"Like a Thief in Broad Daylight"

Slavoj Zizek

Leaders like Lenin and Mao succeeded (for some time, at least) because they invented new proverbs, which means that they imposed new customs that regulated daily lives. One of the best Goldwynisms recounts how, after being told that critics had complained that there were too many old clichés in his films, Sam Goldwyn wrote a memo to his scenario department: ‘We need more new clichés!’ He was right, and this is a revolution’s most difficult task – to create ‘new clichés’ for ordinary daily life.
It is as if the two tendencies (resistance and self-disintegration) move at different levels and cannot meet, so that we get futile protests at the same time as immanent decay and there is no way of bringing the two together in a coordinated attempt to emancipate the world from capitalism. How did it come to this? While most of the Left desperately try to protect workers’ rights against the onslaught of global capitalism, it is almost exclusively the most ‘progressive’ capitalists themselves (from Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg) who talk about post-capitalism – as if the very concept of the passage from capitalism as we know it to a new post-capitalist order is being appropriated by capitalism itself.
Constantly bombarded by so-called ‘free choices’, forced to make decisions for which we are mostly not even properly qualified (or about which we possess inadequate information), increasingly we experience our freedom as what it effectively is: a burden that deprives us of the true choice of change.
Far from being invisible, social relationality, in its very fluidity, is the object of marketing and exchange: in ‘cultural capitalism’, one no longer sells (and buys) objects that ‘bring’ cultural or emotional experience, one directly sells (and buys) such experiences. And since social relationship is directly marketed, this means that personal relations of domination are, too – I pay others to act as my servants... The power of the market economy to reflexively appropriate resistance to itself seems inexhaustible.
when Marx defines exchange value as the mode of appearance of value, we should mobilize the entire Hegelian weight of the opposition between essence and appearance: essence exists only insofar as it appears – it does not pre-exist its appearance. In the same way, the value of a commodity is not its intrinsic substantial property which exists independently of its appearance in exchange. <> This is also why we should abandon the attempt to expand the definition of value so that all kinds of labour are recognized as a source of value – recall the great feminist demand of the 1970s to recognize housework
how will the exchange of populations be organized? When similar things happened in the past, social changes occurred in a spontaneous way, with violence and devastation; such a prospect is catastrophic in today’s conditions, with weapons of mass-destruction so readily available. One thing is clear: national sovereignty will have to be radically redefined and new levels of global cooperation invented.
We shouldn’t be shocked at China, but rather at ourselves, when we accept the same regulation while believing that we retain our full freedom and that our media just help us to realize our goals (at least in China people are fully aware that they are regulated). {um...}
The biggest achievement of the new cognitive-military complex is that direct and obvious oppression is no longer necessary: individuals are much better controlled and ‘nudged’ in the desired direction when they continue to experience themselves as free and autonomous agents of their own life.
In the late 1920s, none other than Stalin for a while financially supported the ‘human ape’ project proposed by the biologist Ilya Ivanov (a follower of Alexander Bogdanov, the target of Lenin’s critique in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism ): the idea was that by coupling humans and orangutans one could create a perfect worker and soldier impervious to pain, tiredness and bad food... the humans he used were black males from the Congo, since they were supposed to be genetically closer to apes – the Soviet state financed an expensive expedition there.
supplement the famous passage in The Communist Manifesto, adding that sexual ‘one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible’, that in the domain of sexual practices ‘all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned’, and that capitalism tends to replace the standard normative heterosexuality with a proliferation of unstable shifting identities and/or orientations? Today’s celebration of ‘minorities’ and ‘marginals’ is the predominant majority position:
The point is thus that fetishistic disavowal of ideology renders subjects more enslaved to the ideology than simple ignorance of its functioning.
One should always bear in mind that a permanent people’s presence means a permanent state of emergency – so what happens when people get tired, when they are no longer able to sustain the tension?
