‘The Wandering Earth’ by the Chinese SF author Cixin Liu is the sort of science fiction book that has become something of a rarity nowadays, a collection of short stories. Time was, during the ‘golden era’ of SF that there was a big market for short stories. Magazines like Amazing, Astounding, Weird Tales, World’s Beyond, Cosmos and others bought hundreds of short stories every year. Then, once an author had published a dozen or so stories in those magazines they would arrange to have a collection of their stories published as paperbacks. I have dozens of such collections in my library.
Recently however series of novels, like George R. R. Martin’s ‘A Song of Fire and Ice’ or even Cixin Liu’s ‘Three Body Problem’ triology have become the norm. There are few magazines left today who can pay enough to make writing short stories worthwhile, let alone a way to make a decent living. Most unknown writers today may write a few short stories to build a resume and get a little notice but as soon as they can they’re writing those series because that’s where the money is!
So when I came across a collection of short stories by Cixin Liu I was quite excited. Having already given very favourable reviews to four of Mister Cixin’s novels in this blog I wanted to see if he could reproduce the same sense of wonder in short form.
I’m happy to say that ‘The Wandering Earth’ is a great read. The ten stories contained within the collection are each in their own way both thought provoking and entertaining. The first story gives its name to the collection and concerns a future time when the Sun is running out of its nuclear fuel and becoming unstable. In order to survive the human race converts the Earth into a spaceship that heads out toward Proxima Centauri.
While all of the stories do have the Earth as their stage they still pretty well run the gamut of SF stories. There are aliens, both invading and benevolent, as well as stories with only human protagonists. Most of the stories take place in the near future but several are set in more distant times. And just for a bit of fun Mister Cixin even makes himself a character in one story.
One of the things I thing I like best about Cixin’s brand of SF is that he does give you enough information to at least figure out a bit of what’s going on. In the story ‘Devourer’ for example I was able to guess who the attacking aliens were and how humanity would fight back before the big reveal near the end of the story.
One thing however, before I started writing this review I got out my old copy of Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘Reach for Tomorrow’, one of his short story collections, and compared it to ‘The Wandering Earth’. ‘Reach for Tomorrow’ contained 12 stories in 166 pages while ‘The Wandering Earth’ held 10 stories in 447 pages. That means that the average story in ‘The Wandering Earth’ is three times as long as the average one in ‘Reach for Tomorrow’. In fact several of the ‘”stories” in ‘The Wandering Earth’ actually have chapters to them. I suppose it’s just the fashion of the time, novels have become series and even short stories are now long enough to be divided into chapters. Writers today just seem to feel that they have to stretch each and every good idea they have into as many words as they can.
Despite that ‘The Wandering Earth’ has plenty of good ideas so if you’re looking for a collection of SF short stories worth reading ‘The Wandering Earth’ is the best I’ve seen in a long time.
P.S. The short story ‘The Wandering Earth’ has been turned into a movie by the Chinese film industry and is apparently available in an English dubbed version on Netflix. I have not seen it yet but the reviews I’ve read rate the effects as very good but dialog and character development as pretty bad. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 70% with 48% audience approval. I’ll have to check it and and I’ll let ya know what I think!