All Things Starry Sky

"The Sky of Everything": Under the tyranny of physics, we grow roses and battleships [Federal interstellar book list/hard science fiction/sociology/about how to mess up the first interstellar contact gracefully] In the year 2240, you have to choose one of two hells: "Earth" is as safe as a golden nursing home, big data knows better than you when you will die, and boredom is the only terminal disease; The other is Titania (K-291b), a metal graveyard baked by red dwarf stars, torn apart by the twin satellites, and with temperatures that repeatedly jump between absolute zero and lava hell. Engineer Zhong Yuan, who suffered from severe "existential anxiety", resolutely chose the latter. He thought he was signing a pension contract for an interstellar farmer, but he dug through the planet's disguise with a shovel. Welcome to Titania, where there are no laws, only physics. Here, your neighbors are a deep-sea killer whale that writes sonnets, a crazy octopus that lives in code, and a killer robot that's learning abstract painting. Here, the so-called "quiet years" means that the two satellites above your head, ready to tear up the earth's crust at any time, have not gone crazy for the time being; and the so-called "neighborly harmony" means that you have not been killed by the planetary defense system underground that has been sleeping for five million years as a virus. This is not a story about conquest, it is a story about not being digested by the universe. "We came as dust and we will leave as stars."