Hold Up the Sky

About

A rural Chinese school must use physics to repel an alien invasion. A coal mine's new technology threatens to ignite a fire that will burn for centuries. A civilization spanning light-years faces a moral dilemma that sounds uncomfortably familiar. Cixin Liu's short fiction ranges across time, space, and scale, but every story returns to the same question: what are human beings willing to sacrifice for survival — and is the answer always the same? From the author of The Three-Body Problem, these stories showcase Liu's gift for diamond-hard science fiction that never loses sight of the human beings caught inside its cosmic machinery. The ideas are enormous; the emotional stakes are intimate and precise. A collection that proves the universe's most terrifying problems are also its most personal — and that the distance between a village and a galaxy is shorter than you think.