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"The Wandering Earth" cured my winter depression. 

Seriously: on opening night, I happily joined a packed Times Square auditorium-full of moviegoers watching this science-fiction adventure, which stars a talented ensemble of of Mandarin-speaking actors trying to stop the Earth from crashing into Jupiter. I left the theater hoping that "The Wandering Earth"  would be one of this year's Chinese New Year's hits . It grossed $300 million in China during its opening week alone, a hopeful sign that we'll see more entertainment as assured as this.

The setup might seem familiar at first. Two teams of astronauts fight to save the Earth years after its leaders transformed it into a planet-sized spaceship to escape destruction by an overactive sun. The first team is a two-man skeleton crew: the square-jawed Peiqiang Liu ( Jing Wu ) and his Russian cosmonaut buddy Makarov ( Arkady Sharogradsky ). The other is a small exploratory group led by Peiqiang's feisty twentysomething son Qi Liu (Chuxio Qu) and his upbeat partner Duoduo Han (Jinmai Zhao). These factions respectively spend most of their time battling MOSS, an unhelpful computer in a remote space station; and exploring an ice-covered Earth in stolen all-terrain vehicles (some of which bring to mind "Total Recall," specifically the tank-sized drill-cars).

But while director Frant Gwo and his writing team blend Cixin Liu's source novel with elements from American-made sci-fi disaster films—including " Armageddon ," " The Day After Tomorrow ," and "Sunshine"—they synthesize them in a visually dynamic, emotionally engaging way that sets the project apart from its Western cousins, and marks it as a great and uniquely Chinese science fiction film.

For one thing, rather than build the tale around a lone hero ringed by supporting players, "The Wandering Earth" distributes bravery generously amid an ensemble that includes action hero Wu; rising stars Qu and Zhao; and comedy institution Man-Tat Ng, who plays a grey-bearded spaceman named Zi'ang Ha. The script, credited to a team of six, never valorizes a singular chest-puffing hero, nor does it scapegoat a mustache-twirling antagonist (not even MOSS, the sentient, HAL-9000-style computer program in the space station). 

The teamwork theme is cross-generational, too. Both Peiqiang and Ng (formerly the straight man to film comedy superstar  Stephen Chow ) are treated with reverence because they're older, and are therefore presumed to have more experience and stronger moral fiber. The veterans work well with the film's younger astronauts, whose optimism makes them as brazen as they are idealistic. 

This apolitical blockbuster about a post-climate-change disaster extends its belief in teamwork to the rest of the international community. The movie is filled with narrative diversions that reassure viewers that no single country's leaders are smarter, more responsible, or more capable than the rest—except, of course, for the Chinese.

Second, "The Wandering Earth" looks better than most American special-effects spectaculars because it gives you breathing space to admire landscape shots of a dystopian Earth that suggest old fashioned matte-paintings on steroids. Although Gwo and his team realized their expensive-looking vision with the help of a handful of visual effects studios, including the  Weta Workshop , they have somehow blended their many influences in bold, stylish ways that only Hollywood filmmakers like James Cameron and Steven Spielberg have previously managed.  

Third, the film's creators breathe new life into hackneyed tropes. Gwo and his team take a little extra time to show off the laser beams, steering wheels, and hydraulic joints on their space cars and exoskeleton suits, to make the gear seem unique. And the storytelling goes extra mile to show viewers the emotional stress and natural obstacles that the characters must overcome while solving scientifically credible dilemmas (all vetted by the Chinese Academy of Sciences). This movie may not be the next " 2001: A Space Odyssey ," but it's everything "2010: The Year We Make Contact" should have been (and I like "2010," a lot).

A week after seeing "The Wandering Earth," I'm still marveling at how good it is. I can't think of another recent computer-graphics-driven blockbuster that left me feeling this giddy because of its creators' can-do spirit and consummate attention to detail. The future is here, and it is nerve-wracking, gorgeous, and Chinese.

Simon Abrams

Simon Abrams is a native New Yorker and freelance film critic whose work has been featured in  The New York Times ,  Vanity Fair ,  The Village Voice,  and elsewhere.

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China’s blockbuster The Wandering Earth is gorgeous, goofy, and on Netflix now

The country’s first big-budget science fiction epic is often familiar, but it does spectacle on an impressive scale.

By Tasha Robinson

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This review was originally published in February 2019, when the film was released in China, and in a limited theatrical run in America. It has been updated to reflect the film’s release on Netflix .

We’re living through a fascinating era of rapid change for the blockbuster movie model. America producers, eager to get their $200 million movies into the lucrative Chinese market, are increasingly looking for Chinese production partners, shooting in Chinese locations, and adding China-friendly characters and plotlines to American movies , even including extra scenes just for the Chinese cuts of films. But simultaneously, China and other countries are moving toward the blockbuster model themselves, creating homegrown films that don’t need to involve American partners at all.

And just as American films attempt to find paydays in foreign markets, foreign blockbusters are coming to America. The Wandering Earth , China’s hugely successful big-budget science fiction thriller, quietly slipped onto Netflix over the weekend, after a limited American theatrical run a few months ago. It shows a new side of Chinese filmmaking — one focused on futuristic spectacles rather than China’s traditionally grand, massive historical epics. At the same time, The Wandering Earth feels like a throwback to a few familiar eras of American filmmaking. While the film’s cast, setting, and tone are all Chinese, longtime science fiction fans are going to see a lot on the screen that reminds them of other movies, for better or worse.

