Wang Shiyue graduated from junior high and grew up wild in the South. He has been a bean sprout farmer, construction worker, hand-drawn artist, clothing salesman, screen printer, odd-job laborer, toy factory colorist, tile factory porter, scorpion and mealworm breeder, print supervisor, program controller, and writer. His writing unfolds in sync with the "Reform and Opening-Up" era.
—Zhang Jun, renowned literary critic

Many call him a "migrant-worker writer", but in truth, he is a witness of his time, a participant who stays close to reality while envisioning the future.
—Li Qiaomei, young scholar at Guangzhou University

"If the End Never Comes" is a sci-fi novel that balances "hard" and "soft" elements. Its rigorous exploration of scientific theories forms the "hardcore" foundation, while its profound humanistic care and philosophical inquiry serve as its "soft power".
—Tang Yuanyuan, young scholar at Sun Yat-sen University

★A labyrinth of science fiction constructed with dazzling imagination, exploring artificial intelligence and time paradoxes to question humanity’s most fundamental emotional need — Will we still need each other?
★A mind-bending sci-fi work by a Lu Xun Literary Prize winner, featuring five intricate stories that probe the nature of time: AI awakening, parallel universes, virtual immortality… It’s also a future love guide — when the future dictates the present, and love transcends past and present lives, how should humanity define existence?
★Examining reality through a unique sci-fi lens, it depicts the states of love and contemplates humanity’s place in time and space, offering a profound inquiry into the meaning of life.

If time is not a straight line, and space is layers of illusion;
If life is the creation of a string of code, and death a variation of eternity;
If every experience is a hallucination, every outcome a figment of imagination;
If the future governs today, and thought rules the world;
If love belongs to a past life, yet the meeting happens in this one —
Then, what should humanity do? Where does the meaning of life lie?

Einstein said, "The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

The world is bizarre, life is wondrous — five stories will take you to the end of time, the edge of the world, and the black hole of human nature, immersing you in the magic and wonder of future realism...

Wang Shiyue (pen name of Wang Shixiao) is the author of novels "The Unmarked Tomb" and "Rice Island", story collections "National Order", "Rites of Passage", "The Punch-Press Operator", "Requiem", and "Big Brother", and essay collection "War Between Father and Son". Named among People’s Literature’s "Top 20 Future Masters," his works have been anthologized over 100 times and translated into English, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Mongolian.

His honors include:
Lu Xun Literary Award (Novella)
People’s Literature Annual Novella Prize
Ordos New Talent Award (Chinese Writers)
Fiction Monthly Annual Work Prize
Hundred Flowers Literary Award
Lao She Essay Awards
Bing Xin Essay Awards

Part I: Sub-World
Part II: My Heart Will Go On
Part III: The Möbius Time Belt
Part IV: Victory Day
Part V: If the End Never Comes
Afterword

Afterword

In 2017, I decided to write science fiction.

Before that, I had been defined as a realist writer. Most of my works depicted the lives of ordinary migrant workers over the past three decades. My novel "The Unmarked Tomb" was thus called "a novel that comes infinitely close to the truth". Another novel about migrant workers, "The Footstep Gatherer", was praised as "reaching avant-garde heights through an anti-avant-garde stance" and "an important beginning for the post-70s generation". Logically speaking, writing about migrant workers was where I had the richest life experience, and it was also more likely to earn acclaim. Yet I resolved to step away from that momentum and start writing science fiction.

This was no whim — it was a dream I had harbored for years. Before writing The Unmarked Tomb in 2008, I had already begun a sci-fi novel, but after reaching 100,000 words, I set it aside for reasons beyond my control. A decade passed before I returned to it.

I was born in Jingzhou, Hubei, on the southern bank of the Yangtze River. Witchcraft and ghost lore are at the heart of Chu culture.

I grew up steeped in this mysticism. As a child, I often heard rumors — someone’s sow gave birth to an elephant, a woman somewhere delivered a basin of frogs, a traveler encountered a ghost at night. If a child cried after dark, families would invite a shaman to write a charm: "Heavenly emperor, earthly emperor, my home has a weeping child. Passersby, read this, and let him sleep till dawn." They would then paste it by the roadside. We believed cats were spiritual creatures; when one died, its body was hung from a high tree branch, exposed to wind, rain, and sun until it gradually returned to the universe.

Summers in Chu region were unbearably hot. In my childhood, rural areas still had no electricity, so on summer nights, every household would set up beds on the threshing ground to sleep under the stars. The sky was a tapestry of constellations, the Milky Way a faint river, the moon home to Wu Gang chopping his eternal laurel tree and the Jade Rabbit grinding elixirs — while Chang’e, who regretted stealing the pill of immortality, watched in solitude. Meteors often streaked across the sky.

The elders said a shooting star meant someone had died.

Where did meteors come from? Where did they go?
How many stars were in the Milky Way?
Did those stars also have people?

