SOUNDTRACK: hiatus
[READ: February 2022] The Wandering Earth
This book came to my work and it was quite a challenge to catalog. Cixin Liu is a Chinese science fiction writer. These are graphic novel adaptations of his short stories. But he did not write the graphic novels. However, I wanted them linked together because there are going to be sixteen of them and they should all go together. If you put them under Liu, then they go into the Chinese authors section. But these are American books created for American audiences. (I wound up making it an American series under Liu’s name).
Anyhow, I had never heard of him before, but these books are blurbed by none other than Barack Obama.
So I decided to take a look at them.
This second one is also a dark story about the destruction of the earth (actually, all three are).
The story is also more complicated with a lengthy timespan and a few surprises thrown in.
As the story opens we learn that three hundred years ago scientists discovered that our sun was using up its hydrogen and converting it to helium–it was going to explode. So the scientists began a plan. Using rockets, they would stop the earth’s rotation and then using those same rockets, they would propel the earth into a habitable part of the galaxy.
Obviously, this would take many generations and would result in the destruction of the earth as we know it.
The book begins with a baby born on the day that the earth had stopped rotating. We quickly jump to the boy in school learning about everything that happened (a great way of doing exposition). These students are high-tech and scientifically very smart. Art and philosophy and everything like it have basically been done with because it’s all hands on deck for saving the planet.
When one of the kids says that instead of moving the whole planet, they should just take spaceships. But the teacher gives the example of a shrimp living in a small enclosure and how the environment becomes toxic very quickly–humanity needs a planet, not a spaceship.
Everyone moves underground where elaborate cities have been constructed. The plan is to use the gravity of the sun to slingshot earth out into outer space. It will take fifteen years of going around the sun and being drawn back in until there is enough momentum two then use Jupiter’s gravity as an extra kick off to set the Earth free. In that time the Earth goes from periods of extreme freezing to extreme heat as it nears the Sun again. In between those times, there are moments to enjoy the surface. But they are infrequent.
This also plays havoc with tsunamis and volcanoes and the like. In fact, an asteroid belt nearly undoes everything the worked for. The main character’s parents are killed. Of course, the trip will take over 400 years, so everyone’s death is assured, but it’s still a shock.
But they try to have things return to some kind of normalcy and they announce an Olympic games. The protagonist tries out. It’s basically shuttle racing across the frozen wasteland. The protagonist is by himself (it’s a multi-day event when he runs into a competitor from Japan whose vehicle is destroyed. They join together and fall in love. It’s a very sweet moment.
But as things progress, a faction emerges–call them the anti-vaxxers. This group of people starts spreading rumors that the sun isn’t about to explode–that it was all nonsense made up by the governments of the world. Soon enough, this faction of zealots takes over some of the countries and anyone who believed in the truth was to be executed. The protagonist and his wife are on different sides of this issue.
There’s some good surprises in this story, which I imagine is much longer and probably wonderfully detailed as a short story–oh I just looked up and saw that this is a 400 page novel in its own right. I’ll bet it’s fantastic.
The art by Stefano Raffaele is so different from the first one. I love this style–very soft and beautiful. There is a lot of tenderness in this story and Raffaele conveys it really nicely. Of course there is a lot of death as well, and he handles that just as well. And a special shout out to colorist Marcelo Maiolo for some fantastic choices. The eye color on some of these characters is just mesmerizing.
Without knowing anything about the original it’s hard to comment on S. Qiouyu Lu’s translation, but I think it’s safe to say that if I didn’t think of it as a translation, then it was a good one.
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