Despite having written award-winning science fiction for more than three decades and building up an international niche following, Chinese author-engineer Cixin Liu is still something of an enigma. And A VIEW FROM THE STARS, his second anthology of shorter essays and fiction pieces, does very little to dispel that mystique. But it nevertheless offers a wide range of distinctive and absorbing approaches to an ever-evolving genre.

Liu has written seven previous full-length books, including a critically acclaimed trilogy,  Remembrance of Earth’s Past (especially the opening installment, THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM), as well as numerous short fiction works that have appeared primarily in mainland China’s few but influential sci-fi print journals and e-zines.

In A VIEW FROM THE STARS, comprising 13 essays and six stories --- all older material created between 1998 and 2015 --- Liu seems to have selected work that might better situate him within the Western-dominated continuum of sci-fi writing whose greats include household names like Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Herbert, Lem, Gibson, Dick, Bradbury and Adams, among numerous others produced by predominantly “democratic” societies.

"[A VIEW FROM THE STARS] offers a wide range of distinctive and absorbing approaches to an ever-evolving genre.... Where Liu is most challenging and thought-provoking is in his essays..."

Except for the poignant “Heard It in the Morning,” one of his longer and more substantial selections (about a physicist who chooses fatal new knowledge over his family yet inspires his only child to follow his vocation), the stories here easily reach the very good level, but no higher.

Where Liu is most challenging and thought-provoking is in his essays, which are also of somewhat uneven caliber, but in all fairness were pulled from a variety of quite specific and occasional contexts. (None of the selections were written especially for this anthology, which leaves its content nearly a decade in the past --- a significant shortcoming).

Among the essays, a couple stand out. “One and One Hundred Thousand Earths” (2011) draws out a variety of topics linked with human evolution and technological development, which Liu feels are unevenly matched. He flags economic pressures and political tensions of the 1960s as primary motivations for landing humans on the moon --- an area in which he can make unfettered political comment, since communist China did not enter the space age until much later.

Another more in-depth and slightly satirical essay, “The World in Fifty Years” (2005), offers a series of annotated predictions that are now only about three decades away. Here, Liu covers predictable topics such as Energy, Transportation, Life Sciences, War and Scientific Breakthroughs, but along the way he comments in detail about the differences between abstract theories, facts on-the-ground that can’t be denied (oil resources are finite, climate change is real, etc.), and theories for which we have the scientific but not material means. His idea for changing war from a humanitarian, economic and environmental catastrophe into a cleanly competitive process is to use the Olympics as an international battleground. Implementation would be a global head-scratcher, but there have been crazier and more malignant ideas.

In other essays, Liu addresses issues all too familiar to sci-fi fans --- the fluid definitions of fantasy versus sci-fi, the validity of hybrid genres, the competition between fact-based and non-fact-based literature, whether nostalgia has a place in sci-fi, which (in his opinion) is meant to be youth-oriented and always forward-looking.

However, as with any English-language reader, my reception of Cixin Liu’s writing is tempered by the eternal “elephant in the room” question: Am I experiencing the author’s "real voice” from the seven different translators used in A VIEW FROM THE STARS? As fascinating as Liu is --- and every sci-fi aficionado should include him on their bookshelf --- one is left with the impression that mainland China is still pretty much a sci-fi island unto itself, with carefully managed and nuanced political boundaries around what writers can really say.