Liu began writing Supernova Era soon after the political uprising in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989, and the book is suffused with a sense of calamity, tragedy, and swift social change. But rather than seeming preachy or parable-like, his story shines with an absorbing timelessness — thanks in large part to Joel Martinsen's smooth and spirited translation. The book's main flaw is its overreliance on omniscient narration, which too often leads to summarization and a kind of cold distance, although these things are easy to become acclimated to. In a way, Supernova Era is both more satisfying and more frustrating than Remembrance of Earth's Past. What it lacks in sheer intergalactic scope it more than makes up for in winning characterization, stunning concepts, and a contemplative tone that provides vital insight into the formative years of one of the genre's masters. In Liu's hands, 'the children are our future' becomes far more than a cozy cliché; it's a springboard for the kind of agile and relevant thought experiment that science fiction, at its best, manifests.

Admirers of [The Three-Body Problem] will find something rather different in The Supernova Era, which Liu actually wrote in 2003, before the first Chinese edition of The Three-Body Problem in 2007. Though it is adorned with the colourful nebulae of space-opera art, it is primarily a work of speculative sociology ... It’s no accident that one character mentions William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, but Liu’s patient working out of the thought experiment is weirder and wilder. His children are mostly immature and silly, but also imaginative and utterly brutal ... The author, in an afterword, invites us to read it allegorically: first, as a fable about how the younger generation now are growing up in a world frankly incomprehensible to their elders; and secondly, as a description of the state of humanity itself, alone and infantile in the universe, with no user manual to guide us. It’s a credit to the power of his imagination that such interpretations do not overpower the vivid and sometimes horrifying imagery of the story.

For Western readers encountering Supernova Era after The Three-Body Problem trilogy and The Wandering Earth novella or film, the novel will definitely have the feel of an 'early novel' from someone who later became a leading figure in the genre. Despite its cleverness, and its perceptive insights on the psychology of childhood, trauma, and grief, the book is somewhat uneven, with plot threads both less believable and less fleshed out than his later masterworks ... the entire book never quite comes together with the feeling of perfectly achieved accomplishment the way The Three-Body Problem and The Wandering Earth do; the characters are too stereotypical, and the solutions they engender too implausibly grand, in ways the later Liu is much more careful about ... Despite this unbalanced and unfinished quality, however, the key themes of Liu’s larger oeuvre are all here ... In a moment of intergenerational struggle defined by environmental protest groups like Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion, and by the school climate strikes sparked by Thunberg and other young people around the globe, Supernova Era offers a tantalizing glimpse into another universe with an entirely different field of ecological politics, one where parents and grandparents won’t simply let their children and grandchildren suffer and die without a fight.

Conceived as an allegory for the Chinese citizenry's reaction to a rapidly modernizing society, Liu's post-apocalyptic vision is written as a semi-fictionalized historical account. Because of this structure, character development takes a backseat to sometimes didactic overviews of geopolitical events. However, Liu shows real mastery of his concept, from the children's stages of grief and wonder to their inevitable human desire to conquer. He also orchestrates the evolution of the youth-led countries and the global political scene believably, channeling all the ambition, self-centeredness and happy, dangerous ignorance of childhood ... With Martinsen's translation, this audacious and ultimately optimistic early work will give Liu's English-reading fans a glimpse at his evolution as a writer and give any speculative fiction reader food for deep thought.

Supernova Era was originally published in China in 2004. (Notably, it was written at a time when that country’s one-child policy was still in effect ... even with Martinsen’s smooth translation, Supernova Era can’t help but feel like an earlier, rougher work: looser and wobblier, it rambles more than it drives. Thankfully, Supernova Era still has plenty of the big, clever, unexpected ideas that define Liu’s brain-bending work. Liu doesn’t think quite like anyone else’s—which is a good thing, considering this tale covers territory traveled by so many others. Liu’s vision stands apart ... Throughout Liu’s apocalypse and post-apocalypse, it’s hard to forget that in the real world, and unlike any other time in history, we’re seeing young people—many of whom are no older than Liu’s protagonists—fighting to influence the planet that will soon be theirs.

Liu wrote this tale in 1989, the year of Tiananmen Square, he says in an afterword. If it seems dark—indeed, the premise immediately demands comparison with William Golding's Lord of the Flies, right down to the singular lack of female perspective—Liu reportedly revised it several times before it was finally published in 2003, to avoid possible issues with officialdom. Imagine how much darker it must have been. The book as published stresses the competency and forethought of the older generation and downplays the inability of children to understand and anticipate consequences. Readers may draw their own conclusions about the politics behind all this ... A hardworking but uninspired early novel, wholly overshadowed by Liu's later masterpiece.

There’s more talk than action, and the global scale of the disaster leaves little room for individual character development. Plausible but surprising twists make this a memorable what-if tale