In capitalist countries there is, of course, another way to ease popular pressure: (more or less) free elections – recently in Egypt and Turkey, but they also worked in 1968 in France. One should never forget that the agent of popular pressure is always a minority – the number of active participants in the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 against global economic equality was much closer to 1 per cent than to the 99 per cent of its slogan.
As Marx knew long ago, the secret is in the form itself. In this sense, in a democracy, every ordinary citizen is effectively a king – but a king in a constitutional democracy, a king who only formally decides, whose function is to sign measures proposed by an executive administration. This is why the problem of democratic rituals is homologous to that of constitutional democracy: how do we protect the dignity of the king? How do we maintain the appearance that the king effectively decides, when we all know this is not true?
On the contrary, when obscenity penetrates the political scene, ideological mystification is at its strongest: the true political, economic and ideological stakes are more invisible than ever. In short, public obscenity is always sustained by a concealed moralism, its practitioners secretly believe they are fighting for a cause, and it is at this level that they should be attacked.
A listener asks: ‘Is it true that Rabinovitch won a new car in the lottery?’ The radio answers: ‘In principle yes, it’s true, only it wasn’t a new car but an old bicycle, and he didn’t win it, it was stolen from him.’ The same goes for the French presidential elections of 2017: is it true that, in a great display of anti-fascist unity, the people of France elected an outsider and defeated a threat to Europe? In principle yes, only the victorious Macron represents a Europe out of touch with ordinary people, i.e. the very politics which gave such strength to Le Pen, and he is not an outsider but the establishment in its purest form.
The sad prospect that awaits us is that of a future in which, every four years, we will be thrown into a panic, scared by some form of ‘neo-fascist danger’, and in this way be blackmailed into casting our vote for the ‘civilized’ candidate in meaningless elections lacking any positive vision . . . Meanwhile we’ll be able to sleep in the safe embrace of global capitalism with a human face. The obscenity of the situation is breathtaking: global capitalism is now presenting itself as the last protection against fascism;
We should, of course, never forget that Bannon is the beacon of the alt-right while Clinton supports many progressive causes, such as the fight against racism and sexism. However, at the same time we should never forget that the LGBT+ struggle can also be co-opted by mainstream liberalism against ‘class essentialism’ of the Left.
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Trotsky thus targeted the material (technical) grid of power (railways, electricity, water supply, post, etc.), the grid without which state power hangs in the void and becomes inoperative. Let the mobilized masses fight the police and storm the Winter Palace (an act without any real relevance): the essential move is accomplished by a tiny, dedicated minority... <> Instead of indulging in a miserable moralist-democratic rejection of such a procedure, one should rather analyse it coldly and think about how to apply it today, since this insight of Trotsky has gained new actuality with the progressive digitalization of our lives in what could be characterized as the new era of posthuman power.
the lesson of the last decades is that neither massive grass-roots protests (as we have seen in Spain and Greece) nor well-organized political movements (parties with elaborated political visions) are enough – we also need a narrow, striking force of dedicated ‘engineers’ (hackers, whistle-blowers . . .) organized as a disciplined conspiratorial group. Its task will be to ‘take over’ the digital grid, to rip it out of the hands of corporations and state agencies that now de facto control it.

The disintegration of the shared ethical basis of our lives is clearly signalled by the abolition of universal military conscription in many developed countries: the very notion of being ready to risk one’s life for a common-cause army appears more and more pointless, if not directly ridiculous, so that the armed forces, as the body in which all citizens equally participate, are gradually becoming a mercenary force. This disintegration affects the two sexes differently: men are slowly turning into perpetual adolescents, with no clear passage of initiation into maturity
I am not sure which position I should take in a particular political struggle, but when I learn the position of my enemy, I automatically assume the opposite one. One should add that Lenin provided a scathing critique of this stance (ironically, his target was Rosa Luxemburg6). Such was the case in the cultural Cold War: when, in the late 1940s, Western culture was perceived as promoting universalist cosmopolitanism (under Jewish influence), pro-Soviet Communists from the USSR to France decided to turn patriotic, promoting their own cultural tradition and attacking imperialism for destroying it.
although Immanuel Kant’s views are racist, he nonetheless contributed to the process which led to contemporary emancipatory struggles – to put it bluntly, there is no Marxism and no socialism without Kant.)
