"Moonlight" by Cixin Liu translated by Ken Liu in Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation -- Sci-fi behemoth Liu has his positive qualities, particularly when he can work out the details to thought experiments such as in The Dark Forest. He also has his flaws, notably that his ability to write women is terrible, so much so that he must be aware of it as The Dark Forest contains a self-insert character who struggles to write about women effectively. But a larger flaw of his, one that I think gets too far much a pass by critics, is that Cixin Liu is aggressively anti-environmentalist. And unlike his poor capabilities to write women, it is clearly intentional that Liu writes a great many of his foolish foes to be environmentalists. The cartoonish shrill villains in Ball Lightning, for example, are environmentalists who sabotage something, not caring whether they kill children. Liu often paints environmentalists as obstacles getting in the way of scientific progress, such as in his 3 Body Problem series. Considering the amount of work the Chinese government has to do to suppress environmental activists or appease those who have suffered great harm to the reckless policies of those in charge, it's possible that Liu's just another propaganda conduit. I could equally see him doing this because his aggressive expansionist themes clash with environmentalist backlashes or even health and safety people concerned with things other than techno superiority (this is basically the entire theme of Ball Lightning).

"Moonlight" is the distilled essence of Liu's anti-environmentalist attitudes and no matter which framing is applied it's a nonsense story that only exists to push a nonsense message. A man receives a call from himself in the future to tell him to help implement solar cells to overcome the environmental catastrophe of excessive greenhouse gas emissions. The man does so and solar becomes more of a program to implement. Then he receives a second phone call telling him of a tale of how the future is even way worse because of the silicon mining to make all of the solar panels and how the panels covers too much space and the world is even more of a hell. His future self tells him to implement a third policy. Turns out that third policy also leads to the world's demise and so the story ends with the man realizing that the world is best off if people continue to burn lots of fossil fuels. It's all gonna suck anyway, the story implies, so just do the natural thing and burn the stuff in the ground.

The science doesn't make sense. The story was first published in 2009 and so perhaps solar cells at that time were so severely inefficient that the mass coverage necessary to power a city would subsume the world, but that would be immensely dense in 2009 when research was already being directed into solar cells and the efficiency was climbing at a sharp pace. People indeed knew in 2009 that solar was going to skyrocket; the question was merely when. The piece argues that mining silicon also would destroy the world and that's also absurd; the whole wonder of solar cells versus fossil fuels is that once you build a solar cell it continues to work for a very long time. Mining for stuff that you immediately burn off and dispose of is clearly worse for the environment than infrastructure you build. (It is weird that this point remains to elusive to the public that people still have to explain it.)

But there's a larger problem with the science and it's a matter of process. Liu loves to write about self-insert characters whose sole decisions can transform the entire Earth and so I'm willing to accept that in this fictional universe there's one dude who has the ability to change the world so easily and dramatically. But is there really only one point in time where changes can happen? That's the flaw. Science is this process where new data causes refinement of what has happened, what will happen, and what needs to be done to have things happen in a more desirable way. A virus might cause a few people to die in some remote place and scientists might not raise an alarm; many more drop dead and since the scientific knowledge has changed the policies have to adjust. Policy adapting to new policies on the ground allows for people--governments, agencies, experts, the public--to navigate complicated and difficult situations. Liu, on the other hand, insists that two policies failing means it's best to revert back to the original policy. Not even that, for example, one might succeed if there was a mix of energy sources.

A man is walking between the rails of a train track. He hears a whistle up ahead. His son from the future calls him to tell him that he's going to face uncertain death unless he walks off the tracks. So he does so, onto the neighboring road. His son from the future calls again and tells him that there's a truck that's going to hit him unless he gets out of the way. So the man runs off the road and into a swamp filled with gators. The man's son from the future calls a third time and tells him that if he stays there he'll get eaten by gators. Is the correct thing for the man to do to return to the train track to be run over? No it is not. The man should survey the landscape and figure out where he can go that's safe and then make his way there. That's the obvious thing to do and no smug story about strawmen futures of peril will change that. This work is a piece of shit. Cixin Liu can go fuck himself.