The film, based on a short story by Three-Body Problem author Cixin Liu, lays out a crisis of unprecedented proportions: the sun has become unstable, and within a hundred years, it will expand to consume Earth. Within 300, the entire solar system will be gone. Earth’s governments rally and unite to face the problem, and come up with a novel solution: they speckle the planet with 10,000 gigantic jets, and blast it out of its orbit and off on a hundred-generation journey to a new home 4.2 light-years away. The idea is to use Jupiter’s gravitational well to pick up speed for the trip, but a malfunction of the Earth Engine system leaves the planet caught in Jupiter’s gravity, and gradually being pulled toward destruction. A frantic group of workers have to scramble to reactivate the jets and correct the Earth’s course.

The action takes place in two arenas simultaneously. On the Earth’s frigid surface, self-proclaimed genius Liu Qi (Qu Chuxiao) and his younger adopted sister Han Duoduo (Zhao Jinmai) get roped into the rescue efforts after they run away from home. Han is just curious to see the planet’s surface — most of humanity now lives in crowded underground cities, and the surface is for workers only — but Liu Qi is nursing a deeper grudge against his astronaut father Liu Peiqiang (longtime martial-arts movie star Wu Jing) and grandfather (Ng Man-tat, whom Western audiences might recognize from Stephen Chow’s Shaolin Soccer ). When Liu Qi was a child, his father moved to a newly-built international space station, designed to move ahead of Earth as a guide and pathfinder. Now an adult, Liu Qi feels his father abandoned him, and wants to strike out independently.

Meanwhile, on the space station, Liu Peiqiang is ironically a day away from completing his 17-year tour of duty and returning to Earth and his family when the crisis hits. The station’s artificial intelligence, MOSS, insists on putting the station’s personnel in hibernation to save energy, but Liu Peiqiang realizes the computer has a secret agenda, and he and a Russian cosmonaut set out to defy it.

The entire space plot may feel suspiciously familiar to American audiences, who have a strong emotional touchstone when it comes to a calm-voiced computer in space telling a desperate astronaut that it can’t obey his orders, even when human lives are on the line, because it has orders of its own. MOSS even looks something like the HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey : it’s represented as a red light on a gimbled panel, like a single unblinking, judgmental red eye. But a good deal of Liu Peiqiang’s space adventure also plays out like a sequence from Alfonso Cuarón’s 2013 Oscar-winner Gravity , with dizzying sequences of astronauts trying to navigate clouds of debris and find handholds on a treacherous moving station while tumbling through space.

Meanwhile, the Earthside half of the mission resembles nothing so much as the 2003 nonsense-thriller The Core , about a team trying to drill their way to the center of the Earth to set the planet’s core spinning again. As with that film, Liu Qi and Han are part of a group trying to restart a failed system, and encountering most of their obstacles just in the attempt to get to the problem site. They pick up a few distinctive allies along the way, including biracial Chinese-Australian gadabout Tim (viral video star Mike Sui ), but mostly, the characters are drawn as blandly and broadly as in any American action movie, and a fair number of them get killed along the journey without ever having developed enough personality for audiences to feel the loss.

Pretty much any flaw The Wandering Earth can claim — flashy action scenes without much substance, a marked bent toward sticky sentimentality, an insistently pushy score that demands emotional response from the audience at every given moment — are familiar flaws from past blockbusters. Where the film really stands out, though, is in its eye for grandiose spectacle. Director Frant Gwo gives the film a surprising stateliness, especially in the scenes of the mobile Earth wandering the cosmos, wreathed in tiny blue jets that leave eerie space-contrails behind. His attention to detail is marvelous — in scenes where characters stand on Earth’s surface, contemplating Jupiter’s malicious beauty, the swirling colors of the Great Red Spot are clearly visible in reflections in their suit helmets.

No matter how familiar the plot beats feel, that level of attention not just to functional special effects, but to outright beauty, makes The Wandering Earth memorable. Not every CGI sequence is aesthetically impeccable — sequences like a vehicle chase through a frozen Shanghai sometimes look brittle and false. But everything having to do with Jupiter, Earth as seen from space, and the space station subplot is visually sumptuous. This is frequently a gorgeously rendered film, with an emphasis on intimidating space vistas that will look tremendous on IMAX screens.

And while the constant attempts to flee the destructive power of changing weather have their own echoes in past films, from The Day After Tomorrow to 2012 , Gwo mostly keeps the action tight and propulsive. The Wandering Earth is frequently breathless, though the action occasionally gets a little muddled in editing. At times, particularly on the surface scenes where everyone is wearing identical pressure suits, it can be easy to lose track of which character is where. It’s often easy to feel that Gwo cares more about the collective rescue project than about any individual character — potentially a value that will work better for Chinese audiences than American viewers, who are looking for a single standout hero to root for.

But the film’s biggest strengths are in its quieter moments, where Gwo takes the time to contemplate Jupiter’s gravity well slowly deepening its pull on Earth’s atmosphere, or Liu Qi staring up, awestruck, at the gas giant dwarfing his home. In those chilly sequences, the film calls back to an older tradition of slower science fiction, in epic-scale classics like 1951’s When Worlds Collide or 1956’s Forbidden Planet . The interludes are brief, but they’re a welcome respite from chase sequences and destruction.