Walter Benn Michaels: The problem is that the whole idea of cultural identity is incoherent, and that the dramas of appropriation it makes possible provide an increasingly economically stratified society with a model of social justice that addresses everything except that economic stratification.
We should persist in the properly dialectical approach: such an acceptance of identity in no way invalidates universality, it merely renders it ‘concrete’ in the Hegelian sense... Each way of life implies its own universality: it is not just about itself but also about how to relate to others, and the two cannot be separated.
brutal Chinese colonization of Tibet is a fact, but this fact should not blind us to what kind of country Tibet was before 1949, and even before 1959 – a harsh feudal society with an extreme hierarchy regulated in detail.
what about the opposite strategy, which resides in strengthening local traditions in order to make colonial domination more efficient? No wonder the British colonial administration of India elevated The Laws of Manu – an ancient detailed justification for and manual of the caste system – into the seminal text to be used as a reference for establishing the legal code that would render possible the most efficient domination of India;
Many tribes wisely spend the income earned from casinos and mining rights on this restoration or, as Richard Wagner put it, ‘die Wunde schliesst der Speer nur der sie Schlug’ (only the spear that struck you heals the wound).
Susan Buck-Morss: human universality emerges in the historical event at the point of rupture. It is in the discontinuities of history that people whose culture has been strained to the breaking point give expression to a humanity that goes beyond cultural limits. And it is our emphatic identification with this raw, free, and vulnerable state, that we have a chance of understanding what they say. Common humanity exists in spite of culture and its differences. A person’s nonidentity with the collective allows for subterranean solidarities that have a chance of appealing to universal, moral sentiment, the source today of enthusiasm and hope.
The French colonized Haiti, but the French Revolution also provided the ideological foundation for the rebellion which liberated the slaves and established independent Haiti; the process of decolonization was set in motion when the colonized nations demanded for themselves the same rights that the West took for itself. In short, one should never forget that the West provided the very standards by which it (as well as its critics) measures its criminal past.
Against this view, Freud and Lacan consistently emphasized that perversion, far from being subversive, is the hidden obverse of power: every form of power needs perversion as its inherent transgression which sustains it. In order to be operative, every ideological edifice has to be inconsistent: its explicit norms have to be supplemented by higher-level implicit norms which tell us how to deal with those explicit norms (when to obey them and when to violate them). In other words, an ideology does not just consist of its explicit norms; it always comprises an obscene underside which violates those explicit norms – this inconsistency is what makes it an ideology.
isn’t Lubitsch’s indirectness also conditioned by the Hays Code censorship? Adorno wrote somewhere that a really good film would follow all the rules of Hays Code, although not in order to obey the law but out of an immanent necessity
This is how ideology works in classic Hollywood: nothing is totally repressed, everything can be unambiguously signalled in a codified way (if someone remarks that a guy smells of perfume, it means he is gay, etc.)
"Climb Every Mountain": Significantly, when The Sound of Music was shown in (still socialist) Yugoslavia in the late 1960s, this scene – the three minutes of this song – was the only part of the film which was censored. The anonymous socialist censor thereby displayed his profound sense of the truly dangerous power of Catholic ideology: far from being the religion of sacrifice, of renunciation of earthly pleasures (in contrast to the pagan affirmation of the life of passions), Catholicism offers a devious stratagem to indulge in our desires without having to pay the price for them,
Miranda’s lover feels castrated because he gets too much from her, more than he really asked for – he asked her to voice all the obscenities that pop up in her mind, and what he gets is the exception on which his universality was based. He experiences castration here – not lack, but this ‘too much’ is castrating.
the way MeToo addresses the issue. In downplaying the complexity of sexual interaction, it not only blurs the line between lewd misconduct and criminal violence but also cloaks invisible forms of extreme psychological violence as politeness and respect.
