To Hold Up the Sky by Cixin Liu

To Hold Up the Sky
by Cixin Liu
Tor/Forge, 2020

Cixin Liu has been a key figure in raising awareness of Chinese science fiction in the Western world ever since the publication and translation into English of his Hugo Award winning The Three-Body Problem, the first in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy.

The short story is a long-standing tradition in genre fiction. Many readers cut their teeth on science fiction and fantasy magazines that are decades old and still run today. Other readers enjoy reading short story collections, such as Gardner Dozois’ The Year's Best Science Fiction. Liu continues that tradition with his first translated short work in To Hold Up the Sky, a collection of eleven stories.

This collection’s brief introduction, from Liu himself, gives the reader an overall sense of where Liu will take them, with one primary goal being “to try hard to imagine and describe the relationship between the Great and the Small” – “The Small” referring to humanity’s smallness within “The Great” universe. To some, Liu’s concepts may seem wistful, but there is a sense of wonderment even within his introduction. To put it more simply, Liu’s stories read like parables, instructing the reader that tiny, seemingly unimportant actions can have a greater impact on the world than they might think, and despite the short time human beings have on Earth, the universe will continue on.

Fans of Liu’s epic, sprawling trilogy should fear not, for despite their length, there is conceptual weight behind these stories and their themes. In one standout, “Contraction,” (1985, the oldest story here) Liu details politicians and scientists waiting to witness the universe contract, a unique take on the idea of time moving backward:

The starlight in the universe changes from a troublesome red to an empty white…

… time reaches a strange point …

… starlight changes from white to a beautiful, tranquil blue. The blueshift has begun. The contraction has begun.

…

…

.nugeb sah noitcartnoc ehT .nugeb sah tfihseulb ehT .eulb liuqnart, lufituaeb a ot etihw morf segnahc thgilrats …

Other stories run the gamut with their peculiarity - there is a technology war between America and Russia, time travel by way of hibernation, and Earth conquering dinosaurs who have an impassioned opinion on poetry. Enticingly, only one of the eleven tales has previously been available to Western readers (Sea of Dreams via Asimov's Science Fiction), about an alien being disrupting an ice art exhibit to attempt to make its own art by commandeering Earth’s oceans as its medium, and is another standout. While the mileage may vary in terms of quality, there is enough strong storytelling here to make To Hold Up the Sky worth any science fiction fan’s time. A second collection of translated fiction would be a welcome entry into the Liu bibliography.

—Michael Feeney is a book reviewer and pop culture junkie from the Philadelphia area. He is an avid reader of fantasy and science fiction.