Chapter 1 Liu Cixin’s 2018 Clark Award Acceptance Speech

Good evening, gentlemen and ladies,

It is an honor to receive the Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society Award.

This award is a reward for imagination, and imagination is an ability possessed by human beings that seems to belong only to gods. The significance of its existence is far beyond our imagination. Some historians have said that the reason why human beings can transcend

Other species on Earth have established civilizations mainly because they are able to create things in their brains that do not exist in reality. In the future, when artificial intelligence has intelligence that exceeds that of humans, imagination may be what we have for them

The only advantage.

Science fiction is literature based on imagination, and the works that first impressed me deeply were the works of Arthur. Clarke. In addition to Jules Verne and e Wells, Clarke's works were the first modern Western science fiction novels to enter China. In the 1980s,

In the early 1900s, China published his "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Rendezvous With Rama". At that time, the Cultural Revolution had just ended, the old life and beliefs had collapsed, and the new ones had not yet been established. Like other young people, I

I was confused. These two books activated my imagination for the first time, and my thoughts suddenly broadened. It felt like a stream flowing into the sea. Late that night after reading "2001: A Space Odyssey", I walked out of the house and looked up at the stars.

At that time, the sky in China was not too polluted. I could see the Milky Way. In my eyes, the starry sky was completely different from the past. For the first time, I felt a sense of awe at the grandeur and mystery of the universe. This was a kind of

A religious feeling. And then I read "Rendezvous With Rama", which also made me marvel at how you can use your imagination to construct a lifelike imaginary world. It was these feelings that Clarke brought to me that made me later become a science fiction writer

.

Now, more than thirty years have passed, and I have gradually discovered that our generation, who were born in China in the 1960s, is probably the luckiest people in human history, because no generation before has witnessed anything like ours.

The world around us has undergone such tremendous changes. The world we live in now is completely different from the world of our childhood, and this change is still accelerating. China is a country full of a sense of the future.

China's future may be full of challenges and crises, but it has never been as attractive as it is now. This provides fertile ground for science fiction, which has attracted unprecedented attention in China. As a person born in the 1960s,

Chinese science fiction novelists are the lucky among the lucky.

My original purpose of writing science fiction novels was to escape from ordinary life and use my imagination to contact the magical time and space that I could never reach. But then I found that the world around me became more and more like science fiction novels. This process

It is still accelerating rapidly, and the future is like a heavy rain in midsummer, rushing towards us before we can even open our umbrellas. At the same time, I also found with dismay that when science fiction becomes reality, no one will find it magical, and they will soon become

A part of life. So I can only let my imagination move forward to more distant time and space to find the magic of science fiction. Science fiction novels will become a part of ordinary life at an increasingly faster speed. As a science fiction writer,

I think our responsibility is to write them out before things get boring.

But on the other hand, the world is developing in the opposite direction to Clarke's prediction. In "2001: A Space Odyssey", in the past 2001, humans have built magnificent cities in space and built cities on the moon.

Permanent colonies and huge nuclear-powered spaceships have sailed to Saturn. In reality, in 2018, no one will ever land on the moon again. The furthest distance humans have traveled in space is the one that passes through my city.

A two-hour mileage by high-speed train. At the same time, information technology is developing at an unimaginable speed, and the network covers the entire world. In the increasingly comfortable comfort zone created by IT, people are gradually losing interest in space.

Compared with real space exploration, which is full of dangers and dangers, they prefer to experience virtual space in VR. This is like a saying: "We promised to go to the stars and the sea, but you only gave me FACEBOOK." (Note: this sentence.

There should be an original text in English, but I can’t find it.)

This reality is also reflected in science fiction novels. Clarke's magnificent imagination of space has gradually faded away, and people have withdrawn their eyes from the stars. Today's science fiction novels increasingly imagine human life in cyber utopias or dystopias. More

Paying close attention to various problems encountered in reality, the imagination of science fiction has changed from the broadness and far-reachingness of Clarke to the narrowness and introversion of Cyberpunk.

As a science fiction writer, I have been working hard to continue Clarke's imagination. I believe that the boundless space is still the best destination and destination for human imagination. I have been describing the grandeur and magic of the universe, interstellar adventures, and stories about distant worlds.

Life and civilization, although among today's science fiction writers, this may seem a bit naive or even out of step with the times. Just like Clarke's epitaph: "He never grew up, but he never stopped growing."

Different from people's common misunderstandings, science fiction does not predict the future. It just arranges various possibilities for the future, like a pile of imaginative pebbles, placed there for people to appreciate and play with. These countless possibilities

Science fiction cannot tell us which future will become reality. This is not its task and beyond its capabilities.

But one thing is certain: from a long-term time scale, among the countless possible futures, no matter how prosperous the earth has achieved, those without space navigation are bleak.

I look forward to the day when science fiction about space travel becomes as mundane as those about the information age, when Mars and the asteroid belt are boring places with countless people.

Make a living there; Jupiter and its many moons have become tourist attractions, and the only thing stopping people from going there is the high price.

But even at this time, the universe is still an unimaginably large existence, and the nearest stars to us are still out of reach. The vast starry sky can always carry our infinite imagination.

thank you all.
Chapter completed!