One should also bear in mind that patriarchal domination corrupts both of its poles... Consequently, one should also talk about female manipulation and emotional brutality (ultimately as a desperate reply to male domination): women fight back any way they can. And one should admit that, in many parts of our society in which traditional patriarchy is to a large extent undermined, men are no less under pressure, so the proper strategy should be to address male anxieties too and to strive for a pact between women’s struggle for emancipation and male concerns.
The underlying paradox is that love, as the Absolute, should not be posited as a direct goal; it should retain the status of a by-product, of something we receive as an undeserved grace. Perhaps there is no greater love than that of a revolutionary couple, where each of the two lovers is ready to abandon the other at any moment if the revolution demands it.
Marx: Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
However, there are today, in our Western world, two other forms of the opium of the people: the opium and the people. As the rise of populism demonstrates, the opium of the people is also ‘the people’ itself, the fuzzy populist dream destined to obfuscate our own antagonisms. And, last but not least, for many among us the opium of the people is opium itself, escape into drugs –

"The Dark Forest"

Never quite found a good opportunity to read this in Chinese, and finally did the audiobook in six days. Despite many grumbles about Liu Cixin's portrayal of an ideal female love interest, I still have to admit that this is a worthy follow-up to his groud-breaking 《三体》.

• “Romance of the Three Kingdoms4. You won’t understand that.”
  I understand a small part, like how an ordinary person who has a hard time understanding a mathematics monograph can make out some of it through enormous mental effort, and by giving full play to the imagination.
  “Indeed, that book lays out the highest levels of human schemes and strategy.”
• “Academics didn’t use to study aliens. They sifted through piles of old paper and become celebrities that way. But later the public got tired of the cultural necrophilia of that old crew, and that’s when I came along.”
• You ever read a book by Liang Xiaosheng called Floating City?”... “Right. I read it when I was a kid. Shanghai’s about to fall into the ocean, and a group of people go house to house seizing life preservers and then destroying them en masse, for the sole purpose of making sure that no one would live if everyone couldn’t.
• He was especially pleased with his control over the pace this time. He had known her for just one week, and the breakup proceeded smoothly, as elegantly as a rocket discarding its booster.
• On the day I can no longer read you or figure you out, but you can easily understand me, that’s when you’ll finally have grown up.” And then I grew up like you said, and you could no longer so easily understand your son. I know you must have felt at least some sorrow at that. But your son is indeed becoming the kind of person you’d hoped for, someone not particularly likeable, but capable of succeeding in the complicated and dangerous realm of the navy.
• She had an elegant style, and a mature lucidity that her peers lacked. But this style was not complemented by the novels’ content. Reading them was like looking at dewdrops on the undergrowth: pure and transparent, but distinguished from each other only by the way the light reflected and refracted through them and how they rolled about on the leaves, fusing together where they met and separating when they fell, until they evaporated entirely within the space of a few minutes after sunrise. Every time he read one of her books, beneath the graceful style he was left with one question: What do these people live on if they spend twenty-four hours a day in love?
• He imagined every one of her favorite foods, the color and style of every item of clothing in her dresser, the decorations on her mobile phone, the books she read, the music on her media player, the Web sites she visited, the movies she liked; but never her makeup, because she didn’t need makeup.… Like a creator outside of time, he wove the different stages of her life together and gradually came to discover the endless pleasure of creation.
• Luo Ji sensed that the man was incredibly experienced. So much was hidden behind his decorum, but the gleam in his eyes betrayed the presence of secrets. Luo Ji was fascinated by the man’s gaze, like a devil and an angel, like an atom bomb and an identical-size precious stone.…
• “The Wallfacers are undertaking the most difficult mission in human history. They will truly be on their own, their souls closed off to the world, to the entire universe. Their only communication partner and sole spiritual support will be themselves. Shouldering this great responsibility, they will pass through the long years alone, so let me speak for all humanity and offer them our deepest respect.
• One thing in particular that struck him was the total absence of landscapes, the mark of a mature aesthetic sensibility: hanging landscape paintings in a house situated in the Garden of Eden would be as pointless as pouring a bucket of water into the ocean.
