creation of science fiction was to escape the ordinary life and use my imagination to contact those magical time and space that I could never reach.But then I discovered that the world around me is becoming more and more like science fiction, and this process is still accelerating rapidly. The future is like a heavy rain in midsummer, blowing in front of us before we can open our umbrellas.I was also dismayed to find out that when sci-fi becomes reality, no one marvels and they quickly become a part of life.So I can only let my imagination advance to a more distant time and space to find the magic of science fiction. Science fiction will become a part of ordinary life at an increasing speed. As a science fiction writer, I think our responsibility It's about writing things out before they get mundane.

But on the other hand, the world is developing in the opposite direction to what Clarke predicted.In "2001: A Space Odyssey", in the past 2001, humans have established magnificent cities in space, established permanent colonies on the moon, and huge nuclear-powered spaceships have sailed to Saturn.In reality, in 2018, no one has landed on the moon again, and the farthest distance humans have traveled in space is the two-hour mileage of the high-speed train passing through the city where I live.At the same time, information technology is developing at an unimaginable speed, and the network has covered the entire world. In the increasingly comfortable comfort zone created by IT, people gradually lose interest in space. Exploration, they prefer to experience virtual space in VR.It seems like there is a saying: "The promised stars and seas, but you only gave me FACEBOOK." (Note: This sentence should have the original English text, but I can't find it.)
This kind of reality is also reflected in science fiction. Clarke's magnificent imagination of space has gradually faded away, and people's eyes have withdrawn from the starry sky. Today's science fiction is more about imagining human life in cyber utopia or dystopia, and more Focusing on various problems encountered in reality, the imagination of science fiction has changed from Clarke's broad and far-reaching to Cyberpunk's narrow and introverted.

As a science fiction writer, I have been working hard to continue Clarke's imagination. I believe that the boundless space is still the best destination and destination for human imagination. I have been describing the grandness and magic of the universe, describing interstellar exploration, and describing the world in the distant world. Life and civilization, although in today's science fiction writers, this will appear a little naive, and even out of date.As Clarke's epitaph says: "He never grew up, but he never stopped growing".

Unlike people's common misunderstanding, science fiction is not about predicting the future, it just arranges various possibilities of the future, like a pile of imaginative pebbles, placed there for people to appreciate and play with.Which of these countless possible futures will become a reality, science fiction cannot tell us, this is not its task, and it is beyond its capabilities.

But one thing is certain: on long-term timescales, of the myriad possible futures, no matter how prosperous Earth may be, those without space travel are bleak.

I look forward to the day when science fiction about space travel becomes as flat as science fiction about the information age, when Mars and the asteroid belt are dull places with millions of people Make a living there; Jupiter and its many moons have become a tourist attraction, and the only thing stopping people from going there is the exorbitant price tag.

But even at this time, the universe is an unimaginably large being, and the nearest stars to us are still out of reach.The vast starry sky can always carry our infinite imagination.

thank you all.

(End of this chapter)