Sometimes, I’d see a ball of fire fall from the sky, landing not far from home. But the next day, searching turned up nothing. Most of my childhood summers were spent sleeping beneath that starry expanse.

Yet, beyond myths and legends, no one could tell me what truly happened in the heavens. What lay in those distant stars? I began to dream. The same dream, over and over: a rope stretching from the ground into the infinite sky, and me, an ant, tasked with crawling along it. But each time, either the rope snapped, or I woke before reaching the end. Why did I keep dreaming this? I sought answers from Freud, from Jung, from the Zhou Gong’s Dream Dictionary, even from my psychology professor.

No solution. Or rather, none that convinced me. Maybe I was from a distant planet. Maybe, in my dreams, I longed to return to my home among the stars.

At fifteen, I read two lines of poetry in a magazine:
"Remember me if you will, like a dream in spring.
Forget me if you must, like a star on a summer night."

I don’t recall the poet, but those lines stayed with me for thirty years.

They moved me deeply. In the summer nights of my childhood, I had seen countless stars — eternal fixtures, fleeting flashes, blazing trails that fell to earth. I think the seed of literature was planted in me then. The distant sky was so beautiful, so mysterious — yet untouchable, unknowable.

As a child, I grew inexplicably melancholy, quiet and withdrawn.

Then, in 1986, something changed me. I don’t remember the exact date, but that night, as usual, my brother, our neighbors, and I sat chatting in the darkness outside our home. No moon, only starlight. Suddenly, the night brightened — as if under a full moon — the world bathed in a silver glow. Someone pointed to the western sky: a star was growing larger, larger, from a speck to the size of a fist, illuminating the ground like snow. Everyone froze. The village erupted. An old man dropped to his knees, kowtowing to the ever-brightening star, muttering prayers. The light lasted ten full minutes before fading, the star shrinking back to a speck, then vanishing. The elders said the Jade Emperor had opened the Southern Gate of Heaven, and wishes made then would come true. By then, I was in middle school — I didn’t believe in the Jade Emperor or wish fulfillment. But I couldn’t explain what we’d seen. My brother called it a UFO.

The next day at school, everyone was talking about that star. From then on, I devoured books on UFOs, on all unexplained phenomena. In the rural backwater, books were scarce, but I remained convinced I’d witnessed a UFO. Years later, reading A Short History of Nearly Everything, I learned of two recorded supernova explosions visible to the naked eye — one in 1986. Only then did I understand: it wasn’t a UFO. It was a dying star’s last cry.

In 2005, I worked for a company in Wuhan. The owner, Engineer Xu, was a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Physics. He had undergone a kidney transplant for uremia and knew his time was limited, so he treated us, his employees, like his own children. He taught me physics, recommended obscure books on cosmology. Through him, I learned of the Big Bang, parallel universes — but what fascinated me most was quantum mechanics’ description of reality. Back then, I was obsessed with the unknown.

After becoming a writer, my focus shifted sharply to the present. I believed writers must have the courage and wisdom to confront the defining issues of their time. With the rise of big data, AI, VR — technology’s relentless march — these changes would shape our era’s central questions.

A friend in bioengineering once told me human immortality is no longer a pipe dream. Soon, nanobots will course through our veins, repairing aging cells, purging viruses. Lifespans will stretch to a thousand, ten thousand years — perhaps forever. Humanity will merge with machines. Of course, such procedures will be exorbitant. My concern isn’t whether we can live forever, but who gets to. Not everyone today benefits equally from progress — why would the future differ? Immortals and mortals could become separate species, with all the conflicts that implies. And if we do achieve eternity — how do we endure endless time? Would we even be happy? What’s the ultimate meaning of life?

If the end never comes?

This question haunted me. So I planned a book titled If the End Never Comes. The title was a starting point — a way to interrogate the breakneck advancements in science and the dilemmas they’ll bring. Drawing on Chinese myth, Taoism, Buddhism, quantum theory, and the anthropic principle, I constructed my own cosmic model: a universe of primal worlds, sub-worlds, and null-worlds strung along Möbius time belts. Infinite Möbius belts fold into multidimensional structures. I proposed that humanity’s ultimate evolution would shed physical form, existing purely as consciousness. I even speculated that dark energy, cosmic constants — might themselves be ascended, disembodied minds.

I let my characters roam this universe freely. I was merely an observer, recording their existence.

I call this book "future realism".

I don’t know if it succeeds or fails. I only know it’s my answer to the boy who once stared at the stars, wondering. I still don’t know what happens after death, or what unfolds in alternate universes, across four, five, even eleven dimensions. In the grand scheme, my existence is but a meteor’s flash on a summer night. Perhaps this book will extend my presence. Years from now, someone might remember me, thinking I foresaw their world.

But no matter how humanity evolves, how time twists — whether in three dimensions or eleven — I’ve anchored this story’s ending in the simplest truth: love. Let me close with those two beloved lines:

Forget me if you must, like a dream in spring.
Remember me if you will, like a star on a summer night.

May 19, 2018
Lu Xun Literary Academy