• In space warfare, nuclear bombs may be low-efficiency weapons, since nuclear explosions produce no shock wave in the vacuum of space and only negligible pressure from the light they generate, so they don’t produce the mechanical impact found in explosions in the atmosphere. All their energy is released in the form of radiation and electromagnetic pulses, and, at least for humans, radiation and EM shielding on spacecraft is a fairly mature technology.”
• A twenty-megaton nuclear explosion, for example, has a fireball that can last for over twenty seconds. The superbomb we’re designing is two hundred megatons, and its fireball will burn for several minutes. Think about that. What will it look like?”
  “A small sun.”
  “Correct! Its fusion structure is very like that of a star, and it reproduces stellar evolution over a very abbreviated period. So the mathematical model we need to construct is essentially the model of a star.”
• “Education: She’s got at least a bachelor’s, but less than a doctorate.”
  Luo Ji nodded. “Yes, yes. She’s knowledgeable, but not to the point where it calcifies her. It only makes her more sensitive to life and to the world.”
• Shi Qiang smiled scornfully. “Dr. Luo, how many people have you seen?”
  “Not as many as you, of course, but I know that there’s no perfect person in the world, much less a perfect woman.”
• “A wide range of time, from perhaps ancient Greece through the Second World War. What’s key is the spiritual commonalities I mentioned: duty and honor above all, and, in time of need, to unhesitatingly lay down one’s life. You may have noticed that after the Second World War, this spirit vanished from the military in democratic and authoritarian countries alike.”
  “The army is drawn from society, so it would mean that the past spirit you speak of would need to be restored throughout society.”
  “Our views agree on this point.”
  “But, Mr. Tyler, that is impossible.”
  “Why? We have four hundred years. In the past, human society used exactly that amount of time to evolve from the era of collective heroism to one of individualism, so why can’t we use the same amount of time to evolve back?”
• Looking at her innocently holding the wineglass stirred the most delicate parts of his mind. She drank when invited. She trusted the world and had no wariness about it at all. Yes, everything in the world was lying in wait to hurt her, except here. She needed to be cared for here.
  You’re like the blank space in a traditional painting: pure, but to a mature appreciation, infinitely appealing, he thought as he looked at her.
• “Yes, if it continues to develop. Let its soul and spirit permeate the space force so that your organization will be part of it forever.”
  “And you value that so highly because?” The sarcasm in the old man’s voice grew stronger.
  “Because it’s one of the few armed forces available to humanity that uses lives as a weapon. You know, fundamental science has been frozen by the sophons, and this imposes corresponding limitations on advances in computer science and artificial intelligence. In the Doomsday Battle, space fighters will still be piloted by humans, and that requires an army who possesses that spirit. Ball lightning requires a close-range attack.”
• “Annihilation. That’s the highest respect a civilization can receive. They would only feel threatened by a civilization they truly respect.”
• When an ordinary person spoke with one of them, they would always be thinking, He’s a Wallfacer, his words can’t be trusted, and those suggestions would present a barrier to communication. But when two Wallfacers spoke with each other, the suggestions that existed in both minds cross-multiplied those communication barriers. Such an exchange, in fact, rendered anything either side said meaningless, so that communication itself lost all significance. This was why there had been no private interaction between Wallfacers.
• The three people he was about to kill were innocent, too. In the years before the Trisolar Crisis, they had made what, looking back now, seemed like particularly meager investments, and had crept carefully over the thin ice toward the dawn of the space age. That experience had imprisoned their thinking. They had to be destroyed for the sake of interstellar-capable spacecraft. Their deaths could be viewed as their final contribution to the cause of humanity’s endeavors in space.
• Through their visors he saw everyone in the crowd screaming in terror, and from the shape of their lips he knew that their words included the ones he was expecting:
  “Meteor shower!”
