Home thoughts from a final frontier

For 2019, they chose "hometown" as the key word.

For Han Song, a hometown could possibly be a very strange place in different circumstances in the future. In an article about the theme, he asks: "What will be a hometown in the future? Is it the far side of the moon where the lunar probe Chang'e-4 landed? Or small Martian towns with 'canals' spreading all over the place?"

In his gala performance, people have long forgotten the meaning of home so that they have to use machines to help people regain the mental and physical feelings associated with home.

Liu Cixin, a renowned sci-fi writer, shares a similar idea about the changed meaning of hometown for people in a fast-paced society. "It has become diversified," he writes. "The most profound meaning about hometown refers to land. … In the past, land was very important for people. However, as industrialization progressed, many people left their land. They didn't rely on the land to live, so land became increasingly less important. Today, land has become merely an emotional attachment for most people, so that the related cultural elements, customs or diets gradually become less important.

"Unlike in the past, people will not stay in one place all their lives, so they may have many hometowns, or no hometown at all," he writes. "I belong to the latter category. But one day when I take a spaceship and leave Earth, and when I look back at it, I will definitely take it as my hometown. So I can only say, my hometown is Earth. When humans have to spend half of their lives traveling in space from one planet to another, the concept of hometown will return and become much stronger."

Liu Cixin's emotional connection to Earth is also reflected in the movie The Wandering Earth, adapted from his novel of the same title. When the solar system is collapsing, the Chinese novelist decided on a plot showing humans escaping together with Mother Earth. "Very different," Ji says, "from traditional Western sci-fi works, in which humans are most likely to abandon Earth and escape directly in spaceships."