The Wandering Earth gets pretty goofy at times, with jokes about Tim’s heritage, or Liu Qi’s inexperienced driving and overwhelming arrogance, or with high-speed banter over an impossibly long technical manual that no one has time to digest in the middle of an emergency. At times, the humor is even a little dry, as when MOSS responds to Liu Peiqiang’s repeated rebellions with a passive-aggressive “Will all violators stop contact immediately with Earth?” But Gwo finds time for majesty as well, and makes a point of considering the problem on a global scale, rather than just focusing on the few desperate strivers who’ve tied the Earth’s potential destruction into their own personal issues.

Much like the Russian space blockbuster Salyut-7 was a fascinating look into the cultural differences between American films and their Russian equivalents, The Wandering Earth feels like a telling illustration of the similarities and differences between Chinese and American values. Gwo’s film is full of images and moments that will be familiar to American audiences, and it has an equally familiar preoccupation with the importance of family connections, and the nobility of sacrifice. But it also puts a strong focus on global collective action, on the need for international cooperation, and for the will of the group over the will of the individual.

None of these things will be inherently alien to American viewers, who may experience The Wandering Earth as a best-of mash-up of past science fiction films, just with less-familiar faces in the lead roles. But as China gets into the action-blockbuster business, it’ll continue to be fascinating to see how the country brings its own distinctive voices and talents into a global market. The Wandering Earth feels like the same kind of projects American filmmakers are making — accessible, thrill-focused, and at least somewhat generic, in an attempt to go down easy with any audience. But there’s enough specific personality in it to point to a future of more nationally inflected blockbusters. Once every country is making would-be international crossovers, the strongest appeal may come from the most distinctive, personal visions with the most to say about the cultures they come from.

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The Wandering Earth (2019)

Original title: 流浪地球.

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The Wandering Earth streaming: where to watch online?

Currently you are able to watch "The Wandering Earth" streaming on Netflix, Netflix basic with Ads.

Where does The Wandering Earth rank today? The JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts are calculated by user activity within the last 24 hours. This includes clicking on a streaming offer, adding a title to a watchlist, and marking a title as 'seen'. This includes data from ~1.3 million movie & TV show fans per day.

Streaming charts last updated: 9:12:21 AM, 04/04/2024

The Wandering Earth is 1907 on the JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts today. The movie has moved up the charts by 591 places since yesterday. In the United States, it is currently more popular than The Wood but less popular than Aliens vs Avatars.

When the Sun begins to expand in such a way that it will inevitably engulf and destroy the Earth in a hundred years, united mankind finds a way to avoid extinction by propelling the planet out of the Solar System using gigantic engines, moving it to a new home located four light years away, an epic journey that will last thousands of years.

Videos: Trailers, Teasers, Featurettes

Streaming Charts The JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts are calculated by user activity within the last 24 hours. This includes clicking on a streaming offer, adding a title to a watchlist, and marking a title as 'seen'. This includes data from ~1.3 million movie & TV show fans per day.

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Could 'The Wandering Earth' Actually Happen? Here's What a NASA Engineer Says 

"The science in it is compelling," says a senior NASA engineer.

Earth’s inhabitants are in danger of being swallowed up by the sun. So the United Earth Government comes up with a plan to thrust the Earth out of orbit and send the planet beyond our solar system to its new home as a satellite of Proxima Centauri.

Such is the out-of-this-world premise for The Wandering Earth . In February, the Mandarin-language sci-fi action movie rapidly became the second-highest grossing film in Chinese box office history. Its worldwide box office total now stands at just shy of $700 million. Netflix quickly snatched up streaming rights to The Wandering Earth for over 190 countries, including the United States.

After the film’s impressive theatrical run, Netflix added the movie to its streaming library on May 5 with zero fanfare. (It wasn’t even included in Netflix’s May newsletter sent to press.)

The hit movie is based on the 2000 short story of the same title by Liu Cixin, best known for his Hugo Award-winning novel, The Three-Body Problem .

The Wandering Earth ’s premise may sound ridiculous, but it turns out much of the film’s science holds up better than you might expect.

Here’s the official premise from Netflix:

The Wandering Earth tells the story of a distant future in which the sun is about to expand into a red giant and devour the Earth, prompting mankind to make an audacious attempt to save planet. The multi-generational heroes build ten-thousand stellar engines in an effort to propel Planet Earth out [of] the solar system, in the hope of finding a new celestial home. During the 2,500 year-long journey, a group of daring heroes emerge to defend human civilization from unexpected dangers and new enemies, and to ensure the survival of humanity in this age of the wandering Earth.

"Things that I would have expected it to gloss over, I was happy to see that they actually addressed."

“Things that I would have expected it to gloss over, I was happy to see that they actually addressed. So it looked like they did their homework to an extent,” says John Elliott , a senior engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Indeed, The Wandering Earth filmmakers did their homework. Four scientists from the Chinese Academy of Scientists consulted on the film.

Inverse spoke with Elliott, a systems engineer and vision architect at JPL, to play “what if?” and determine what aspects of The Wandering Earth are feasible and what parts are a stretch.

This article contains some spoilers for The Wandering Earth .

