Facts have proved that netizens can quarrel for the national version and the Netflix version, and "The Three-Body Problem" has become a world masterpiece

Text | Ling Hu Boguang

Recently, the Netflix version of "The Three-Body Problem" released a trailer, this year is simply the year of Liu Cixin's outbreak, the Spring Festival movie "The Wandering Earth 2", the TV series "The Three-Body Problem", and then to the animation "The Three-Body Problem" (although the reputation collapsed), and now Netflix "The Three-Body Problem" is coming again.

This Netflix version trailer stirred up a thousand waves with one stone, and there is a domestic version of "Three-Body Problem" pearl jade in front. Although the Netflix version of the trailer is much better, it is still very controversial from a Western perspective. But since the show has not been broadcast, there is nothing controversial now, and the analysis on the Internet is also overwhelming.

I think it's still because "The Three-Body Problem" has too high a status in the country. Even if we don't look at its literary artistry and imagination, its profound ideology alone is definitely worthy of the status of a world famous book. No matter how bad the film and television drama version is, "The Three-Body Problem" will still shine a hundred years later, and the film and television drama is not important.

At least even if the current domestic TV series version, in terms of the significance of the film and television industry, is still not comparable to the "Wandering Earth" series.

World science fiction looks at the West, Western science fiction looks at the United States, and Liu Cixin is not inferior to the Big Three of American science fiction

The golden age of Western science fiction in the last century, like the golden three of science fiction, developed greatly during the US-Soviet space race, but the hidden problem was the decline in the quality of life of the people, and a series of science fiction masterpieces represented by "Starship Paratroopers" became entertaining in the process of film and television at the end of the 20th century, and many serious content was not discussed or performed.

The general perception of science fiction fans "The Three-Body Problem" is already the pinnacle, but it may not be able to surpass the American science fiction triumvirate, after all, it is difficult to compare specifically with different eras, and Liu Cixin also clearly said that he was influenced by Clark.

The most important thing is to compare Liu Cixin with the Big Three. Because of modern China, modern development combines different paths of history. We look at a lot of classic Western science fiction today, but we may not be able to get why they are so classic, or even feel backward.

This backwardness is not only due to the backwardness of technological performance and science fiction concepts, but also the disagreement of cultural values.

For example, the "Star Wars" series, to "Dune", including the space opera based on "Galactic Empire". Chinese audiences are really getting less and less interested in "space opera". The reason is that China has been beaten because of backwardness in modern times, and has a deep understanding of science and technology as the primary productive force.

Therefore, the interstellar-level advanced productive forces of space opera, as a result, the production relations are very incomprehensible to the lords of the feudal era. But Europe and the United States are technologically advanced, and there is still a right to define in the cultural field, you may not like space opera, but you can't deny that people have a great influence on science fiction around the world, right.

Western science fiction is a space knight novel from the beginning, it is not literature rooted in the genre of serious literature. Scientists don't need science fiction to help them fantasize, scientists can just think for themselves, just like knight masters don't need to read knightly novels to satisfy their desire for canonization.

"The Three-Body Problem" and Liu Cixin science fiction, many people criticize Liu Cixin's poor writing, the works all rely on ideas, and the characters are all tool people. This is a bit stereotyped, and for Western science fiction, characters like Shi Qiang, Luo Ji, Cheng Xin, Yun Tianming, Thomas Vader, etc.

If it weren't for the rich images of these characters, relying only on the "imagination" text similar to the plot outline, do you think "The Three-Body Problem" can be widely recognized and resonated around the world?

Let's take the most classic scene of "Dark Forest": Luo Ji tells Shi Qiang under the dark sky that all civilizations are hunters with guns - if only by outlining the setting of the first axiom of cosmic sociology, survival is the first need of civilization; Second, civilization continues to develop and expand without the total amount of matter in the universe remains unchanged, and then define the chain of suspicion and technological explosion, do you think anyone will like and agree?

For example, one of the many well-known golden sentences in "The Three-Body Problem": "Weakness and ignorance are not obstacles to survival, arrogance is", so in the author's view, these are just imaginative words, what exactly should literature be embodied through?

Not to mention the heated discussions caused by "The Three-Body Problem" in the scientific community, such as the law of the dark forest is an explanation of Fermi's paradox, which is one of the factors that make the three-body out of the circle; Dimensionality reduction strikes have become a hot word in the mouths of many big coffee in the scientific and technological industry, indicating its extensive influence and so on.

These show that imagination alone is not enough to make "The Three-Body Problem" out of the circle, which is also where "The Three-Body Problem" and Liu Cixin's science fiction itself are powerful and have become the representative of Chinese science fiction.

Although there is still controversy over whether "The Three-Body Problem" is a famous work, whether "The Three-Body Problem" represents Chinese science fiction and the highest achievement of Chinese popular literature should be undoubted. Before looking at Hong Kong and Taiwan, Jin Yong Gulong and Qiong Yao (the mainland was serious literature at the same time), from the late 90s to the present, it is Liu Cixin.

Compared with the "American Science Fiction Golden Three", is Liu Cixin science fiction world-class? Yes and no

Let's put it this way, what is the good thing about Liu Cixin's science fiction? More than "The Three-Body Problem", he is rooted in the land of China, combining the ideas of Marxism-Leninism and Mao and modern Chinese history.

