To Mr. and Mrs. Bryan

Author’s Preface

In the spring of 2008, I came to know with Mr. Bryan, who was from Memphis, a city by Mississippi River in the U.S., when he was visiting Chengdu with his beautiful wife Jane. It was their first trip to Chengdu, which is known as the home of the giant pandas and the land of abundant resources, and whose name has been there for more than 2,000 years.

We were glad to meet with each other. We talked extensively on topics we both interested in through the assistance of the interpreter. Time seemed to have been frozen and the happy scenes of that meeting had been with me all the time. At that time, the U.S. Commercial Officer Mr. Eric Wolff and the U.S. traveler Pete were also in the visiting group.

Mr. Bryan is very smart. He could fully understand my thoughts, ideas and opinions in spite of the language barrier between us. Messages from the bottom of our hearts were passed to each other through our eyes and gestures. Then I spontaneously realized that we are the same kind of people, as we share the same beliefs and observations about life, and we both have love for nature, and great passions for exploring the unknown world. We also share the same aspirations for truth and for true friendship, and the same compassion for the miseries in the world...

Mr. Bryan has a stalwart figure, a shiny florid face and sonorous voice. Though I am not as tall as him, I have developed a strong and sturdy figure out of my years of horse riding in the Hulun Buir Grassland and Morin Dawa mountains throughout my youth. We look like brothers from the same family.

Since then, we have stayed in touch with each other.

In 2009, I sent my son, Tianmeng, to visit them in Memphis. Mr. Bryan prepared very carefully to receive Tianmeng. What touched me most was that Mr. Bryan deliberately hung a big national flag of China on a big roadside tree, which was about 1,000 meters away from their house.

In 2010, my wife Zhang Weixing went to the U.S. to attend a training course and dropped by Memphis. Mr. and Mrs. Bryan got their sons and grandsons all back home from New York and Los Angeles. Their whole family received my wife at their home with the exceptional hospitality.

In 2011, Mr. Bryan revisited Chengdu. This time we had a chance to have more profound exchanges of our ideas and views. We shared with each other our own experiences, knowledge and wisdom on topics ranging from the Rocky Mountains of the U.S. to the Daxingan Mountains, from the Grand Canyon of Colorado to the May 12 Wenchuan earthquake, from the traditional farming culture to the civilization of modern IT era, from the origin of civilization to the metagalaxy and then to the basic particles.

We both believe that science and technology is still the great drive of human civilization and social progress, without which there will be no advancement of the society. As long as a nation respects science and technology, values invention and creation, honors scientists and engineers, and is able to make scientific judgment and rational analysis, it will become very powerful and win the respect of the whole world.

Mr. Bryan was amazed when I told him that I have been a fan of science fiction and writer of scientists’biography since I was young. I told him that I have written stories about William Harvey, the English physician and founder of experimental physiology who discovered circulation of blood; I also wrote stories about Robert FitzRoy, captain of HMS Beagle and pioneering meteorologist in the field of weather forecasting; Le Verrier, the French astronomer who discovered Neptune; Tu Changwang, the world-famous meteorologist and founder of China’s modern meteorology and Lomonosov, the great Russian scientist who founded the law of conservation of mass. In the biographic fictions I wrote about these scientists, I tended to describe the most splendid moments of their life, thus present their great creative spirit as well as their positions in the science history. Having heard these, Mr. Bryan said to me in an earnest and serious manner that he wished he could read the English versions of these stories, and that he would be greatly honored to read them!

In order to realize my friend’s wishes, I requested the assistance of two experts in Chinese-English translation to put three pieces of my previously published science literature works into English. They are science fictions Dashing to the Typhoon and Evacuation of the Aliens , and a biographic fiction titled Death Under the Northern Lights , which is the story of the German scientist Wegener who founded the continental drift theories. These three fictions, along with the other five biographic fictions of scientists mentioned earlier, well demonstrate my understanding of the long lasting impact those science and technology advancements have made upon human being. They also represent my personal respect to those pioneers and precursors of the unknown world and technology inventions as well as my infinite gratitude to the elites who have contributed to scientific achievements of today. In these fictions I endeavored to portray and honor the noble personality of those scientists, which stands out like tall mountains, and their humanistic feelings that are as soft and tolerant as the sea. And all these are significant demonstration of their huge dedication, strong will and courage in their scientific exploration efforts.

With tremendous pleasure and respect, I would like to dedicate this book to my dear American friend Mr. Bryan and his wife. JZGZkjEahs5l+zFkJTIpQ7LUMBP5S5N4eqLtspJMcY3ahS1NnvC688qnXlTU39Cc