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James Kidd

The Redemption of Time
by Baoshu
Head of Zeus
3.5/5 stars
There are many ways to classify Baoshu’s debut novel, The Redemption of Time: a sequel, a paraquel (to quote Baoshu himself), a pastiche, an homage. But whichever way you turn, you always meet its inspiration: Liu Cixin’s science-fiction masterpiece, The Three-Body Problem .
The background is told by Baoshu himself in what proves to be a necessary introduction. He was a cítie, meaning “magnets”, punning Chinese shorthand for “diehard fans of Liu Cixin”, and above all his classic Three-Body trilogy, also known as “Remembrance of Earth’s Past”.
After its opening instalments – The Three-Body Problemand The Dark Forest – were published six months apart, in 2007 and 2008, fans such as Baoshu believed their biggest problem was the interminable wait for part three. It was only when Death’s End dropped, in November 2010, that they realised the painful truth. While the book put them out of their long-delayed misery, it created a new agony: “The magnificent, grand arc of the trilogy was at an end, and we felt ourselves drifting away from the story day by day.”
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Grief is not too strong a word to describe Baoshu’s feelings, and yet it was of the most productive kind: “The melancholy that seized [the fans] made me decide to write separate stories for a few of the characters in the trilogy and extend the epic tale a little longer.” His tribute, then titled Three Body X, began as a dialogue between the two main characters from Death’s End, Yun Tianming and AA, but swiftly expanded, along with its audience. This success, Baoshu notes modestly, had more to do with luck than talent or design: “What I wrote was exactly what tens of thousands needed at that moment: more stories from the Three-Body universe.”
Resurrection fantasies are a common part of mourning: see Louis Creed in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, who dreams of bringing his dead son back to life in a magical graveyard. In literary terms this is fan fiction (or fanfic), in which readers express their love for a particular book by writing new stories. Fan fiction is as old as writing itself: the apocrypha of the Bible, or the Han dynasty’s ch’anwei texts. But arguably the most famous, or infamous, modern example is E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey, inspired by her bittersweet sorrow upon finishing Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series.
Strip away the technology and sales, and James isn’t so different from most debut writers who learn through emulation. As André Maurois (is supposed to have) said: “Writing is a difficult trade which must be learned slowly by reading great authors; by trying at the outset to imitate them; by daring then to be original; by destroying one’s first productions.”
What would Maurois have made of Baoshu, a writer whose daring is inextricably linked to his desire to imitate? As his introduction makes clear, the story of how and why Baoshu came to write The Redemption of Time is in many ways the story of The Redemption of Time.
Here is a sequel that flaunts its derivativeness from the start. The English-language title nods one way towards Liu’s “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” (itself a nod to Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, 1913), and another to a sly joke about a bereft Baoshu’s desperation to recapture the experience of first reading Liu Cixin. These debts bleed into the opening line: “A long, long time ago, in another galaxy.”
The story proper opens, aptly enough, with the end of a universe that only signals the creation of a new one: “This ancient and far-flung universe was nearing the end of its own life”; “a terrifying, unanticipated change was about to take place.”