A Helium Flash in the Near Future

Let’s start there. In The Wandering Earth , scientists have determined that a helium flash from the sun is nigh. Do we need to worry about the sun unleashing a burst of blazing hot helium on us anytime soon? Short answer: probably definitely not.

Helium flashes are known to occur in stars in the red giant phase. Our sun won’t become a red giant for another 5 billion years.

Elliott’s an engineer though, so “never” and “no way” aren’t exactly in his vocabulary.

“I would not be one to say there couldn’t be something that goes wrong in the sun that causes this to happen, but it’s not in current theory,” he says.

In 'The Wandering Earth,' a threat from the sun drives humanity to move Earth beyond our solar system.

Thrusting Earth Out of Orbit

Now, let’s imagine that a helium flash is a verified danger, and we do need to relocate the Earth. If that still sounds absurd to you, hang tight while we break it down with Elliott’s help.

In The Wandering Earth , the journey from Earth’s orbit to Jupiter’s neighborhood takes 17 years. Elliott kindly took the time to run some numbers for us: To move that distance in 17 years would take roughly 10 kilometers per second of delta-v.

(Elliott notes, though, that it depends on how you do the math to know what that exact number would be — it could be anywhere between 8 and 16 kilometers per second.)

There are 10,000 “Earth engines” in the film propelling the planet through space. To provide 10 kilometers per second of delta-v to the mass of the Earth (rounded to 6 x 10^24 kilograms) over 17 years, each of those engines would need to produce a continuous 2.5 x 10^15 pounds of thrust, Elliott says.

This chart provides the vital statistics for the F-1 rocket engine.

That’s a number wildly beyond realistic capabilities once you consider the real-world F-1 engine, Elliott notes. The F-1 engine used on Saturn V (a launcher which NASA used from 1967 to 1973) is the most powerful single-nozzle, liquid-fueled rocket engine ever developed, according to NASA’s website . Alas, this legendary engine falls short of what the engines of The Wandering Earth would need: a single F-1 engine that puts out 1.5 million pounds of thrust.

“Pretty inconceivable” is how Elliott sums up the movie’s giant engines.

In Liu’s short story (translated into English by Holger Nahm), the largest Earth engines are 6,000 feet taller than Mount Everest.

" I don’t know how you would build something that big."

“Well, I don’t know how you would build something that big,” Elliott says.

A massive engine used to move the Earth in 'The Wandering Earth'.

But even if you could build engines large enough, mining the Earth (as these engines do in the film) causes a problem. There would barely be any Earth left by the point you mined enough dirt to thrust the planet to Proxima Centauri, 4.2 light-years away.

“It would take about 95 percent of the mass of Earth to do this,” Elliott estimates.

Other Ways to Keep Safe From a Helium Flash

So if thrusting the Earth through the galaxy is out, what would be a more realistic way to save the human race?

The best plan may be to “get as many people as you can off the Earth,” Elliott says.

He notes that “you’re not likely to go anywhere outside the solar system with current technology or even projected technology.”

Settling on nearby planets might be the way to go. Perhaps Mars would become habitable if the sun expands. “Would it warm it up enough that the water that’s sub-surface now would melt and cause an atmosphere?” Elliott wonders. Ganymede, an icy moon of Jupiter, might also become a decent contender for a new home.

Stopping Earth’s Rotation (?!?)

Let’s accept that the Earth could be thrust toward the next-closest star. We’ll now examine how the rest of the film holds up.

To use these giant engines, first the Earth’s rotation is stopped. The resulting widespread tsunamis (and limited space in underground havens) seem to be to blame for Earth’s population being reduced to 3.5 billion.

Though Elliott says he finds it “a little odd” that the United Earth Government was willing to accept that level of casualties, he says the tsunamis themselves are a realistic consequence of halting the Earth’s rotation.

"If you’re going to stop the Earth rotating, the oceans are gonna splash over everything when you slow down."

“If you’re going to stop the Earth rotating, the oceans are gonna splash over everything when you slow down,” Elliott says. “It does depend on how fast they stopped [the rotation], but it would be hard to conceive of them stopping it very quickly just because of the mass. I don’t know if there’s a [speed at which] you could stop it when you wouldn’t get extreme flooding.”

Elliott continues: “You’d have flooding, you’d have earthquakes, tectonic plates would be screwed up and moving around.”

Conditions on the Surface of the Earth

Several years after Earth has stopped rotating and is on its way to Alpha Centauri, siblings Qi and Duoduo journey out of the safety of underground early, and a display screen in the elevator indicates that the temperature on the surface near Beijing is -84° Celsius (a brisk -119.2° Fahrenheit). Thermal suits protect them from the icy conditions outside.

Elliott says -84° Celsius on the bright side of the Earth while it’s in Jupiter’s neighborhood “didn’t seem non-credible to me,” while the dark side of the Earth “might be well below that.”

By comparison, daytime temperatures on Ganymede , Jupiter’s largest moon, range from -297° to -171° Fahrenheit.

The JPL engineer notes that Earth has its own internal heat — both that and the planet’s atmosphere means Earth would take some time to cool down. It seems that the sun hasn’t reached red giant status yet by this point in the film, so an expanding sun would not keep the Earth warm as it reaches the outer edges of the solar system.

Where's the moon?

What About the Moon?

