Environmental Settings And Humanistic Thinking In Liu Cixin's Fictions

Facing the prosperity of Chinese science fiction represented by Liu Cixin's creative works since the 21 st century,literary criticism needs new theoretical tools.On the basis of realizing equal rights among literary types by means of structuralism,starting from environment setting in science fiction texts,this study combs the formation process of all publicly published "core science fiction"(hard science fiction)works by Liu Cixin up to now.This paper adopts the research method of combing environmental settings across texts and explaining the humanistic topics touched by the deductions of these environmental settings.That is,to read Liu Cixin's different works as a set of environment settings.After summing up the common environmental setting which is repeated,the humanistic thinking caused by Liu Cixin's sci-fi works is discussed.These humanistic thoughts mainly include three aspects: epistemology,ethics,art and aesthetics.After completing the above tasks,it is not difficult to find that the humanistic topics in the core science fiction(hard science fiction)are actually limited by the "environment setting" of the text.And the environment setting designed by the same author in his different works is diverse.Therefore,this paper argues that criticism of specific texts and comments on science fiction writers should be distinguish into two levels.We should not rashly criticize the writer's morality because of the plot of a story.Before criticizing,we should pay attention to the diversity of environmental setting used by the author.After that,this paper further explores the reasons why environmental setting has entered contemporary literature,and the personal characteristics of environmental setting in Liu Cixin's works.Finally,with the help of the theoretical framework of DarkoSuvin,a Canadian sci-fi theorist,this paper discusses the genealogy of sci-fi literature,which is the difference and connection between serious literature(pure literature),science fiction literature,Fantasy-fantasy and popular literature.