Here’s A Chance To Win Cixin Liu’s The Dark Forest.

Me: I feel optimistic about life as a concept and about humanity and our place in the cosmos. Yes, the universe is vast and indifferent but that fact doesn’t have to be inherently terrifying and doesn’t necessarily mean there’s anything out there that means us harm. There’s reason for hope. 

Liu Cixin: 

aaaaaaa I can’t wait

“Every book I have written is a book of my heart, but WANT is especially dear to me. A near-future thriller set in Taipei, it is an ode to my birth city, the vibrancy of which is deeply rooted in me.” —Cindy Pon, the story behind WANT cover reveal.

Juno mission: Nasa spacecraft successfully enters Jupiter's orbit – watch live

Nasa mission reaches crucial moment as spacecraft attempts make-or-break gravity capture manoeuvre so it can study the solar system’s largest planet. Follow all the developments here

“Welcome to jupiter”

“Welcome to jupiter,” a voice said over the radio at Nasa’s JPL, with scientists cheering, clapping and hugging each other.

The burn time was within one second of the predicted time, putting it in exactly the orbit it needed.

“You’re the best team ever! We just did the hardest thing Nasa has ever done,” shouted, principle investigator of the Juno mission, Scott Bolton.

Astron'art

Films watched in 2015.

Film 184: Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)

Nota: 8.5/10

“What you’re trying to say is you don’t want me to love you.”

Chinese sci-fi writer beats Stephen King for top fiction prize

Hao Jingfang wins Hugo award with dark story of social inequality and injustice in Beijing

“A futuristic tale of urban life in Beijing has won a Chinese novelist a top international prize for science fiction, beating out heavyweight Stephen King for the honour.

Hao Jingfang, 32, won the Hugo Award for best novelette with Folding Beijing, a year after another Chinese writer, Liu Cixin, won the best novel prize for The Three-Body Problem, Xinhua reported on the weekend.

Receiving her award in Kansas City, Missouri, Hao said she was not surprised she had won but had also been prepared to lose.

“In Folding Beijing, I have raised a possibility for the future and how we face the challenges of automated production, technological advances, unemployment and economic stagnation,” she said.

Hao said her book offered a solution to those challenges, but she hoped the situations she described would not become reality.

Hao is from Tianjin, and graduated with a physics degree from Tsinghua University in 2006.

The Hugo Awards, established in 1953, are regarded as the highest honour in science fiction and fantasy. They are named after Hugo Gernsback who was the founder of the American science fiction magazineAmazing Stories.”

Read the full piece here

Congratulations Hao Jingfang!

as above so below  [submission ]

“Oh, heavens! Starry Sky!” AA cried out.

Cheng Xin knew that she was referring to Van Gogh’s  painting. True, the universe really did look like the painting. The painting in her memory was almost a perfect copy of the two-dimensional Solar System before her eyes. Giant planets filled space, the areas of the planets seeming to exceed even the gaps between them. But the immensity of the planets did not give them any sense of substantiality. Rather, they looked like whirlpools in space-time. In the universe, every part of space flowed, churned, trembled between madness and horror like fiery flames that emitted only frost. The Sun and the planets and all substance and existence seemed to be only hallucinations produced by the turbulence of space-time. 

Cheng Xin now recalled the strange feeling she had experienced each time she had looked at Van Gogh’s painting. Everything else in the painting - the trees that seemed to be on fire, and the village and mountains at night - showed perspective and depth, but the starry sky above had no three-dimensionality at all, like a painting hanging in space. 

Because the starry night was two-dimensional.

How could Van Gogh have painted such a thing in 1889? Did he, having suffered a second breakdown, truly leap across five centuries and see the sight before them using only his spirit and delirious consciousness? Or, maybe it was the opposite: He had seen the future, and the sight of this Last Judgment had caused his breakdown and eventual suicide.

Death’s End (p. 529), Cixin Liu

These two I imagine as Zhang Behiai and Wang Miao. 

Infernal Affairs (2002) - dir. Andrew Lau and Alan Mak. 無間道/无间道