  Everyone in the photo group turned their thrusters to full power and sped back to the station, trailing tails of white mist behind them,
• The French representative left his seat in his excitement. “Which is more tragic for humanity: the loss of the ability and right to think freely, or defeat in this war?” <> “Of course the latter is more tragic!” Hines retorted, standing up. “Because under the first condition, humanity at least has the chance of regaining independent thought!”
  “Not so. In thought control, there must be a controller and a subject. If someone voluntarily places a seal in their own mind, then tell me, where is the control in that?” <> The assembly fell silent again. Feeling that success was near, Hines went on, “I propose that the mental seal be opened up, like a public facility. It would have but one proposition: belief in a victory in the war. Anyone willing to gain that faith through the use of the seal could, totally voluntarily, take advantage of the facility.
• When the spiral flow of ejected matter expands outward from the sun like an unwound mainspring, its thickness eventually passes Mars’s orbit, at which point a magnificent chain reaction begins.
  “First, three terrestrial planets—Venus, Earth, and Mars—pass through the sun’s spiraling atmosphere, losing speed due to the atmospheric friction and turning into three giant meteors that eventually crash into the sun. But well before this happens, the Earth’s atmosphere is stripped away by the intense friction of the solar matter. The oceans evaporate, and the lost atmosphere and evaporated oceans turn the Earth into a giant comet whose tail extends along its orbit to wrap all the way around the sun. The surface of the Earth returns to the fiery magma sea of its birth, where no life can survive.
  “When Venus, Earth, and Mars crash into the sun, it exacerbates the sun’s ejection of solar matter into space.
• What state the sun will be in and how the Solar System will have been transformed after the chain reaction finishes and the four dense terrestrial planets and four gas giants are consumed is unknowable. But one thing is certain: For life and for civilization, this will be a hell even crueler than attack by Trisolaris...
  “This is your strategy: death for both sides. Once everything is prepared, with all of the stellar hydrogen bombs in place on Mercury, you will use it to coerce Trisolaris to surrender and gain the ultimate victory for humanity.
• “But you had one major slipup. Why did the first test have to be carried out on Mercury? There would have been plenty of time to bring the bombs there in a later phase, but maybe you got impatient and wanted to see the outcome of a stellar hydrogen bomb blast there. You saw it: lots of rock matter blasted to escape velocity, perhaps even exceeding your expectations. You were satisfied. But this provided the final confirmation of my hypothesis.
• But it was grand, and even beautiful. If the chain reaction triggered by Mercury’s fall actually took place, then it would be the most magnificent movement of the entire symphony of the Solar System … although, unfortunately, humanity would only be able to enjoy the first section. Mr. Rey Diaz, you are a Wallfacer with the makings of a god. It is my honor to become your Wallbreaker.”
• The next discovery was an incredible shock to Luo Ji, although the thing itself was still quite plain. The nurse pointed to the cup of milk and told him that it had been put into a heating cup especially for hibernators, because the people of this era generally did not drink hot liquids.
• The woman had her umbrella—or, rather, her bicycle—positioned on her back like a backpack, and then it stood up in back of her and opened overhead to form two coaxial propellers that started up silently, turning in opposition to offset rotational torque. Then she lifted slowly up into the air and hopped over the railing beside her into the abyss that had so dazzled him.
• The speaker was Keiko Yamasuki. She said, “Mr. Chair, I have something to say.”
  The chair said, “Dr. Yamasuki, you are not a Wallfacer. You are allowed to attend today’s meeting due to your special status, but you do not have the right to speak.”
• Keiko Yamasuki smiled derisively, revealing a seldom-seen expression that conjured up for the assembly an ancient picture of moonlight reflecting off the scales of a snake in the grass.
  “You’re being naïve,” she said.
• I used the mental seal to imprint this proposition on myself: Everything about my Wallfacer plan is entirely correct.”
  The assembly exchanged amazed glances, and Yamasuki even turned to her husband with the same expression.
  Hines flashed her a small smile and nodded. “Yes, dear, if you’ll permit me to call you that. Only by doing that could I obtain the spiritual strength necessary to execute the plan. Yes, right now I believe all I’ve done is correct. I absolutely believe it, regardless of what reality says. I used the mental seal to turn myself into my own god, and God can’t repent.”
