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. (more…)
