【推荐3】A stoop（门廊） might seem like a simple set of stairs leading up to a door. But in many US cities, stoops were the lifeblood（命脉）of the community in years past. People would sit outside on their stoops, chatting with their neighbors and passers-by. They’d get to know each other. This strong sense of neighborliness has seen a revival（复兴）during the coronavirus pandemic（新冠流行期间）.

In Bernal Heights, a small neighborhood in San Francisco, people have been in lockdown since mid-March. But that hasn’t stopped people there from getting creative and socializing.

Natalie Mead, for example, has a large garden right in front of her house. She’s using the garden to set up scavenger hunts（拾荒搜索游戏）for children who’ve been stuck at home. Mead says about 10 to 20 families visit her garden each day to hunt for the small toys she hides in her garden.

Colleen Irwin, a nurse, has brought her neighborhood together by setting up an outdoor food pantry（食品储藏柜）in front of her home. She filled a bookshelf with food and offered the goods for free. Soon, neighbors were giving away their own food. In this way, people who haven’t been able to shop at the supermarket can still have food to eat.

Activities like these have brought neighbors together and even helped them make new friends. “Many of us didn’t know each other though we’re living within 50 yards,” Sarah Gordon told The New York Times.

【推荐3】From Star Wars to Interstellar, I have always loved science fiction. My favorite class in university was astronomy (天文学). I was introduced to Chinese sci-fi through The Three-Body Problem after I moved to China in 2015. An old bookworm friend of mine told me about Liu Cixin’s famous trilogy (三部曲).

The Three Body Problem begins with the “cultural revolution” (1966-76) in the background. The key event of the story is when an alien civilization (文明) receives a signal (信号) from Earth. The Trisolarans (“三体人”) make immediate plans to invade (侵略) our planet. However, humans have 450 years to prepare. In that time, they form different groups. Some want to embrace the invading aliens while others want to fight them. The book goes back and forth between past and present, covering many themes—politics, psychology (心理学), physics and environmentalism.

I enjoyed the realism of the story. I think Liu is right in that aliens would likely come to our planet for environmental reasons. He’s also correct about humans being divided. After all, I think humans are irrational (不理性的). Liu also uses real science. String Theory (弦理论) is the modern idea about how our universe works. It features heavily in this story.

China has a rich history of scientific knowledge and certainly is no stranger to sci-fi. Lunar Colony was one of the first Chinese sci-fi stories ever written. It was published in 1904. The Chinese writer, known by the pen name Huangjiang Diaosou, wrote the serial in the magazine Xiuxiang Xiaoshuo. As a foreign lover of sci-fi, I find this interesting because some countries have only more recently started writing sci-fi. In spite of cultural, historic and political differences between East and West, China has made a massive contribution (巨大的贡献) to sci-fi.