> science Literature which first came out in 1979, continued to publish during the campaign against spiritual pollution and continues to this day under the name of Science Fiction World.
Here are some interesting trivia about Science Fiction World
- Nearly all of Liu Cixin's work was first published on this magazine
- The publisher was located in Chengdu, Sichuan, it's an official member of Sichuan Science Society, which is under direct control of Communist Party Sichuan Committee.
- One of the chief editor of SFW, A-Lai[1], who is a Tibetan, also a very established award-winning writer. His most famous work is about the conflict in feudal serfdom Tibet in the 20s century. A very interesting novel.
- SFW was once considered the largest science fiction magazine published by volume. In 2010 there was an online campaign from its staff requesting step down of Party appointed president & chief editor, LiChang.
- LiChang was also responsible for opening another magazine lineup, the famous Magic Fantasy World. Because of the LotR and Harry Potter influence. The magazine was discontinued in 2013.
"He writes the science fiction that would have existed in an earlier era, had science existed then" made me think with amusement of caveman science fiction [1].
I've been a fan of Chiang for a very long time. I'm a real fan of superintelligence fiction [2] and "Understand" [3] was the first to catch my attention.
Those names shine so brightly because the sky is so dark ;). China Mieville is awesome, as is Michael Chabon. And I’ll throw in Charles Yu ( How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe). You’re right that there are lots of talented writers out there in the field. I love science fiction, and my criticism was a bit of “making fun of your own.” You can’t deny there is also a huge mass of third rate hackery - same as with other genre fiction like Crime, Romance, Historical Fiction, etc. Its not all Ursula LeGuin and Samuel Delaney ;).
I have always understood that everyone agrees that he is one of the greatest sci-fi writers ever. His writing and philosophy has depth and he understood the future would be interaction between the society and technology.
Maybe he is underrated in the sense that while he is considered a great, many of his writings are still relatively unknown.
His nonfiction is also remarkable (Golem XIV is technically sci-fi, but it's so philosophically heavy that it can be seen as philosophical work).
I think Liu is more inline with Isaac Asimov than Arthur Clarke. Liu is clearly an atheist and intentionally avoid cheap reading gratification achieved by science-religion association.
My complaint about Liu: he has a silly admiration towards Stephen Hawking probably due to his obsession with black hole. (but who doesn't?) 200 years later, people might only get to know Stephen Hawking when reading Liu's books.
> One, they had a significant impact on the science fiction that came after them. We see recapitulation of this imagery in a lot of '70s-'90s anime (less often in live action, which I attribute to cost to film it).
Don't forget Gene Wolfe's marvelous The Book of the Long Sun!
> Human knowledge of the universe has widened and deepened since Verne's day, but for sheer intellectual and adventurous wonder about what that universe might contain, has any writer, from any era or land, outdone him since?
No, I don't think so. It seems sci fi went the way of the graduate thesis: hyper specialized, hyper focused. I think this might have been out of necessity. Maybe Stephenson has come close though.
He's covered nonfictional history, space travel (anathem, seven eves), colonization of Earth orbit and the moon (seven eves), generational space travel (anathem), multiple universe theories (anathem), and to come back down to earth, cryptography (cryptonomicon, reamde, fall), AI (diamond age), wetware hacking (snow crash), VR (snow crash, fall), post mortem VR (fall), nanotech (fall, diamond age), and layered simulated universes (fall).
So beyond Stephenson I don't think anyone comes close to fantastical exploration at the level of Verne. Crichton didn't. Watts is highly focused in biology. Banks deals with cosmic horror, AI, and a touch of multiverse. Doctorow is fantastic "realistic near future" exploration but he never takes us to space, and I don't think he really even explores AI.
I hope you've read Vinge's _A_Deepness_In_The_Sky_? :)
I wonder if anyone has written an essay of the significance of wood as a medium of value in science fiction. I first noticed it with the burl in Niven's the _Integral_Trees_, but it also shows up in Cherryh and lots of other authors.
VV is up there with Stephenson and Gibson as the top 3. I don't put Asimov, etc in there since Asimov was hard sci-fi to the max and couldn't write a character to save his life, much like later Stephenson.
I wish I could find something else like VV's work that's sort of under-the-radar. I do have to mention that things like The Three Body Problem get hype, but are several tiers below VVs work.
Why do you/he think that some nutjob would try to track him down? It's not like that's the case with many writers is it? I don't think Arthur Clark, Asimov or even more contemporaries like Liu or Cixin had nutjobs after them
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