Supernova Era (2004)
Cixin Liu (1963)
Translated from the Chinese by Joel Martinsen (2019)
348 pages
Sometimes you truly can’t judge a book by its cover. I certainly found that to be the case for the hardcover edition of Cixin Liu’s science fiction novel, Supernova Era. The cover art does admittedly include a bright explosion off in the distance beyond a picture of Earth, apparently representing the supernova of the title. But, in my eyes, the cover also shows what appear to be dozens of satellites circling Earth, which look for all the world like giant, orbiting skyscrapers; and although it could certainly be argued that imagining these objects to be inhabited satellite-cities was a product of an over-active imagination on my part, the fact is that the story takes place entirely on Earth, with the exception of a cryptic reference in the Epilogue to a settlement on Mars – never a mention of a veritable cloud of fancy-looking orbiting structures.
So, anticipating – chapter-by-chapter – an eventual shift into orbit based on the cover art is a fruitless wait. And that, unfortunately, turns out to be a bit appropriate, because the story itself never quite leaves the ground.
Unlike Liu’s trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past (a review of the first novel in that series, with links to the others, at right), which gathers momentum slowly but develops into an enthralling story eventually encompassing the entire universe and ranging from the recent past to the unimaginably distant future, Supernova Era begins with an apocalyptic bang – a nearby star exploding – but then carries forward through events only a few years into the future.
Which can be ok: as I’ve written in earlier reviews (for example here), my fascination with apocalyptic novels is not so much the catastrophic event at their core, but rather how the author imagines individuals and societies will react to it, for which the immediate period after the catastrophe can be the critical one. In Supernova Era, however, the opening pages describing the location, history and finally explosion of the star that initiates the plot end up being the most affectingly written part of the story. For, while the bulk of the novel focuses on the aftermath of the supernova, it plays out as little more than a sequence of descriptions of the cultural phenomena that result, sprinkled with occasional dialogue that serves little more than to break up that description a bit.
Oddly, Liu himself seems to indirectly acknowledge this stiffness in the Epilogue, presented as if written by one of his descendants, a man living in a colony on Mars with an interest in history. This struggling historiographer explains that he wrote the story as an attempt to convey the events of the immediate aftermath of the supernova in novel from, to tell the history of the period through the eyes of the people involved. But, in focusing on societal development, our historiographer-become-novelist doesn’t bother to develop the characters, and we so never learn much of anything about what they think or how they feel; instead they seem rather like props added in only to help carry the narrative, each fulfilling a stereotypical role – the quiet savant, the caring healer, the bully.
The situations these characters experience and react to turn on the conceit that roughly a year after the supernova everyone over the age of 13 will suddenly die of radiation poisoning. Discovering this coming disaster in the immediate aftermath of the supernova, each country’s adults move aggressively to train their children to take over all the work of their nation and society, from delivering the mail, to working in agriculture and manufacturing plants, and including political and military functions.
When the adults’ time is up, they then disappear, preternaturally passive and herd-like, to distant gathering centers to die, leaving their children in charge. Given the short time available to prepare the children for the handover of control and responsibility, and the momentum of centuries of human history that have led to the social, cultural, economic and political structures of our current world, Liu’s historiographer portrays the adults as having done the best they could.
But once they have left it is not long before the spectacular – though perhaps inevitable – failure of imagination that the adults have displayed in assuming how it would go for the children in their absence becomes evident. The remainder of the book covers the shocking first few years of the eponymous Supernova Era, as within a few days of the adults disappearance the momentum of their old world flags, the children’s world going spectacularly off the rails. The suddenly rudderless kids proceed to ricochet through a terrifying sequence of social transitions and transformations that repeatedly push their new world to the brink of collapse, though occasional references to quotes and comments from future historians let the reader know that civilization will ultimately survive.
The on-going calamity of the children lurching forward earnestly but haplessly as they confront a life without adults recalls William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, which Liu, not surprisingly, references at one point. And Supernova Era can certainly be viewed as Golding’s scenario playing out on a world stage, with all of the world’s resources – both natural and manufactured – in play, though with no hope of adult rescue at the end. The crushing finality of the children’s separation from the security of the adult world seems to prevent any of them from coming to a full appreciation of their changed reality – to weep for, as Golding’s main character Ralph does upon rescue, “the end of innocence [and] the darkness of man’s heart” that they come to discover as the supernova era deepens.
Liu centers his story in China, thus telling it from his home country point of view, though the young Chinese leaders do end up spending time in the US capital at a summit that includes the child leaders of other first world countries. As it was in the trilogy mentioned earlier, this non-Western point of view is an intriguing aspect of the book, encouraging readers mostly familiar with Western authors to shift their expectations relative to science fiction fare that tends to imagine a Western-led future where Earth is involved. What came through in Supernova Era much more than I recall from the trilogy, were some rather stark stereotypes of the West; these characterizations not only provide an eye-opening look at how Western culture is perceived in China (at least from Liu’s viewpoint), but force a reader to question how Western writers most likely also build stereotypes of the Eastern world into their stories.
Unfortunately, these stereotypes, as well as a series of astounding coincidences, pile up as a reader gets deeper into the story. To name but a few: the hard cut-off at 13 years old for survivors; all the adults dying of radiation sickness within a few days of one another at the collection points (and not, for example, gradually, over a period of months); the ability of 13 year olds on only less than a year’s training to run large industries, fly planes and so on well, if not perfectly, or even just to be able reach all the necessary controls.
And perhaps most striking: even assuming the best and most accomplished 13 year olds have been chosen for leadership positions, and allowing for their childish outbursts, the characters all still display an uncanny level of maturity in their behavior and their knowledge of history.
Ultimately these and other coincidences, as well as stereotypes taken to extremes largely in service to the plot (American children becoming obsessed in playing “games” with real guns and experiencing rapidly mounting casualties that don’t seem to slow the fascination) make the story seem too pat. It becomes a series of cultural shifts that Liu imagines would happen in such a scenario, but, without characters that a reader can develop an attachment to, the mounting casualties from the social disruption have little impact on a reader, and the characters’ decisions seem arbitrary and of little psychological consequence. Supernova Era, unfortunately, reads more like a detailed outline for a story than a fleshed out novel.
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