Fate lies within the light cone. - Liu Cixin

In this cosmic arena, Luo Ji faced not the fancy moves of Chinese sword fighting, resembling dance more than war; nor the flourishes of Western sword fighting, designed to show off the wielder’s skill; but the fatal blows of Japanese kenjutsu. Real Japanese sword fights often ended after a very brief struggle lasting no more than half a second to two seconds. By the time the swords had clashed but once, one side had already fallen in a pool of blood. But before this moment, the opponents stared at each other like statues, sometimes for as long as ten minutes. During this contest, the swordsman’s weapon wasn’t held by the hands, but by his heart. The heart-sword, transformed through the eyes into the gaze, stabbed into the depths of the enemy’s soul. The real winner was determined during this process: In the silence suspended between the two swordsmen, the blades of their spirits parried and stabbed as soundless claps of thunder. Before a single blow was struck, victory, defeat, life, and death had already been decided.

when you read or make science fiction, your sympathy automatically moves away from ideas of ethnicity and nation and toward a higher idea of humanity as a whole; from this vantage, humanity naturally becomes a collective unit, rather than an assembly of different parts divided by ethnicity and nation.

Comrades, revolutionary youths, revolutionary faculty and staff, we must clearly understand the reactionary nature of Einstein’s theory of relativity. This is most apparent in general relativity: Its static model of the universe negates the dynamic nature of matter. It is anti-dialectical! It treats the universe as limited, which is absolutely a form of reactionary idealism.…” As