This doesn’t feel cosmic so much as a manifestation of Baoshu’s despondency, reinforced by sentences such as: “But at the end of the universe, at the moment when time was about to cease its flow, this ghost stubbornly wished to continue writing a story that was already concluded.”
You don’t need a PhD in cítie studies to equate the ghost with The Redemption of Time itself. But Baoshu is also preparing us to re-encounter Yun Tianming and AA, who have passed from Liu’s vivid universe into another world, both literally and figuratively. The time is “Terminal Era, Year 1, 0 hours, 0 minutes, 0 seconds”. The place is like a glorious digitised Big Bang, out of which a single being emerges, more in spirit than body, to create a new universe like a virtual-reality god. “The ghost knew that for billions of light-years around this spot there were no other beings who would have recognised a human shape. Its world and species had long ago disappeared, leaving no trace behind.”
Cue the lengthy dialogue between Yun and AA that Baoshu has prepared us for. This Q&A both reviews and remixes Death’s End, joining the dots between narrative gaps that Liu left wide open: how Yun’s brain fell into the hands of the alien Trisolarans and how they broke his will with nightmarish visions of alternative lives. AA’s interjections begin by offering an emotional commentary and proceed by hinting at secrets of her own.
One question frequently asked about The Redemption of Time is: what does Liu make of it? If his approval is implied by the publication of Baoshu’s book, the reasons for his acquiescence might be found in their shared love of story.
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Early in Baoshu’s novel, AA recalls a pivotal moment in Death’s End: Yun sends three fairy tales to humankind, which his earthly love, Cheng Xin, realises contain codes – hidden from the Trisolarans – that could save the Earth. The parallels between Yun’s trilogy and Liu’s are clear, not least if we read The Three-Body Problem as a warning about environmental collapse.
Yun’s first fairy tale, “The New Royal Painter”, is set in the Storyless Kingdom: “The people of such a kingdom were the happiest. Stories meant twists and catastrophes,” Yun notes, his irony a shield perhaps against Trisolaran readers. This kingdom so alarms the charming Princess Dewdrop that she resolves to abandon her homeland and seek unpredictable adventure. “I like the outside more than the palace. I don’t want to live the rest of my life in the Storyless Kingdom. I want to go where there are stories.”
In Baoshu’s telling, AA knows a secret about Princess Dewdrop’s real-life inspiration so extraordinary that it shocks even Yun, who invented her in the first place. What makes this such an audacious gambit is the suggestion that Baoshu is telling Liu Cixin: I know things about your trilogy that you haven’t even dreamed of.
This literary sampling raises intriguing questions about creativity, originality and imitation. Can a novel that owes its existence to an earlier book become a work of art in its own right? Where does Liu end and Baoshu begin? And is Baoshu’s sincerest form of flattery disrupting and even destroying his beloved Three-Body Problem?
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These questions swirl through a story fascinated by ideas of starting afresh, of fleshing out secrets from existing stories (not just Liu, but Homer, Sherlock Holmes, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms), of discovering new worlds in old ones and reincarnating one character in another. They are present, too, in the main plot, in which Yun (Baoshu? Liu?) encounters the spirit of a long dead “master” (Liu?), who tells a creation myth of a perfect, 10-dimensional universe shattered into fragments by a satanic force known as “The Lurker” (Baoshu?).
Our own puny three- or possibly four-dimensional universe is one of these splinters, which blows what is left of Yun’s mind, but not before the spirit suggests he fights the Lurker and restores the perfect universe, possibly by turning himself into a black hole.
The challenge and curious joy of what follows owes much to Baoshu’s ambitious fusion of intellectual space opera to meta-homage and quantum philosophy. This can be pretty mind-boggling, as Yun deconstructs the spirit’s “ideabstractions” to find those pesky missing six (or seven) dimensions. One might, if one chooses, read this as an existential parable (whose life is ours anyway?), a portrait of futuristic religion or a satire on social networking (who do these online avatars think they are?). My own preference is to see The Redemption of Time as a love letter to a story that was itself a love letter to stories.
“I would still let time begin again, so that everything would have another chance.”
Luckily, readers – including Baoshu – can always rewind to page one.


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The Redemption of Time, by Baoshu, transports Liu’s characters into a new universe
The book can be interpreted in many ways, not least as a love letter to the novels that inspired it



The Redemption of Time, by Baoshu, transports Liu’s characters into a new universe.


Liu Cixin’s sci-fi masterpiece, the Three-Body Problem trilogy, gets a mind-boggling fanfic sequel

.css-1mniedq{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;} The Redemption of Time, by Baoshu, transports Liu’s characters into a new universe The book can be interpreted in many ways, not least as a love letter to the novels that inspired it

The Redemption of Time, by Baoshu, transports Liu’s characters into a new universe

The book can be interpreted in many ways, not least as a love letter to the novels that inspired it