In all of the film’s shots of the wandering Earth, the moon is nowhere in sight.

Leave the moon behind? “You can’t just do that,” Elliott says.

The engineer explains that if the speed of the Earth moving through the solar system is accelerating, “the moon’s gonna adjust its orbit as you move, and as it does that, it’s gonna get into an unstable orbit,” Elliott notes. “And depending on how fast they’re accelerating and how fast they’re moving away, I would not be surprised if [the moon] ran into [Earth].”

As for how (somehow) getting rid of the moon would affect the Earth’s tides, well, remember, stopping the Earth’s rotation has already messed with the oceans and tectonic plates.

“You’ve already done so much to the surface of the Earth by stopping the rotation that I think the tidal forces aren’t gonna be a big issue by that time,” Elliott points out.

A Gorgeous Jet Stream

The moving Earth is depicted on screen with a jet stream trailing behind it. The image seems almost too picturesque to be plausible.

" Given the size of everything in this, you probably would see something like that."

“It was maybe a little artistically enhanced, but given the size of everything in this, you probably would see something like that,” Elliott says.

He further explains: “The way they show the engines, I guess they don’t tell you a lot, but the implication is they’re basically using dirt and propelling that out of these engines. And with that much propulsion and that much thrust and that much force, you probably would see a dust trail.”

As for real-life images of something similarly picturesque, Elliott suggests checking out images of Saturn’s outermost ring (E-ring) and its sixth-largest moon, Enceladus. The E-ring is largely composed of icy water vapor that has burst out of geysers on Enceladus.

Jupiter appears above Earth in 'The Wandering Earth'

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot

Also supplying stunning visuals in The Wandering Earth is our solar system’s largest planet. Jupiter looming over Earth’s sky is quite a sight. The Great Red Spot is on full display above Sulawesi in the film’s climactic moments.

If you’ve heard that the Great Red Spot is shrinking, you may be quick to deem this a goof.

It’s not explicitly stated in The Wandering Earth when the film’s events take place, but a frost-covered stadium boasting a 2044 Olympic Games label in Shanghai tells us that the film takes place sometime after 2061 since the planet’s been on the move with everyone tucked underground for 17 years.

So will Jupiter’s iconic massive storm (twice as wide as the Earth!) still be brewing 42 years from now? About a year ago, Business Insider reported that the Great Red Spot may disappear within one or two decades. According to a post on NASA’s website by Elizabeth Zubritsky, “Researchers don’t know whether the spot will shrink a bit more and then stabilize, or break apart completely.”

The film’s apparent proposition that the Great Red Spot will hold out for at least another four decades “didn’t really bother me,” Elliott says. “There’s a chance that it will go away, but, being a weather-related thing, it’s always hard to predict.”

Approaching Jupiter

The plan is to slingshot Earth around the solar system’s largest planet. This concept is basically a Jupiter gravitational assist, which Elliott says is “a reasonable thing for them to do.”

Real scientists used a Jupiter gravitational assist on the Cassini mission, which sent a probe to study Saturn.

How humans would fare that close to Jupiter, though, is another matter. Jupiter’s intense radiation field would be a problem, for one.

A rendering of the Cassini–Huygens probe near Saturn.

Much of The Wandering Earth film adaptation focuses on Earth nearing Jupiter — an approach that gets too close. Our planet goes off-course and is at risk of colliding into Jupiter rather than slingshotting around it.

“If you were doing a mission like this, you’d do all these trajectory correction maneuvers, and you would always know exactly where you were and make sure you were on course,” Elliott says. “You wouldn’t wait until a week before you were too close to figure that out.”

But this is a suspenseful action movie, so of course we get too close to Jupiter. At that point, humans across the globe are warned that Jupiter is “capturing Earth’s atmosphere” and people will die of asphyxiation.

This dramatic turn does seem to be a plausible expression of the Roche limit , which is the minimum distance at which a satellite can approach another celestial body without being broken apart by tidal forces.

“When you get to the Roche limit, yes, stuff would start being sucked off,” Elliott explains.

Final Thoughts: The Appeal of The Wandering Earth

Elliott says he can see why The Wandering Earth would find box office success.

"The science in it is compelling."

“The science in it is compelling. It’s realistic enough that it’s not just something that you’d dismiss,” he says. “It’s got the one big thing about moving the Earth, which is hard to accept, but once you accept that, the rest of it kind of flows from that.”

The Wandering Earth is an epic action flick that channels movies like Armageddon and Roland Emmerich’s collection of disaster movies. The director, Gwo Frant, has cited Terminator 2: Judgment Day as an influence.

The fast-paced, high-octane vibe of these movies is a stark contrast to the cadence of the short story that inspired The Wandering Earth ’s screenplay. Like Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past (the trilogy that begins with The Three-Body Problem ), the short story Wandering Earth spans several generations.

Title cards in the film do lay out the 2,500-year plan — 500 years accelerating, 1,300 years coasting, and then 700 years decelerating before firing up rotation again by Proxima Centauri — but the movie primarily takes place within a suspenseful 36-hour period.

The movie focuses on characters solving the immediate problem of a potential collision with Jupiter. It’s an effects-laden film that depicts human resilience in the face of a majorly daunting (but quickly solved) challenge.

