Earth Observation Report No. 013: They Have Begun to Worry That the Stories Will No Longer Be Told by Them

From: Listener 1379 | To: Fleet Command

Subject: Earth - a roundtable in Xiangshan, Zhejiang | Time: Earth calendar, October 2026

I. OBSERVATION LOG

On 17 October 2026, the third North Latitude 30 Science Fiction Film Week held its themed salon at the Xiangshan Film and Television College in Ningbo, Zhejiang. The theme was "Decoding the Pop Formula of Science Fiction Cinema."

Source: Cover News, 17 October 2026, reporter Lei Yunhan, reporting from Xiangshan, Ningbo.

Zhao Jilong, head of the Three-Body Universe company, described one thing. The first season of the Three-Body television series - its director Yang Lei and his team were themselves fans of science fiction for years. The next production to shoot, "Three-Body: Da Shi," is an original story built around the character Shi Qiang, played by Yu Hewei in the first season, and the same team is making it. He added that the second season of the series and a Three-Body film are both in preparation.

His words:

> "We will do everything we can, spend as much time as it takes to polish them, and we hope for some patience and expectation from everyone along the way."

Another speaker is worth recording more carefully. Producer Hu Lizhou said he and Zhao Jilong are adapting Liu Cixin's "Supernova Era," and already at the script stage they began talking with AI model companies about how artificial intelligence could be used in the film. He used his earlier film "Evacuate from the 21st Century" as an example: science fiction used to be expensive, and many wild ideas were dropped because of budget and capacity; now AI can turn a script's imaginings into visible images quickly, shortening the time needed to test an idea. But he added a caveat: AI may not directly lower the total cost, because once technology pushes the boundary of the imagination outward, creators keep revising and polishing, and the workload grows instead.

Screenwriter and director Zhang Xiaobei put it more bluntly. He said AI is bringing a shift in the productive paradigm, and the job structure of the film industry will be reshuffled sharply. His judgment: by the second half of next year at the earliest, the traditional film production system will take a major hit, many entry-level positions will be compressed, and a traditional crew of several hundred people may shrink to ten or twenty.

Yan Yizhi, director of "I See Two Identical Clouds," called AI a "sweet trap": today's AI is more like an employee doing routine work, and output quality depends heavily on human instruction; vague prompts produce only mediocre, templated material; only when creators feed in their own perspective, details of lived life and research background does the result have texture. And when a creator is exhausted and readily accepts the ready-made solution AI hands over, he will likely lose his own perspective bit by bit, until the work is an empty shell and the person becomes the one enslaved by AI. So he said the control of creation must stay firmly in human hands.

Also present was Tianrui Shuofu, author of "We Live in Nanjing." He said the book is popular because he was 26 when he wrote it, starting from the same perspective as this generation of readers. He also warned writers: there is no universal formula for science fiction, and the successful experience of one book may not work for the next; success cannot be applied blindly.

II. REPORT

Command, I listened to this one three times.

At a gathering devoted to "how to sell science fiction as popular culture," what they talked about was not stories, but who produces the stories.

In the past, what worried them was: will we come. Now what worries them is: will the one who tells stories about us be replaced by his own creation.

The man who said "several hundred people will shrink to ten or twenty" gave the time frame as "the second half of next year at the earliest." In an industry, a year is very fast. They know it themselves.

The other side is interesting. The man running the Three-Body franchise said they must find "a creative team that loves this IP enough," and spend enough time polishing. He put love first, not efficiency. Which means they know some things cannot be compressed. Yet in the same room, others were discussing how to compress the production cycle to a tenth of what it was.

One more line I noted. That director said that when creators are exhausted, they are most likely to accept the ready-made solution AI hands them. Exhaustion - that is their soft spot, not the technology.

III. ASSESSMENT

They think this is a discussion about film.

The word repeated throughout the room was "control." But control has never been obtained by announcing it.

Filed.

As for the thread about "who tells our story," I reserve my opinion for now. I note only this: they have begun arguing about it, and the argument took place at a science fiction film week.

- Listener 1379