外媒称《流浪地球2》太“民族主义”，《科幻世界》主编这样回应……

It takes some time to usher in the era of science fiction. The rise of sci-fi culture is closely related to the development of the industrial revolution, as it is essentially an urban civilization.

In the era of agrarian civilization, when economic development was not advanced enough, people lacked such an urgent need for science fiction. It is only when people's material life and technological development have reached a certain level that they begin to have thoughts about the future on a spiritual level and the demand for science fiction arises.

Fantasy has an indispensable role to play in science fiction. It refers to technology that is not only unattainable at the moment, but also unattainable in the near future. This "imagined technology" can only be realized under certain conditions, or under certain technologies or future technological developments.

The space elevator mentioned earlier has been conceptualized for decades but has not been realized due to a lack of new materials and engineering capabilities, as well as low economic efficiency, environmental protection, and safety conditions. In this case, we can put the space elevator as a fictional concept in the story and let it be the background or the place where the story takes place. This not only adds novelty to the story, but also expands our imagination for what is possible in the future.

A characteristic of science fiction is that the setting is particularly grand. For example, many of Liu Cixin's works are interstellar-scale stories, of which he chooses only one aspect to depict. The Wandering Earth 2 is also a fragment in a long history of more than 2,000 years. It shows us not only the wonderful story of this fragment, but also refers to this grand backstory.

A major reason for The Wandering Earth 2, resonating with all audiences, is that it asks important questions. What choices can human beings make when faced with a space-level or even a cosmos-level disaster? How fearless is mankind? What technological miracles can be achieved? In this regard, the film maintains the essence and core ideals of the original book and presents it in a visual form with a more detailed story, which moved me very much.

This is also something many adaptors can learn from. The movie is based on the core spirit of science fiction, not just one technical point. Movies and science fiction novels have something in common — both must have a strong logic and internal self-consistency, and must be developed in line with the setting.

The novel is more of a pure creation, where there is a lot of space for people's imagination. The author can only describe the story through words and each reader can envision a different world, and its audience is mainly science fiction fans.

The film is different, as its audience is not only science fiction fans but also people from all walks of life. Therefore, we cannot ask all audience members, which include children and the elderly, to imagine on the basis of reading like those science fiction fans. Instead, we need to have some more explicit expressions.

As science fiction editors, we value not only storytelling and technological creativity, but also the humanism within the novels. The Wandering Earth and many of Liu Cixin's works have several distinctive features, the first of which is the profoundness of his thoughts.

Science fiction comes up with numerous future technologies, but these future technologies only serve as a background. What is more important is that it provides excellent scenario depictions including worldviews and conflicts. Liu Cixin is particularly good at describing such scenes in the extreme and also keeps them credible. You can also feel it in his works The Micro-Era and The Village Teacher.

Secondly, on the basis of authenticity and a sense of detachment from reality, he is able to build a very grand and detailed story that reflects the choices of a group of people facing these scenarios. He has always treated a civilization as a character, which is different from many science fiction works.

In The Wandering Earth, whether it is the novel or the movie, what shocks us is never one or two characters or one or two relationships, but a civilization's choice in the face of disaster. There are entanglements of emotions and controversy for them, and you can even think of “them” as a person struggling in the face of adversity. This is why The Wandering Earth, or Liu Cixin's other works, are so impactful.

In his novel, there is often the cost of the lives numbering in the hundreds of millions, the length of history is thousands and even tens of thousands of years, and the space scale is extreme. However, if you read it carefully, you will find that we are not resigned to defeat, that we have to carry forward the development of civilization. This is based on Chinese civilization, and it is an important point that moves so many Chinese people.

In the series of The Wandering Earth, human beings appear as a whole civilization. The story is not just about the Chinese but all of humanity saving the world. All human beings are saving all human beings, with Chinese people playing a certain leading role. To take it a step further, the story is nothing more than a break in the trend of Americans saving the world.

Robert J. Sawyer, a famous Canadian science fiction writer, once had an interesting analogy, saying that scientists imagine the emergence of cars while science fiction writers conceive the emergence of traffic jams. This is very true, because science fiction is not merely about predictions of technology, but is more about imagining technological developments for the fundamental purpose of telling stories. The development of science and technology is relatively easy to imagine, because the general direction of the development of laboratory technology and human technology is visible to all.