To Hold Up the Sky,
by Cixin Liu
Various translators
from the Chinese
Tor Books
10/20/2020
336 pages
Science Fiction
Goodreads

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I discovered Cixin Liu a couple of years ago and was totally blown away by Supernova Era.
This time, I would like to present the latest collection of his science-fiction short stories: To Hold Up the Sky.

I don’t often read short stories, as they often feel like unfinished pieces to me, but there are a few impressive exceptions.

This collection is definitely one of them. It contains eleven stories:
The Village Teacher, The Time Migration, 2018-04-01, Fire In The Earth, Contraction, Mirror, Ode To Joy, Full Spectrum Barrage Jamming, Sea of Dreams, Cloud of Poems, and The Thinker.

Cixin Liu is here just as impressive as in the novel Supernova Era.
Most stories deal with themes of science, space, astrophysics for instance, IT, genes, and the environment, how humans stand in all that, and what their challenges are, or as the author explains in the introduction, “the relationship between the Great and the Small”, in other words, between the universe and “human smallness”.

I like the high level of science contained in some of them. His writing is very compact, with some amazing endings. This is not beach reads sci-fi, but really very complex stories, so brilliantly crafted. This shows even in translation (which can only be masterful I assume, even though I can’t read Chinese).

I was particularly impressed by Contraction.
We are currently observing space expansion. But is it an infinite phenomenon? Will space-time start to contract at one point? Will it impact matter? These are the issues considered in this story, with a fabulous ending worthy of Oulipo writing.

Another impressive story is dealing with art. I will not give any details about Sea of Dreams, it’s like a major universe-size fresco reflection on art and life. 

“Art is the only reason for a civilization to exist.”

The introduction helped me measure even more Cixin Liu’s impact on the genre. Indeed, most of his stories presented here were written more than a decade ago, at a time when “sci-fi was still a very marginal pursuit in China.”

VERDICT: An impressive collection of brilliantly crafted short stories. Very solid sci-fi with science and reflection on our place in the universe.

In full compliance with FTC Guidelines, I received this ebook free of charge through Netgalley, for review. I was in no way compensated for this post as a reviewer, and the thoughts are my own.