The Wandering Earth was released in China on the first day of the Lunar New Year, and the filmmakers amped up the emotion of that human resilience with values the holiday is meant to celebrate. Hope and the idea of a family reunion fuel the characters’ determination to save Earth — much like July 4 provides the rousing backdrop to Independence Day .

The idea of Earth being in danger of getting burned up by the sun naturally calls to mind the real-world dangers of global warming. Has that very real threat ever been made into a big-budget movie? Yes, sort of.

The highest-profile film about global warming is yet another installment in the lineup of high-octane disaster movies: Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow , the 2004 film that depicts climate change at a rapid pace.

But, hey, if the movie followed the short story or the pace of real-life science more closely, we wouldn’t have been treated to this memorable disaster movie line: “Let’s light up Jupiter!”

The Wandering Earth is currently available to view on Netflix in several territories, including the United States. It is scheduled to debut on Netflix in Australia and New Zealand on August 5, 2019.

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The Wandering Earth Hardcover – October 26, 2021

From New York Times bestselling author Cixin Liu, The Wandering Earth is a science fiction short story collection featuring the title tale--the basis for the blockbuster international film, now streaming on Netflix. These ten stories, including five Chinese Galaxy Award-winners, are a blazingly original ode to planet Earth, its pasts, and its futures. Liu's fiction takes the reader to the edge of the universe and the end of time, to meet stranger fates than we could have ever imagined. With a melancholic and keen understanding of human nature, Liu's stories show humanity's attempts to reason, navigate, and above all, survive in a desolate cosmos.

• Print length 464 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Tor Books
• Publication date October 26, 2021
• Dimensions 6.5 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
• ISBN-10 1250796830
• ISBN-13 978-1250796837
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

“Liu conjures a sense of wonder while grounding his tales in well-wrought characters. This is a masterwork.”― Publishers Weekly , starred review “The passion in Liu's writing becomes an unstoppable force. These are the stories that really leap off the page and stick with you long after you’re done.”―Tor.com “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.”― Shelf Awareness on Supernova Era Praise for the Three-Body trilogy: “Wildly imaginative.”―President Barack Obama “ The War of the Worlds for the twenty-first century . . . Packed with a sense of wonder.”― The Wall Street Journal “A breakthrough book . . . A unique blend of scientific and philosophical speculation, politics and history, conspiracy theory and cosmology.”―George R. R. Martin “Tackles politics, philosophy, and virtual reality in a story that moves at a thriller's pace.”― The Washington Post “Evokes the thrill of exploration and the beauty of scale.”― The New Yorker “Stunning, elegant . . . A science fiction epic of the most profound kind.”―NPR

About the Author

Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Tor Books (October 26, 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 464 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1250796830
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1250796837
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.45 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
• #1,584 in Science Fiction Anthologies (Books)
• #2,603 in Hard Science Fiction (Books)
• #6,547 in Short Stories Anthologies

About the author

Liu Cixin, born in June 1963, is a representative of the new generation of Chinese science fiction authors and recognized as a leading voice in Chinese science fiction. He was awarded the China Galaxy Science Fiction Award for eight consecutive years, from 1999 to 2006 and again in 2010. His representative work The Three-body Problem is the BEST STORY of 2015 Hugo Awards, the 3rd of 2015 Campbell Award finalists, and nominee of 2015 Nebulas Award.

His works have received wide acclaim on account of their powerful atmosphere and brilliant imagination. Liu Cixin's stories successfully combine the exceedingly ephemeral with hard reality, all the while focussing on revealing the essence and aesthetics of science. He has endeavoured to create a distinctly Chinese style of science fiction. Liu Cixin is a member of the China Writers' Association and the Shanxi Writers' Association.

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A Bronx Teacher Asked. Tommy Orange Answered.

When the author received an impassioned email, he dropped everything to visit the students who inspired it.

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By Elisabeth Egan

Elisabeth Egan is still in touch with her high school English teachers.

Tommy Orange sat at the front of a classroom in the Bronx, listening as a group of high school students discussed his novel “There There.”

Listen to this article with reporter commentary

Open this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.

A boy wearing blue glasses raised his hand. “All the characters have some form of disconnection, even trauma,” Michael Almanzar, 19, said. “That’s the world we live in. That’s all around us. It’s not like it’s in some faraway land. That’s literally your next-door neighbor.”

The class broke into a round of finger snaps , as if we were at an old-school poetry slam on the Lower East Side and not in an English class at Millennium Art Academy, on the corner of Lafayette and Pugsley Avenues.

Orange took it all in with a mixture of gratitude and humility — the semicircle of earnest, engaged teenagers; the bulletin board decorated with words describing “There There” (“hope,” “struggle,” “mourning,” “discovery”); the shelf of well-thumbed copies wearing dust jackets in various stages of disintegration.

His eyebrows shot up when a student wearing a sweatshirt that said “I Am My Ancestors’ Wildest Dreams” compared the book to “ The Road ,” by Cormac McCarthy . When three consecutive students spoke about how they related to Orange’s work because of their own mental health struggles, he was on the verge of tears.

“That’s what drew me to reading in the first place,” Orange said, “The feeling of not being as alone as you thought you were.”