• But environmental deterioration was also a major factor. The environmental laws were there, but in those pessimistic times, the general attitude was, ‘What the hell is environmental protection for? Even if Earth turns into a garden, isn’t it all going to the Trisolarans anyway?’ Eventually, environmental protection was seen as no less treasonous to humanity than the ETO.
• “When I entered hibernation, desertification was just starting,” another neighbor said. “It’s not what you imagine, like the desert advancing from the Great Wall. No! It was patchwork erosion. Perfectly fine plots of land in the interior began turning to desert simultaneously, and it spread from those points, like how a damp cloth dries in the sun.”
• you could pull up a complete command console, including a captain’s interface, which effectively made the entire ship, even the passageways and bathrooms, a bridge, command module, captain’s room, and operations room! To Zhang Beihai, it felt like the evolution from a client-server model to a browser-server model in late-twentieth-century computer networks.
• Oil film was a substance found in Neptune’s rings. At high temperatures, it turned into a rapidly diffusing gas that then condensed into nanoparticles in space, forming space dust. It was so called because when it evaporated, it became highly diffusive, so a small quantity of the substance could form a large patch of dust, like a tiny droplet of oil spreading into an oil film of molecular thickness across a large area of water. Dust formed from this oil film had another property: Unlike other types of space dust, “oil-film dust” was not easily dispersed by the solar wind.
  It was the discovery of oil film that made the Fog Umbrella Project possible. The plan was to use nuclear blasts in space to evaporate and spread the oil-film substance into a cloud of oil-film dust between the sun and Earth as a means of decreasing the sun’s radiation on Earth and alleviating global warming.
• Powerful radiation from the fusion engines of Natural Selection and the pursuing force had caused atmospheric ionization and lightning. The fleeting lightning strikes illuminated the surrounding atmosphere, visible at this distance as halos in constantly changing locations, turning the surface of Jupiter into a pond spattered with fluorescent rain.
• The fleet accelerated with no disruption to its formation, its huge wall blocking out the sun, and then made a stately advance into space with the force of a thundercloud, declaring to the universe the dignity and invincibility of the human race. The human spirit that had been repressed since the first appearance of the Trisolaran Fleet two centuries ago had finally found total liberation. At this moment, all the stars in the galaxy silently held back their light, and Human and God stepped out proudly into the universe as one.
  The people wept and cheered, and many of them were moved to loud wails. Never before in history had there been such a moment, in which every single person felt fortunate and proud to be a member of the human race.
• When the world saw the probe for the first time, everyone was captivated by its magnificent exterior. The mercury droplet was just so beautiful, so simple in shape yet masterfully styled, with each point on its surface in exactly the right place. It was imbued with a graceful dynamism, as if at every moment it was dripping endlessly in the cosmic night. It inspired the feeling that even if human artists tried out every possible smooth closed shape, they wouldn’t come up with this one. It transcended every possibility. Not even in Plato’s Republic was there such a perfect shape: straighter than the straightest line, more circular than a perfect circle, a mirrored dolphin leaping out of the sea of dreams, a crystallization of all the love in the universe.… Beauty is always paired with good, so if there really existed a demarcation between good and evil in the universe, this object would fall on the good side.
• Now, humanity was facing a far more arrogant display of power.
  “Can an absolutely smooth surface really exist?” Xizi gasped.
  “Yes,” Ding Yi said. “The surface of a neutron star is nearly absolutely smooth.”
• “Who knows? Maybe it really is just a messenger. But it’s here to give humanity a different message,” Ding Yi said, turning his gaze away from the droplet.
  “What?”
  “If I destroy you, what business is it of yours?”
• In the roughly two seconds it took to cover that distance, the computer actually dropped its alert from level two back to level three, concluding that the fragment wasn’t actually a physical object due to the fact that its motion was impossible under aerospace mechanics. At twice the third cosmic velocity, executing a sharp turn without a drop in speed was like slamming into an iron wall. If it was a vessel containing a metal block, the change in direction would have exerted such force as to flatten that metal block into a thin film. So the fragment had to be an illusion.
