In the future, when the Sun runs out of fuel and begins to expand, Earthlings dig thousands of mountain-sized rockets into their planet's surface and use them to propel their home away from certain destruction. Billions die, as to turn the Earth into an effective mobile ark, its natural rotation must be halted. The resulting tsunamis wipe out entire continents, and with them all life not safely ensconced underground.

This is the plot of  "The Wandering Earth", a Chinese film adapted from a short story of the same name by Liu Cixin, China's leading writer of science fiction. After taking over $700m in cinemas, mostly in China, it launched on Netflix in May, making it the first Chinese sci-fi movie to go global. Like much Chinese sci-fi, the story is both darker and more grandiose than many Western blockbusters. The implicit loss of human life is on a par with some Marvel movies, but without the superheroes to soften the blow. Startlingly, the moral authority of the security forces is never challenged in the film. Far from being villains, they help save the world.

As China's economy has grown over the past 30 years, its sci-fi writers' vision has expanded, too. Their stories tend to focus on Earth itself—eschewing galaxies far far away and long ago—while being conceived on a stupendous scale. One recurring wide-angle shot in "The Wandering Earth", for example, shows the planet gliding through space on a pincushion of blue flame, its atmosphere trailing off into a vacuum.

Other Chinese science-fiction stories unfold in similarly mindboggling dimensions. In "Mountain", another tale by Mr Liu, the alien ship that enters Earth's orbit is so massive that its gravitational pull creates a tower of water in the ocean off the coast of Taiwan, up which the protagonist ascends. In another, "Sun of China", a rural man moves to Beijing and finds work cleaning skyscraper windows. His industry and enterprise eventually lead him to manage the great artificial sun which China launches to light up its cities.

Chinese sci-fi took its first step towards the global stage in 2014 with the English publication of "The Three-Body Problem", the first book in a trilogy by Mr Liu. It tells the story of Earth's first contact with an alien civilisation, the Trisolarans, whose planet is stuck in climatic chaos as it oscillates wildly between the three stars in its stellar system. The Trisolarans covet the environmental stability that comes with the relative dullness of Earth's solar system and, armed with technological superiority, plan to take over. Barack Obama name-checked the book while he was president. Mark Zuckerberg liked it. The boss of Xiaomi, one of China's biggest smartphone companies, has made the trilogy required reading for his employees. Li Yuanchao, China's former vice-president, is also a fan.

Mr Liu's epic yarns have been well-received abroad, but China's darkest sci-fi stories have not yet left home. Some of the most popular are written by his contemporary, Han Song. Mr Liu has been compared to the British futurist Arthur C. Clarke, says Mingwei Song of Wellesley College in Boston; Mr Han, meanwhile, is sometimes likened to Philip K. Dick, an American dystopian. Mr Liu's stories are scientifically rigorous; Mr Han's are allegorical and uncanny—but also grittier and more subversive. Mr Liu offers lucid descriptions of hypothetical Chinese futures. Mr Han conjures parallels of the present.

The writers of Chinese science fiction anticipated their genre's rising profile. In 2010 Fei Dao, another author, described its devotees as a "lonely hidden army". Chinese sci-fi, he said, might "unexpectedly rush out and change heaven and Earth”. That has not quite happened yet. But in the future, anything is possible.

Source: The Economist