*I had started to write this just as I finished up the movie version of This Wandering Earth, having only glanced at a summary of the short story. Now having read through the fifty-ish page novella, I think that I can more clearly articulate my ideas. There’s not much to spoil about each, but if you want a fresh experience, you might want to skip this one. *

Sci-Fi was born as junk culture. As a life-long genre fan, that chip on the shoulder has been ever-present. Renowned writer and famous asshole Harlan Ellison summed up his feelings rather famously: [“... At best, the literary genre called science fiction tells us we must be responsible for one another and for the common good... At worst, it's merely "Sci-Fi," which holds that the world is full of monsters and conspiracies and that logic is beyond us.”]

The Wandering Earth movie is a triumph of spectacle filmmaking in China, proving their industry can make schlock on the scale of Roland Emmerich or Michael Bay. It’s a visual feast of CG grabbing bits of genre tropes from Aliens, The Abyss, 2001, and a host of other movies. It’s got its distinct tone though, where the collective will of the Chinese overrides the Coalition government and rallies the world to avert disaster.

Both the movie and the novel start with the same premise. The Sun is in danger of a helium flash as it becomes a red giant. The Earth would be consumed, leading to the plan of constructing giant engines to push the earth to Proxima Centauri.

The movie picks up a decade into the trip as it nears Jupiter. We follow a couple of teenagers with their grandfather and the teenagers’ Dad on a navigational spaceship with his Cosmonaut friend. (American sci-fi movie, Chinese sci-fi movie, comic relief always drunken Russian.) When they attempt to use Jupiter to increase speed fails, and the Earth is in danger of falling into the gas giant, the movie really begins.

There’s Earthquakes, Icequakes, machines that will crush our heroes to death, and a rogue AI all to deal with as humanity tries to escape the Solar System. The CG is good enough not to be distracting, and there’s plenty of speculative tech on display. Particularly weird is the idea that everyone will use giant spheres to drive in the future.

Their HAL and the faceless coalition of governments are convinced by our heroes plucky spirit to abandon Earth for a chance to take a seed ship to a possible colonization target. Instead, they bet it all on the vision that everyone must come together to restart the one engine to steer away at the last moment. It’s a glorious, spectacular mess that will more than once leave you scratching your head.

I’m a big fan of the angry soldier firing his chain gun at the looming Jupiter on the horizon screaming in fury. It’s the sort of cable movie classic scene we don’t see much of anymore. The dad’s sacrifice is straight out of Independence Day. It’s the movie meant for afternoon cable, or in this case, streaming. The only thing it asks is you read the subtitles. The Wandering Earth is a statement about the state of the film industry in China, but it is mostly empty calories.

The novella is a slower and more meditative story. It’s dense and full of rumination on technology, disaster, social unrest, and hope for the future. The language is dense and poetic and moves through time in almost a montage. I can see why Cixin Liu ended up using a trilogy to tell a story; he has a lot of ideas that need room to stretch out.

It tips its hand in the early chapters that we’re dealing with a metaphor for climate change, as the first chapter depicts a battle between the people who want to move the earth and those that want to build colony ships.

Liu has a style that alternates between info dumps on the technology and these very human moments. We see the main character grow up, explaining to us the changes to Earth as it moves through the solar system.

We also get to see the social and political changes to the planet. People are less worried about personal disputes, and procreation is tightly controlled by lottery.

The journey through the asteroid belt introduces another problem as the Earth is pummeled and marred by passing rocks the leading spaceships try and break up into survivable pieces. There are giant tidal waves and the transformation of the Earth into a barren, frozen wasteland. Our narrator’s dad dies a hero here

Then as the Earth nears Jupiter, the division between people who believe that the Helium Flash is a hoax and the government begins with vocal doubt.

It escalates to a full-on Civil War. Our narrator and his wife spit up on opposing sides, though he is quickly stuck in a hospital after an injury. He and the other injured soldiers lose faith and help the rebels take control of the Earth’s navigational bridge. The government surrenders to prevent anything happening to the guidance of Earth. Here, the action stops for a grand description of all the technology at work.

Then the rebels march the government heads out to the middle of the ocean to take the heaters out of their suits. It happens to coincide with the moment that Sun’s transformation begins. A conceit that sets up their sacrifice renewing humanity’s commitment to cooperation. Our narrator dies dreaming of the Earth melting and green in the light of Proxima Centauri and reuniting with his dead wife.

That’s basically fifty pages of a trade paperback. Liu moves through the story with pure utility. He peppers songs throughout along with the refrain, “Ahh, my wandering Earth.” I’m reading in translation, obviously, so in Chinese it might move less methodically. There are so many big ideas about how all this works; much of the world-building is done in massive paragraphs.

This conflict isn’t just a case of the movie not being as good as the book. The stories are from entirely different perspectives on Science Fiction and its utility. Liu, as a writer (more on that when I review the whole anthology), is interested in ideas and different concepts about how technology changes society. The novella is very obviously a metaphor for Global Warming, but also the way that central planning is used to solve problems.

The movie is less concerned with presenting much of a point of view. The Chinese heroes and army manage to rally the world for the climax, but it doesn't fee like a philosophical celebration. Considering that China seems to want docile consumers who conform and behave, it doesn't surprise me that blockbusters made on the Mainland would try and escape the trappings of subtext.

In Hollywood Science Fiction doesn't fare much better. There's been a resurgence of thoughtful movies like The Arrival and Ex Machine, but more of than not it's superheroes, Star Wars, or disaster movies with tinges of sci-fi. Television seems to fare a little better, but even there the big market stuff is more action than cerebral.

I think that problem isn't the genre, and it might just be that audiences want escapism. After four decades of the Blockbuster as the de facto business model in Hollywood, we're trained for movies to be significant with broad appeal.

It feels like that inherent conflict between cheap entertainment and high art is in a constant tug of war. As every stripe of sci-fi has become mainstream, it feels like the best of science fiction is left behind.