Alien Encounters in Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Trilogy and Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End

• Published in: Frontiers of literary studies in China Vol. 12; no. 4; pp. 610 - 644
• Main Author: Sun, Mengtian
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Netherlands BRILL 01.10.2018; Higher Education Press
• Subjects: alien encounters; Arthur C. Clarke; Childhood’s End; colonialism; Liu Cixin; The Three-Body Trilogy
• ISSN: 1673-7318; 1673-7423
• DOI: 10.3868/s010-007-018-0029-8

Chinese science fiction (sf) writer Liu Cixin (b. 1963) has constantly been dubbed as China’s Arthur C. Clarke (1917−2008) ever since he won the 2015 Hugo Award for best novel. He himself humbly states on several occasions that everything he writes is just clumsy imitations of Arthur C. Clarke. One similarity between Liu and Clarke is the obsession with the imagination of the alien encounter. But their imagination of the alien other has one major difference: While the aliens in Clarke’s sf are mostly benevolent, those in Liu’s are mostly malevolent. This essay compares the differences between their alien encounter sf, focusing on Childhood’s End and The Three-Body Trilogy (Santi sanbuqu). I will especially look at how the narrative point of view and the consequence of the alien encounter differ in the two texts. And I argue that Childhood’s End is an unapologetic justification of (British) colonialism (dressed up as the benevolent Overlords) and propaganda for colonial logics, whereas Liu’s trilogy is a representation of the colonial encounter story written from the point of view of the (semi-) colonized, for whom this experience is characterized by dehumanization. The Three-Body Trilogy could be considered as resulted from the revival of the national humiliation discourse in the 1990s.