Mixes deep questions of physics and philosophy with realistic characters and touching relationships. Quirky bits of humour glimmer here and there and an overall sense of optimism prevails. It's another fine collection that I'm grateful to be able to now read in English
SF Crowsnest
A perfect example of a theme that continues throughout the collection and Liu's ... Read morewriting as a whole: the relationship between the smallest moments of everyday life and the unimaginably vast and cosmic... [Liu's] work perfectly marries the magic and the mundanity of existence'
SFX
Cixin Liu's first story collection in English continues to provide the same pleasures found in his award-winning novels: the simultaneous honoring and detournement of classic SF tropes, as filtered through a distinctly non-Western worldview and a quirky set of personal sensibilities. He is at once a radical and a conservative, an optimist and a pessimist, a member of the Old Guard and of the New Wave simultaneously. It's a bracing mélange
Locus Magazine
Liu clings determinedly to the idea that the genre can say something useful about the present day. So there is much refreshment to be had in these tales that place ordinary, unaccommodated people up against the genre's favourite concepts: galactic empires! Faustian physics! Timescales long enough to warp the heavens! Most daunting of all the possibility of personal immortality!
The Times
The science may be high-flown and sometimes hard to grasp, but with the cosmic grounded in the commonplace these tales never fail to engage
Financial Times
It affirms Liu as the nerdish, physic-, cosmology- and engineering- obsessed writer who has won many fans among those fond of the 'hard SF' genre
ArtReview
The esteemed Chinese author's second short-story collection grounds high-flying SF speculation in mundane settings and warmly parochial characters. The ideas are big (time travel, first contact with aliens, the end of the universe) but the focus is always on the human element
Financial Times
These are stories of imagination, stories that take you to places you would not have thought of, stories of true science fiction.They are stories worth reading
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