Supernova Era by Cixin Liu

Supernova Era by Cixin Liu
Tor Books Hardcover  ISBN/ITEM#: 1250306035
Date: 22 October 2019 List Price $27.99 Amazon US / Amazon UK /
Originally posted in SFRevu: http://www.sfrevu.com/php/Review-id.php?id=18755

When a nearby supernova’s wave of radiation and high energy particles hits Earth, everyone over twelve receives fatal doses of radiation, but younger bodies are able to shrug off the genetic damage. With only months left to live, the world tries desperately to teach the children enough to keep the lights on and the supply of rice sufficient for survival. The adults hope that the new world of children will be one without the old worlds politics and strife, but they evidently hadn’t read Lord of the Flies. Whatever happens, it won’t be the old world, but something only children could imagine.

Supernova Era follows the children of a Chinese Star school, one of the programs designed to give Chinese children a more flexible nature, after the supernova from a star that had been previously hidden behind a dust cloud lights up the sky, fatally irradiating everyone over 12, as adult bodies lack the resiliency to repair their damaged DNA. Fresh from their graduation from middle school, the children are rushed to a valley where they find thousands of other students all being stage for a game. Each group has an area assigned and has to create a country and negotiate with the others to survive. Just to make it interesting, each area is stocked with provisions, including non-lethal guns, but not enough to get by on. Only by combing the resources of countries can they survive.

The adults tell them it’s a game, and when it’s gone on long enough they tell the children the game is over. Actually, it’s just about to begin.

Fresh from the game, the adults explain that they’re all dying and in ten months the children will be on their own. A cadre of four students from one class are chosen on the basis of their performance to replace China’s rulers, and all of them are pressed into apprenticeships with skilled workers in a crash course on keeping society functioning.

For a while, it looks like the children might actually be able to keep the lights on and the people fed, but when the inevitable day comes that they’re totally alone, reality sets in. Fortunately, they’re not actually alone, because a massive quantum field artificial intelligence is there to help them, able to connect to every phone and terminal in China simultaneously and to offer helpful advice, as well as provide a VR space where the entire country can meet and discuss matters of survival.

But survival isn’t enough. Forced into adult roles, the child citizens grow restless, bored, and defiant. Children don’t want to be adults, and they don’t want to maintain the adult world that was left them. Kids, it turns out, just want to have fun. So the leaders attempt to create a new social paradigm, gamifying the world.

In China, that’s largely a peaceful notion, with dreams of space elevators and roller coasters that make bullet trains seem slow. Unfortunately, a similar realization also takes place in the United States, and the toy of choice for Americans is just what you’d expect. Guns. Lots of guns.

All the new world is a game, and America is determined that it’s going to set the rules, so the American Child President calls the world leaders together and proposes that they play the game nations and children have always liked the most. War. After all, the adults left them all these great toys, so wouldn’t it be a shame not to use them?

The supernova also accelerated global warming to the extent that Antartica is becoming habitable, if not comfortable, and the nations of the world agree to hold war games there. There will be rules of play and scoring, but the dying will be quite real, though the author maintains that children don’t have the same qualms about killing and for the most part they don’t seem to mind dying either. Which they do in great numbers as the nations vie for power and position through the games.

Though not as finely crafted as The Three-Body Problem, this is an ambitious thought experiment about the nature of society and human nature.  You’re probably thinking that Supernova Era is a commentary on current affairs, and while it may fit that role, it was written in 1989 and is only now being translated into English. As I said in the intro, it’s impossible not to see this as The Lord of the Flies written on a vastly larger scale, and it’s certainly uncomfortable for us to see the American’s painted with such an ugly brush. Uncomfortable because the portrait is so lifelike and realistic in detail.

The story is told as a retrospective, so you know at the outset that something will survive, unlikely as it might seem, but the world of the children promises to both break with and echo the old world with the intensity that childrens’ passions demand.

From release/information:

From science fiction legend Cixin Liu, the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of The Three-Body Problem, comes a vision of the future that reads like Lord of the Flies on a global scale in Supernova Era.

In those days, Earth was a planet in space.
In those days, Beijing was a city on Earth.
On this night, history as known to humanity came to an end.

Eight light years away, a star has died, creating a supernova event that showers Earth in deadly levels of radiation. Within a year, everyone over the age of thirteen will die.

And so the countdown begins. Parents apprentice their children and try to pass on the knowledge needed to keep the world running.

But when the world is theirs, the last generation may not want to continue the legacy left to them. And in shaping the future however they want, will the children usher in an era of bright beginnings or final mistakes?