• The region eventually became still, and the metallic cloud lost its luster in the coldness of the cosmos and disappeared into darkness. Over the years, under the pull of the sun’s gravity, the cloud stopped its expansion and began to lengthen, ultimately forming a long strip that turned into an extremely thin metallic belt around the sun, as if a million restless souls were floating endlessly in the cold outer reaches of the Solar System.
• He set the missiles’ warheads to explode at a distance of fifty kilometers from each target. This would avoid causing the targets any internal damage, but an even greater distance would still be within the fatal range for any life aboard the targets. “The birth of a new civilization is the formation of a new morality.”
• Before it was attacked, it had turned its interior into a vacuum and put all personnel in space suits. Because infrasonic waves were impossible in a vacuum, no personnel were injured, and the body of the ship suffered only minimal damage from the electromagnetic pulse.
• Blue Space took pieces of the three derelict warships and set them up in a Stonehenge formation, forming a tomb in outer space. There, they held a funeral for all the victims of the Battle of Darkness.
  Wearing space suits, the 1,273 crew members of Blue Space assembled in a floating formation at the center of the tomb. These were the remaining citizens of Starship Earth. Around them, huge pieces of spaceships towered like a ring of mountains, the gashes cut into the wreckage like enormous mountain caves. The bodies of 4,247 victims remained within this debris, which cast its shadows over all of the living as if they were a mountain valley at midnight. The only light was the iciness of the Milky Way where it shone through the gaps between the wreckage.
• “It looks now like the Battle of Darkness has a lot to teach us.”
  “That’s right. The five ships of Starship Earth formed a quasi-cosmic civilization, not a real one, because they consisted of a single species—humans—who were very close to each other. But even so, when they were dealt that dead hand, the chain of suspicion emerged.
• a large number of astronomers and astrophysicists were of the opinion that the explosion of 187J3X1 was a chance occurrence. Being an astronomer, Luo Ji may have discovered certain signs that the star would explode. The theory was full of holes, but more and more people came to believe it, accelerating Luo Ji’s decline in prestige. In the eyes of the public, his image gradually transitioned from messiah to commoner, and then to fraud.
• The signal is sent once every second to maintain the bombs in a non-triggered state. If I die, the system’s maintenance signal will vanish and all of the bombs will detonate, turning the oil film surrounding the bombs into 3,614 interstellar dust clouds ringing the sun. From a distance, the sun’s visible light and other high-frequency bands will appear to flicker through the dust cloud coverage. The position of every bomb has been precisely arranged in solar orbit so that this flickering will generate a signal transmitting three simple images of the sort I sent out two centuries ago: each image an arrangement of thirty points, with one labeled, for composition into a three-dimensional coordinate diagram. But, unlike last time, the position will contain the transmission of Trisolaris relative to its surrounding twenty-nine stars. The sun will be a galactic lighthouse casting that spell, in the process, of course, also exposing the position of the sun and Earth.
• In the end, strategy was where we failed.
  Luo Ji nodded. “Blocking the sun with dust clouds to send an interstellar message wasn’t my invention. Twentieth-century astronomers had already proposed the idea. And you actually had multiple chances to see through me.
• That did remind us of Rey Diaz, but we did not pursue those thoughts. Two centuries ago, Rey Diaz was not a threat to us, nor were the other two Wallfacers. We transferred our contempt for them onto you.
  “Your contempt for them was unfair. Those three Wallfacers were great strategists. They saw clearly the inevitable fact of humanity’s defeat in the Doomsday Battle.”
• Next they’ll ask us to lift the sophon block and teach science and technology across the board.
  “This is important to you as well. The technology of Trisolaris has developed at a constant speed, and two centuries later, you still haven’t sent a faster follow-up fleet. In order to rescue the diverted Trisolaran Fleet, you have to rely on the future of humanity.”