# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Liu Cixin is a Chinese science fiction author whose novel The Three-Body Problem won the Hugo Award in 2015. He is the first Asian to win the award.

An engineer by profession, Liu writes science fiction short stories and novels that have won numerous awards in China since 2003.

The Three-Body Problem and its sequels, The Dark Forest and Death's End, follow humanity's encounter with an alien race intent on invading Earth. It was first published in 2006 and translated into English by Ken Liu (no relation) in 2014.

Liu writes "hard" science fiction and has been compared to sci-fi great Arthur C. Clarke, whom he claims as an influence.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Liu Cixin biography | birthday, trivia | Chinese Writer | Who2

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Liu Cixin is a Chinese science fiction author whose novel The Three-Body Problem won the Hugo Award in 2015. He is the first Asian to win the award. An engineer by profession, Liu writes science fiction short stories and novels that have won numerous awards in China since 2003.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Ken Liu outside his home in Stoughton, Mass. Credit... Amani Willett for The New York Times

Feature

The translator Ken Liu has done more than anyone to bridge the gap between Chinese science fiction and American readers.

Ken Liu outside his home in Stoughton, Mass. Credit... Amani Willett for The New York Times

In the fall of 2012, Ken Liu received an intriguing offer from a Chinese company with a blandly bureaucratic name: China Educational Publications Import and Export Corporation, Ltd. It was seeking an English-language translator for a trippy science-fiction novel titled "The Three-Body Problem." Liu - an American computer programmer turned corporate lawyer turned science-fiction writer - was a natural choice: fluent in Mandarin, familiar with Chinese sci-fi tropes and culture and a rising star in the genre. Liu had only translated short fiction at the time, though, and capturing the novel in all its complexity seemed daunting.

"The Three-Body Problem" was unlike anything Liu had ever read. A mind-bending epic set in Beijing, Inner Mongolia and on a distant planet, the novel was full of heady technical passages about quantum theory, nanotechnology, orbital mechanics and astrophysics, intertwined with profound moral questions about the nature of good and evil and humanity's place in the universe.

But as he began translating, Liu was confronted by what seemed like a more fundamental problem: The narrative structure didn't make sense. The story careered around in time, bouncing between present-day China, as a panic builds among scientists and government officials over a coming alien invasion, and Beijing in 1967, near the start of the Cultural Revolution, when an astrophysicist watches helplessly as her father, a physics professor, is killed by members of Mao's Red Guard for being a "reactionary academic authority." The astrophysicist loses faith in humanity and uses a high-power radio transmitter to broadcast a defiant message to aliens in a nearby solar system, an act that has dire consequences.

Studying the novel's chaotic timeline, Liu pinpointed what he felt was the story's natural beginning: the scenes of political violence and oppression during the Cultural Revolution, a traumatic moment that triggers the interstellar clash that follows. In a move that was unusually invasive for a translator, he suggested pulling up the historical flashback, which was buried in the middle of the narrative, and turning it into the novel's beginning.

When Liu proposed this radical change to the author, a rising figure in China's burgeoning science-fiction scene named Liu Cixin, he was prepared to be overruled. Instead, the author instantly agreed. "That is how I wanted it originally!" Liu recalls him saying.

As it turned out, the Cultural Revolution had torn Liu Cixin's family apart. He was just 3 when the political upheaval began, and still remembers hearing gunshots at night and seeing trucks full of men wearing red armbands patrolling the city where he lived in Shanxi province. When the situation there became too volatile, his parents, who worked in a coal mine, sent him away to live with relatives in Henan. The brutality of Mao Zedong's revolution was also central to the story that Liu Cixin wanted to tell in "The Three-Body Problem." But his Chinese publisher worried that the opening scenes were too politically charged and would never make it past government censors, so they were placed later in the narrative, he says, to make them less conspicuous. Liu reluctantly agreed to the change, but felt the novel was diminished. "The Cultural Revolution appears because it's essential to the plot," Liu Cixin told me during a Skype interview through an interpreter. "The protagonist needs to have total despair in humanity."

