In five billion years, the expanding Sun will engulf the Earth, rendering it officially uninhabitable. Don’t worry — because of climate change, all life on Earth, including humans, will be gone long before then.
The 2024 science fiction novelette “Stars Don’t Dream” by Chi Hui, a story that spans three hundred million years, imagines a future where most humans choose to be trapped in dreams. Instead of facing the reality of living in an increasingly uninhabitable world, humans spend most of their time in the metaverse.
In the metaverse, a place so pleasurable that people interact with the physical realm as little as possible, “the illusions are boundless, but like an all-too-willing puppet, a joyful, flesh and blood, clockwork doll, you offer your bodily autonomy up on a silver platter.”
The wealthy leave their bodies in the care of robotic exoskeletons, which feed and exercise their bodies for them; the poor simply let their bodies rot away.
Hui envisions a world where apathy, assisted by escapism, is humanity’s biggest problem. It’s a relevant prediction in the age of climate change; 36 percent of the world’s population is skeptical about climate change. Additionally, climate fatalism — the belief that even though climate change is real, it is too late to do anything about it — is on the rise.
“The 2024 science fiction novelette “Stars Don’t Dream” by Chi Hui, a story that spans three hundred million years, imagines a future where most humans choose to be trapped in dreams.“
Yet not everyone in the novelette’s world is enamored with the false dreams of the metaverse. “Stars Don’t Dream” focuses on five people who don’t opt into the metaverse, but instead choose to work on a dream rooted in the reality of a changing society.
Apathy may be the future’s main problem, but Hui doesn’t envision it as a problem that’s unsolvable. In fact, it’s the apathy of others that motivates the main characters of “Stars Don’t Dream” to act.
Because if they don’t act, then who will?
“Stars Don’t Dream” is a story of quiet hope. Rather than feeling fatalistic about their insignificance on a cosmic scale, the main characters take their insignificance as motivation to try to do something significant together.
Their mission is to ensure that even when the Earth becomes uninhabitable, life in some form continues in the universe. It’s a project so long-term that “long” means they will be dead way before the hundreds of millions of years it will take to see whether or not the project is successful.
As a story about the far future, “Stars Don’t Dream” provides a rebuttal to current climate apathy. Weaving together the stories of the five main characters who work together on the project, Hui proposes that there is a solution to apathy and extinction: collective dreaming.
Unlike the illusory, technology-assisted dreams of the metaverse, which encourage escapism and complacency, the characters’ dreams as they work together on the mission are positive and regenerative.
“Stars Don’t Dream” encourages us to look at humanity on a larger scale than the length of our individual lives. It’s an empowering reminder that no matter how insignificant or hopeless our efforts may seem today, they may prove impactful in the future.
I’d recommend this story because of its immersive prose and imaginative sci-fi concepts. What I like most about the “Stars Don’t Dream,” though, is that it’s a story that dwells on the preciousness of small moments. The author’s blending of the mundane and the remarkable in the narrative, portraying the five main characters as realistic and not just idealistic, is what makes “Stars Don’t Dream” so special. For a story about extinction, it’s quite optimistic.
As the readers, we get to see three hundred million years after the five dreamers die. If you read the story, you’ll find out if their mission succeeds or not. You should also read the story because, like our lives, it’s pretty short. It might even inspire you to take action. After all, even if it takes three hundred million years, your dreams can still have an impact.
Vivian Fan PO ’28 imagines a future in which you will read “Stars Don’t Dream.” It’s available online. She also recommends the Wikipedia page “Timeline of the Far Future.”
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