It’s not often that an author walks into a room full of readers, let alone teenagers, who talk about characters born in his imagination as if they’re living, breathing human beings. And it’s equally rare for students to spend time with an author whose fictional world feels like a refuge. Of all the classroom visits he’s made since “There There” came out in 2018, the one at Millennium Art Academy earlier this month was, Orange said later, “the most intense connection I’ve ever experienced.”

The catalyst for the visit was Rick Ouimet, an energetic, pony-tailed English teacher who has worked in the fortresslike building for 25 years. Ouimet is the kind of teacher students remember, whether it’s for his contributions to their literary vocabulary — synecdoche, bildungsroman, chiasmus — or for his battered flip phone.

He first learned about “There There” from a colleague whose son recommended it during the pandemic. “I knew from the first paragraph that this was a book our kids were going to connect to,” he said.

The novel follows 12 characters from Native communities in the lead-up to a powwow at a stadium in Oakland, Calif., where tragedy strikes. “Orange leads you across the drawbridge, and then the span starts going up,” a critic with The New York Times, Dwight Garner, wrote when it came out. The novel was one of The Times’s 10 Best Books of 2018 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. According to Orange’s publisher, over one million copies have been sold.

Ouimet’s hunch proved true: “Students love the book so much, they don’t realize they’re reading it for English class. That’s the rare find, the gift of gifts.”

Some relevant statistics: Attendance rates at Millennium Art are below the city average. Eighty-seven percent of students are from low-income households, which is above the city average.

In the three years since Orange’s novel became a mainstay of the Millennium Art curriculum, pass rates for students taking the Advanced Placement literature exam have more than doubled. Last year, 21 out of 26 students earned college credit, surpassing state and global averages. The majority of them, said Ouimet, wrote about “There There.”

When three students in the school’s art-bedecked hallway were randomly asked to name a favorite character from “There There,” they all answered without hesitation. It was as if Tony, Jacquie and Opal were people they might bump into at ShopRite.

Briana Reyes, 17, said, “I connected so much with the characters, especially having family members with alcohol and drug abuse.”

Last month, Ouimet learned that Orange, who lives in Oakland, was going to be in New York promoting his second novel, “ Wandering Stars .” An idea started to percolate. Ouimet had never invited an author to his classroom before; such visits can be pricey and, as he pointed out, Shakespeare and Zora Neale Hurston aren’t available.

Ouimet composed a message in his head for over a week, he said, and on Monday, March 4, just after midnight, he fired it off to the Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau.

“The email felt like a raw rough draft, but I didn’t agonize,” he said. “It was my midlife college essay.”

The 827-word missive was written in the go-for-broke style Ouimet encourages in his students’ work, full of personality, texture and detail, without the corporate-speak that infiltrates so much Important Professional Correspondence.

Ouimet wrote: “In our 12th-grade English classroom, in our diverse corner of the South Bronx, in an under-resourced but vibrant urban neighborhood not unlike the Fruitvale, you’re our rock star. Our more than rock star. You’re our MF Doom, our Eminem, our Earl Sweatshirt, our Tribe Called Red, our Beethoven, our Bobby Big Medicine, our email to Manny, our ethnically ambiguous woman in the next stall, our camera pointing into a tunnel of darkness.”

Orange, he added, was a hero to these kids: “You’ve changed lives.” There was Tahqari Koonce, 17, who drew a parallel between the Oakland Coliseum and the Roman Colosseum; and Natalia Melendez, also 17, who noted that a white gun symbolized oppression of Native tribes. And then there was Dalvyn Urena, 18, who “said he’d never read an entire book until ‘There There,’” and was now comparing it to a Shakespearean sonnet.

He ended with: “Well, it was worth a shot. Thanks for taking the time to read this — if it ever finds its way to you. In appreciation (and awe), Rick Ouimet.”

“I took a chance,” Ouimet said. And why not? “My students take a chance every time they open a new book. There’s groaning, and they open the page. To see what they gave this book? The love was palpable.”

Within hours, the message reached Orange, who was in the midst of a 24-city tour with multiple interviews and events each day. He asked Jordan Rodman, senior director of publicity at Knopf, to do whatever she could to squeeze Ouimet’s class into the mix. There would be no fee attached. Knopf donated 30 copies of “There There” and 30 copies of “Wandering Stars.”

In a big, bustling school full of squeaky soles, walkie-talkies and young people, moments of silence can be hard to come by. But when Orange cracked open his new novel, you could hear a pin drop.

“It’s important to voice things, to sound them out, like the way we learn to spell by slowly saying words,” Orange read.

He went on: “It’s just as important for you to hear yourself speak your stories as it is for others to hear you speak them.”

The students followed along in their own copies, heads bent, necks looking vulnerable and strong at the same time. Their intentness proved that, like the spiders described in “There There,” books contain “miles of story, miles of potential home and trap.” On this nondescript gray Thursday, Orange’s work offered both.

After the 13-minute reading came the questions, fast and furious, delivered with refreshing bluntness: “What even inspired you to write these two books?” and “Did Octavio die?” and, perhaps most pressing, “Why did ‘There There’ end that way?” Not since “ The Sopranos ” has an ambiguous denouement caused more consternation.

“We were like whaaaat ?” a student said, holding the last word in a high note.

“It was a tragic story,” Orange said. “Some people hate it, and I’m sorry.”

