China's 20-Year Crowdsourced Novel Rewrites History

Long before open-source AI models made headlines, Chinese tech geeks were experimenting with collaborative creativity in an unexpected way: writing a massive science fiction novel together.

The Morning Star of Linggao has grown to nearly 3,000 chapters and millions of words since 2006, crowd-written by thousands of contributors who are mostly engineers, scientists, and tech professionals. Many writers actually insert themselves as characters in the story, blending fiction with their real-world expertise.

The plot centers on more than 500 modern-day time travelers who discover a wormhole transporting them back to 1642 China during the declining Ming dynasty. Armed with contemporary knowledge, they settle in Linggao on Hainan Island and work to spark an industrial revolution centuries early.

What makes this novel remarkable isn't just its collaborative nature. The authors bring genuine technical expertise to every detail, meticulously planning how to build weapons, create air-conditioning systems, and establish infrastructure using only materials and methods available in 17th-century China.

Wang Jiang, a long-time reader and dean at Zhejiang Normal University, points out what sets it apart from typical time-travel stories. The novel tackles practical challenges other fiction ignores, like how people actually handled money in that era or how to prevent disease outbreaks that were common in southern China at the time.

The Ripple Effect

The novel remained relatively unknown outside China's tech circles until January 2025, when Wired magazine featured it as the country's "greatest sci-fi novel you've never heard of." The recognition highlights how collaborative, open-source creativity can produce something extraordinary when passionate experts pool their knowledge.

The story resonates with its contributors, who identify with China's drive for technological advancement and self-reliance. Work on the novel has continued almost nonstop alongside China's real-world tech boom, creating a parallel narrative of innovation and progress.

While it remains niche even in China, the novel has profoundly influenced elite engineering and technology communities. Anonymous contributors include some of China's brightest minds who use the platform to explore realistic solutions to complex historical and technical challenges.

The project demonstrates what happens when thousands of people unite around a shared creative vision for nearly two decades. Their dedication has produced a living document that grows richer with each contribution, proving that collective imagination can build worlds as complex as any individual author could dream.