At a time when the public opinion environment in the early 21st century was generally singing about the decline of this land, Liu Cixin reflected on this singing decline in his works, and it was not expressed in one work, and many of Liu Cixin's works reflected this value.

"The Three-Body Problem" creates the essence of the cosmic order encountered by modern Chinese civilization, that is, the same level of civilization follows the laws of the dark forest. That is, the most important matter of life and death for civilizations of the same level is not to expose their coordinates, otherwise they will inevitably be attacked by other civilizations.

Although this rule is only human imagination of the cosmic order and cannot be confirmed at all, this rule can come from a novel, but it profoundly reveals a certain logic of human beings and alien civilizations. In the future, whether human civilization develops to the realization of controlled nuclear fusion or the control of antimatter energy, it should consciously follow the law of the dark forest.

It's safer to think of strange alien civilizations as enemies trying to destroy you and hide themselves than to imagine angels hugging each other.

The book "The Three-Body Problem" has a strong realistic criticism. What to criticize? Nature is Cheng Xin and the kind of person this person represents, the Virgin. Liu Cixin commented on Cheng Xin: She is actually very selfish, but this selfishness is different from ordinary selfishness, because she herself is not aware of it. People who follow morality are actually selfish because they don't care about anything but morality and conscience.

Cheng Xin is exactly such a person. She will think she is noble, that she is not selfish, that her values and moral principles are universal and correct. As for the consequences of following it, she only considered whether she could bring peace to her conscience.

Such people are sacrificial and can sacrifice their lives for their values and moral code, but they cannot change their selfish nature. In the novel, people who are truly "great love without benevolence" and are not selfish will consider it from the perspective of human beings as a whole, because sacrificing conscience is the most difficult thing, much more difficult than sacrificing life.

See what Liu Cixin's description of Cheng Xin looks like? I believe everyone knows.

The pinnacle of science fiction, comparable to world masterpieces? Not only "The Three-Body Problem", but also Liu Cixin

The most fundamental reason why "The Three-Body Problem" is popular and different from other science fiction novels is that it gives a set of cosmic space-based survival systems called "cosmic sociology", which already belongs to the category of philosophy. Most of the other sci-fi is either aliens or the imagination of some future technology.

This is still at the level of artifacts, and has not risen to the level of philosophy, like Asimov's "three laws of robotics" is also a philosophical concept.

For a long time to come, perhaps the weapon imagination in "The Three-Body Problem" will be outdated, and even the imagination of Gao Wei will be broken, but the self-consistent philosophical system will still not be outdated.

Science fiction does not belong to the category of traditional novels, many people compare science fiction with traditional novels, and then conclude that "The Three-Body Problem" is not worthy of classics and is not a world famous book, but science fiction has a new literary system, although it is popular literature.

Traditional fiction is based on the product of "land", whether its content involves industry or not, it is the business of these people on the land, and more essentially, traditional fiction always looks back to the past.

Science fiction is the product of human beings freed from the shackles of "land", its content is cosmic time and space, its eyes are always fixed on the future, it only exists for the future. Traditional novel human nature is the core, the powerlessness of the individual in the big time, the complexity in the dark depths of the soul.

For science fiction, when in the context of the universe's time and space, the most macroscopic concepts of human beings and civilization become a whole, and the individual must be replaced by the whole, and although the individual's humanity is still important, it must be diluted by the super-large space-time and squeezed by the weapons of civilization. In the face of the continuation of civilization, the humanity of the individual is insignificant.

Therefore, the traditional novel system that exists for the past cannot be incorporated into the system of science fiction that exists for the future. There is no systematic evaluation of science fiction in our history, because the mainland's science and technology are just on the right track. As future science develops into the universe, the status of science fiction will become more and more important.

To be honest, contemporary traditional novelists really do not deserve the development of contemporary China.

The main thing is that in modern times, I thought that the Chinese nation was full of disasters and difficulties, and when New China was established and then opened up, Chinese serious literature began to take off, and a vote of serious literary writers dominated by Mo Yan appeared, and the number of writers, the quality of their works, literary significance, epochal significance, and then world status were very high.

However, Chinese serious literature seems to have fallen into the "local era" and cannot come out, and to this day, serious literary writers seem to be still writing about the events of those years, from technique to content, from era to meaning, it seems that there is no progress but a regression.

And the four kings of Chinese science fiction, Wang Yakang can be described as the same generation of writers, Liu Cixin only began to rise in the 90s a decade or two later, but the four kings of Chinese science fiction only Liu Cixin achieved the highest achievement.

There are too many serious literary writers in China, which are still mainstream today, and Liu Cixin and science fiction literature have just begun, and there are still too few.

Therefore, whether "The Three-Body Problem" is a world masterpiece, and how high Liu Cixin's status is, not to mention the Netflix version of "The Three-Body Problem" does not make much sense. Because the current film and television dramas, even the domestic drama version of "The Three-Body Problem", obviously cannot become an eternal classic of famous history like "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Blade Runner", the movie "The Wandering Earth" series has a chance.

And the original "Three-Body Problem" has always been there, and the domestic audience cares or wants to compete for the right to spread and define film and television culture in the new era, which is the next topic.