Beneath Deep Space

Beneath Deep Space is a long science fiction novel by the web author Zuizhong Yongheng (real name Yu Haoyi), serialized on Qidian.com from 1 September 2017 and completed on 16 August 2018. It runs to 677 chapters and about 1.7 million characters and won the Best Web Literature Award at the 29th Chinese Science Fiction Galaxy Awards. The story begins at Lunar Base No. 1: an unprecedented super-powerful nuclear explosion destroys the Earth, leaving only tens of thousands of survivors at the lunar base. Under the multiple pressures of resources, population, and order, they depart the solar system aboard a vast super battleship, the Noah, becoming the last spark of human civilization, wandering, surviving, and rebuilding in the nearly infinite and lonely depths of space. The work centers on the question of how a civilization survives: from the Moon to Mars, from near-Earth development to encounters with alien civilizations, humanity repeatedly weighs resource distribution, social systems, the ethics of technology, and the transmission of education. Drawing on Robin Hanson's "Great Filter" hypothesis, the author constructs a hierarchy running from K-level surface civilizations and L-level interstellar civilizations to the legendary S-level civilization, and shapes alien societies of different forms such as the Fallen civilization, the Sower civilization, and the Invader civilization, leading readers to ponder the laws of civilizational rise and fall amid interstellar adventure. The narrative overall is plain and leans toward world-building and deduction; the opening chapters are rather rough, after which it gradually hits its stride. It is a rare "hard" science fiction take on civilizational survival among web novels. The work has not been published as a physical book; the common versions are the online serialization and reader-compiled proofread texts (such as the edition compiled by Zhixuan Cangshu).