![]() Science fiction might be the genre best suited to Chinese society today the breakneck pace of change becomes a constant, and to live in the present is to anticipate what is to come. (A recent London Review of Books piece called his Three-Body trilogy, published in English in 2016, “one of the most ambitious works of science fiction ever written.”) Like life in Beijing, the experience was magnificent and exhausting and thrilling and flawed. ![]() In Beijing this summer, I read about two thousand pages of work by Cixin Liu, possibly the world’s most important living science-fiction author and certainly among humanity’s most imaginative prognosticators. I’d just never been so immersed in it before. It’s been said that the past is a foreign country, and I’ve come to believe that the future is too. ![]() In the final room, an animated video envisioned some sort of building project in space-on Mars, maybe?-but I couldn’t really muster the energy to watch it. I’m a Berliner, and the most dizzying display was a table of alternate models for the Reichstag dome, a dozen potential realities in balsa and cardboard. ![]() We had reached the end of an exhibition of architectural models from the firm Foster + Partners: London’s Gherkin, a cruise-ship terminal, sundry airports. My boyfriend and an acquaintance thumbed through some catalogues near the exit and managed to ignore me. “I’m so tired of the future.” It was late in the day at the Tsinghua University Art Museum, and I was getting whiny. ![]()
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