I strongly recommend at least reading that one.BEIJING, Sept. It's just such a powerful tale of human connections and follies in the face of incredible catastrophes. Of all the stories, probably The Wandering Earth was my favorite. Many left me thinking for days on end about the topics presented, which is perfect for hard science fiction stories.

They served well in my daily commute as they didn't require a huge investment of time to get into and resolve. Overall, I very much enjoyed the stories. There is a common character that is mentioned in both these stories, though it's not completely clear if the rest of the world are shared. One of the other stories also had what are effectively space dinosaurs, which was cool to see.Ī few stories also seemed to be connected, the main case being With Her Eyes and Cannonball. The author himself is a character in Curse 5.0 and he is hard at work writing The Three-Thousand-Body Problem with plenty of comical mischief thrown in.

Some stories did have a bit of humor in them, the most prominent of them being Curse 5.0. Despite some of the themes being on the darker side, they are not overbearing. Catastrophes happen, either by natural phenomena, human negligence, or alien intervention, and we get stories of humanity's survival in these dark times. Another prominent theme was that of destruction or the end of the world. In some you had a character bringing himself out of poverty, in others you had philosophical discussions on the distribution of wealth and its consequences. A few stories also touched on concepts of money and capitalism. Sometimes this was benign, if puzzling, other times it was world shattering. Several dealt with humanity's first contact with alien species. There were many themes throughout Liu's stories. In fact, I think several concepts there were probably seeds of ideas that would eventually make it into the The Three Body Problem. I couldn't help but compare them against The Three Body Problem series. I would classify these as hard science fiction as they generally take a few scientifically motivated topics and explore them in some way. It's not clear if these are ordered by publication date or in some other fashion. There are 10 short stories in this collection. Read on after the jump for my impressions. Because this is not a novel, I won't review it in the same fashion but rather give you my impressions as a whole. I had already read the titular short story (you can find my review here), but had not yet read any of the other ones. I picked this up at Balticon, a local science fiction and fantasy convention. The Wandering Earth is a collection of short stories by Liu Cixin and translated by Ken Liu, Elizabeth Hanlon, Zac Haluza, Adam Lanphier, and Holger Nahm.

The Wandering Earth by Liu Cixin