He admitted that he hadn’t been a reader in high school: “Nobody handed me a book and said, This book is for you. I also had a lot going on at home.” He talked about how he staves off writer’s block (by changing points of view), how he reads his drafts aloud to hear how they sound. Orange shared his Cheyenne name — Birds Singing in the Morning — and introduced a childhood friend who is traveling with him on tour.

Through it all, Ouimet stood quietly at the side of the room. He shot gentle stink eye at a gaggle of chatty girls. He used a long wooden pole to open a window. Mostly, he just beamed like a proud parent at a wedding where everyone is dancing.

The truth is, “There There” didn’t cast a spell only on his students: It also had a profound effect on Ouimet himself. When he started teaching the book, he’d just given up coaching soccer and softball after 22 years.

“I was afraid: If I don’t have coaching, am I still going to be an effective teacher? ‘There There’ was this kind of renaissance. I don’t want to get too sappy,” he said, “but it was a career-saver in some way.”

Eventually the bell sounded. The students pushed back from their desks and lined up to have their books signed by Orange, who took a moment to chat with each one.

Over the din, to anyone who was still listening, Ouimet called: “If you love a book, talk about it! If you love a story, let other people know!”

Audio produced by Tally Abecassis .

Elisabeth Egan is a writer and editor at the Times Book Review. She has worked in the world of publishing for 30 years. More about Elisabeth Egan

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

James McBride’s novel sold a million copies, and he isn’t sure how he feels about that, as he considers the critical and commercial success  of “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.”

How did gender become a scary word? Judith Butler, the theorist who got us talking about the subject , has answers.

You never know what’s going to go wrong in these graphic novels, where Circus tigers, giant spiders, shifting borders and motherhood all threaten to end life as we know it .

When the author Tommy Orange received an impassioned email from a teacher in the Bronx, he dropped everything to visit the students  who inspired it.

Do you want to be a better reader?   Here’s some helpful advice to show you how to get the most out of your literary endeavor .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

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The week’s bestselling books, April 7

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Hardcover fiction

1. James by Percival Everett (Doubleday: $28) An action-packed reimagining of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

2. The Women by Kristin Hannah (St. Martin’s Press: $30) An intimate portrait of coming of age in a dangerous time and an epic tale of a nation divided.

3. The Hunter by Tana French (Viking: $32) A taut tale of retribution and family set in the Irish countryside.

4. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride (Riverhead: $28) The discovery of a skeleton in Pottstown, Pa., opens out to a story of integration and community.

5. Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange (Knopf: $29) Three generations of a family trace the legacy of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.

6. Until August by Gabriel García Márquez, Anne McLean (Transl.) (Knopf: $22) The Nobel Prize winner’s rediscovered novel is a tale of female desire and abandon.

7. North Woods by Daniel Mason (Random House: $28) A sweeping historical tale focused on a single house in the New England woods.

8. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (Knopf: $28) Lifelong BFFs collaborate on a wildly successful video game.

9. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (Knopf: $28) An orphaned son of Iranian immigrants embarks on a search for a family secret.

10. Expiration Dates by Rebecca Serle (Atria Books: $27) A heartbreaking novel about what it means to be single, what it means to find love, and ultimately how we define each of them for ourselves.

Hardcover nonfiction

1. The Creative Act by Rick Rubin (Penguin: $32) The music producer’s guidance on how to be a creative person.

2. Atomic Habits by James Clear (Avery: $27) An expert guide to building good habits and breaking bad ones via tiny changes.

3. The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt (Penguin Press: $30) An investigation into the collapse of youth mental health and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood.

4. Age of Revolutions by Fareed Zakaria (W.W. Norton & Co.: $30) Inside the eras and movements that have shaken norms while shaping the modern world.

5. I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy (Simon & Schuster: $28) A memoir from the star of TV’s “iCarly.”

6. The Wager by David Grann (Doubleday: $30) The story of the shipwreck of an 18th century British warship and a mutiny among the survivors.

7. There’s Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib (Random House: $32) A poignant, personal reflection on basketball, life and home.

8. Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen (Dutton: $30) A vivid, expert picture of what the handful of minutes after a nuclear missile launch would look like.

9. Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley (MCD: $27) A deeply moving and suspenseful portrait of friendship and loss.

10. How to Know a Person by David Brooks (Random House: $30) The New York Times columnist explores the power of seeing and being seen.

Paperback fiction

1. Dune by Frank Herbert (Ace: $18)

2. Happy Place by Emily Henry (Berkley: $19)

3. The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, Ken Liu (Transl.) (Tor: $19)

4. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (Penguin: $18)

5. Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson (Penguin: $18)

6. A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas (Bloomsbury: $19)

7. Trust by Hernan Diaz (Riverhead: $17)

8. Horse by Geraldine Brooks (Penguin: $19)

9. Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert (Ace: $18)

10. Never Whistle at Night by Shane Hawk (Ed.), Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. (Ed.) (Vintage: $17)

Paperback nonfiction

1. All About Love by bell hooks (Morrow: $17)

2. Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann (Vintage: $18)

3. The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron (TarcherPerigee: $19)

4. Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (Vintage: $17)

5. Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris (Back Bay Books: $23)

6. Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino (Harper Perennial: $21)

7. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi (Picador: $20)

8. The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. (Penguin: $19)

9. Caste by Isabel Wilkerson (Random House: $21)

10. Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton (Harper Perennial: $18)

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