Books/The Wandering Earth

Author: Liu Cixin
Translator: Holger Nahm
Genre: Science Fiction

Liu Cixin's books are not for the faint of heart. You might come for the grandeur but should have the stomach to handle the tragedy. The author doesn't seem to like drama. Though he has a great narrative style, he has a need to remind the reader once in a while that the universe doesn't give a fuck about humanity's grand projects. There will be consequences to actions and the price has to be paid one way or the other. Having your cake and eating it too is for Twilight fans. There are hardly any happy endings in his books and his readers quickly learn to not expect them. His protagonists don't fight the universe and win. They try to do their best with what the universe lets them do. Sunshine and rainbows are portrayed, but one of your loved ones dies in a thunderstorm right before it.

The Wandering Earth is set billions of years in the future where humanity's cultural norms differ significantly from ours. The author has made an effort to not deviate too much thus making the story inaccessible to readers. Earth is trying to escape the red giant phase of its sun. Humanity is busy executing its biggest engineering project - dislodging the earth from its orbit and fleeing away to the Alpha Centauri AB system and going into orbit there. The entire story is told from the perspective of one ordinary person in whose lifetime all the key events of this process happen.

The Reining Age

I’ve never seen the night, nor seen a star; I’ve seen neither spring, nor fall, nor winter. I was born at the end of the Reining Age, just as the Earth’s rotation was coming to a final halt.

The first step in the process is to stop the rotation of the earth. Colossal Earth Engines bigger than mountains are constructed on two the two tectonic plates of North America and Asia to push the earth in two directions. These engines use heavy element fusion reactors. They can just take rocks as input and push the earth through the equivalent of jet propulsion. Living on earth in China is like staying close to the tail end of a rocket. The Earth Engines have permanently changed the climate of the earth. The sun's heat is negligible in comparison to the amount of heat produced by their fusion reactors. It's always summer in the northern hemisphere. Rain gets scalding hot. The author is happy to kill off the narrator's grandfather just to make a point of how hot it is outside with the Earth Engines operating at less than full capacity.

I didn't appreciate how advanced the science and technology of that age were while reading the first few pages of the book. People live in houses on the earth's surface with outside temperatures reaching 160 to 180 degrees (Celsius I suppose, since the translator isn't American). When they go out they wear thermal protection suits which have built-in refrigeration units powered by fusion batteries. Nuclear fusion itself has advanced so much that they are able to use rocks as fusion fuel. Heavy element fusion is referred to as an "arcane" field of study indicating that it was mastered a long time ago. Humanity seems to live in energy abundance. It's a Level 2 civilization on the Kardashev scale.

The narrator's kindergarten takes a global educational trip in a so-called "bus". It's actually a fusion powered flying bus. Inter-continental travel is trivial and within the reach of ordinary people. People travel between continents in their own personal flying cars. All of earth is ruled by a single government, so inconveniences like visas are eliminated. It takes time to understand how kids at 3 to 6 years of age have such advanced scientific knowledge. This is billions of years into the future. Humans have managed to find ways of transferring some of their knowledge to their offspring, so human babies aren't born as blank slates.

Humanity had 400 years to prepare their escape. One might expect a civilization as advanced as this to be able to leave the earth in space ships and terraform planets in other solar systems. That is indeed within their capability. This caused two factions to form - the earth faction and the spaceship faction. The problem as one might expect, is still the speed of light. Spaceships would take a long time to reach even the nearest star. Entropy would destroy any miniature biosphere a spaceship might have within it given such a long time. The earth would take 2500 years to reach the nearest star. Spaceships would go faster than that but their internal biosphere wouldn't survive the journey. That's the reason why they decided to transport the earth itself though its biosphere would be significantly damaged in the process, but would survive the journey. A hundred generations is a long time, considering the fact that our current documented history is only about that long. One oddity is that human life expectancy hasn't significantly increased considering the level of technology of that age.

The Exodial Age

Once the earth's rotation has stopped, it is time to dislodge it from its orbit. This requires the Earth Engines to run at a greater capacity which increases earth temperatures to unbearable levels with extremes of heat and cold. People in the northern hemisphere have shifted to subterrenean cities. People of this age are so focussed on survival that things like exclusive romantic relationships have taken a backseat. Polyamory in marriage seems to be common. Marriage doesn't seem to have a lot of significance either, except to get a license to have a child.

The planet is ruled by a single government called the Unity government. This government seems like a benevolent version of the current day Chinese government. It is worth noting here that Liu Cixin is a staunch supporter of the CCP and everything it does. So his version of a benevolent government doesn't come as a surprise.

The first stage of the process of reaching escape velocity is making a long elliptical orbit around the sun. This orbit at its longest stretched about as far as Mars. The oceans freeze and thaw based on whether it is perehelion or aphelion. People do have the freedom to go to the surface whenever they want provided they heed the government's warnings about safety. People lived in the constant fear that the Helium flash from the pre-red-giant sun would fry the earth at any moment. They worry that it might be too late to escape. The earth has changed so much that they called the previous times the Pre-Solar Age. Though the Helium flash would take a 100 years to complete, humans living under the surface would be roasted alive before the earth itself gets vaporized.

The Exodial Age soon became an age of catastrophes.

The Earth Engines slightly displaced the earth's iron-nickel core causing huge magma leaks into subterrenean cities. The evacuation process is without sentiment. Citizens are ordered by age from youngest to oldest and evacuate in that order. Babies are separated from their mothers and are instead evacuated by robot nannies. The narrator's mother is over 40 years old at this time and is among the 18,000 who don't make it out in time. It is never clarified in this novel why the human lifespans are so short billions of years into the future. I'd have expected each human to live 400 years. Genetic memory engineering makes it so that humans don't have to spend a lot of time on education but that doesn't make up for extremely short lifespans.

The Unity Government holds Olympic Games to distract people from their cruel reality. The author participates in a motorized sled rally race. He meets a Japanese woman stranded at some point on a frozen ocean. Since he was not going to win the race anyway, they continue their race together in his vehicle. That was enough time for love to blossom. They marry at the end of their race and also win the lottery to have a baby. The government allocates them a subterrenean home in Asia.

The next wave of disaster is when the earth passes through the asteroid belt. The narrator's father works as an officer who is responsible for clearing asteroids out of the way. They use anti-matter bombs to break up asteroids into smaller pieces. Still, a lot of big meteors falls to the earth, creating routine dinosaur-extinction-level events. The narrator's father dies due to asteroid impact. Giant tsunamis and dust clouds that block out the sun are commonplace. The author is somehow kind enough to put the narrator's father in a single person spaceship when he died. I didn't understand why he'd limit collateral damage there. To make it more tragic, perhaps. The narrator receives a posthumous medal of his father.

The earth's fifteenth elliptical orbit would take it close to Jupiter. The plan is to use this gas giant's gravity to slingshot the earth into reaching escape velocity. The narrator is finally able to see stars since the Earth Engines on this continent are not in operation. Jupiter was big enough to fill the entire sky. The gravity of course causes mega tsunamis. People are like meh about tusnamis by this point.

It was under the dark red shadow of Jupiter that my son was born, deep beneath the Earth.