Time and humanity: anthropocene narratives in Liu Cixin’s The Wandering Earth

Time is central in Liu Cixin’s climate change novella The Wandering Earth. The novella explores complex Anthropocene relationships between humanity and time, offering in the process various perspectives on the problematical position of the human within temporal structures, the alienation of people within temporal regimes, and the very meaning of time. One of the effects for humanity is a kind of domestication and regimentalizing of the human that produces both a kind of what we might call a time tyranny over the human and a subsequent sense of anxiety. Marx’s notions about time shed light on the fetishization of the present and our understandings of time, as do Dipesh Chakrabarty’s notions about time (specifically about “species history”). Indeed, no meaningful activism is possible, the novella reveals, without a substantial re-conceptualizing of our notions of time and of our place within history.