When the English translation of " The Three-Body Problem" was published in 2014, it was hailed as a groundbreaking work of speculative fiction. President Barack Obama praised the novel, calling it " just wildly imaginative." Mark Zuckerberg recommended it to his tens of millions of Facebook followers; George R.R. Martin blogged about it. Publishers around the world chased after translation rights, which eventually sold in 26 languages, including Turkish and Estonian. It won the 2015 Hugo Award, one of the genre's most prestigious honors, making Liu Cixin the first Asian author to win the prize for best novel. It was also the first time a novel in translation had won the prize. The book and its two sequels went on to sell nearly nine million copies worldwide.

Now, Liu Cixin says, he recommends that Chinese sci-fi fans who speak English read Ken Liu's translation of "The Three-Body Problem" rather than the Chinese version. "Usually when Chinese literature gets translated to a foreign language, it tends to lose something," he says. "I don't think that happened with 'The Three-Body Problem.' I think it gained something."

The success of "The Three-Body Problem" not only turned Liu Cixin into a global literary star; it opened the floodgates for new translations of Chinese science fiction. This, in turn, has made Ken Liu a critical conduit for Chinese writers seeking Western audiences, a literary brand as sought-after as the best-selling authors he translates. (Among Chinese sci-fi authors and fans, he is often referred to affectionately as Xiao Liu, Little Liu, to distinguish him from Liu Cixin, who is known as Da Liu, Big Liu.) Liu's translations have reshaped the global science-fiction landscape, which has long been dominated by American and British authors. Over the past decade, he has translated five novels and more than 50 works of short fiction by dozens of Chinese authors, many of whom he has discovered and championed himself.

Image

Liu with the manuscript of his upcoming novel, ''The Veiled Throne.'' Credit... Amani Willett for The New York Times

This year alone, Liu published three major new translations: "Broken Stars," an anthology of short fiction by 14 Chinese sci-fi writers; a translation of "The Redemption of Time," by Li Jun, who writes under the pen name Baoshu, which takes place in the aftermath of an interstellar war; and a translation of Chen Qiufan's "Waste Tide," a grim dystopian novel that unfolds on a polluted peninsula on the coast of China, where impoverished migrant workers recycle the world's electronic trash. Next year, Saga Press will publish Liu's 624-page translation of Hao Jingfang's novel "Vagabonds," a meandering philosophical parable about an ideological rift between a communalistic human colony on Mars and an increasingly capitalistic Earth.

Some of the most thought-provoking science-fiction writers in China aren't being published through traditional channels, so Liu searches internet forums and social-media messaging sites like Weibo, WeChat and the self-publishing platform Douban. He has found sci-fi stories in unusual corners of the internet, including a forum for alumni of Tsinghua University. Chinese friends send him screenshots of stories published on apps that are hard to access outside of China. As an emissary for some of China's most provocative and boundary-breaking writers, Liu has become much more than a scout and a translator. He's now a fixer, an editor and a curator - a savvy interpreter who has done more than anyone to bridge the imagination gap between the world's current, fading superpower and its ascendant one.

Liu has also grown adept at navigating political minefields, finding ways to transmit writers' political or social critiques without being too direct. Some of the writers Liu translates use the framework of science fiction to explore the dystopian consequences of China's rapid economic and technological transformation, setting a story in the distant future or on another planet in order to tackle taboo issues like the lack of social freedoms, the exploitation of migrant workers, government land seizures, economic inequality and environmental destruction. In an odd inversion, some of the stories he has translated into English have not been officially published in China, at times because of their politically sensitive nature. "It's a very tricky dance of trying to get the message that they're trying to convey out, without painting the writers as dissidents," Liu told me over coffee one day, as we sat in the kitchen of his home in Massachusetts. "A lot of Chinese writers are very skilled at writing something ambiguously, such that there are multiple meanings in the text. I have to ask them, how explicit do you want me to be in terms of making a certain point here, because in the original it's very constrained, so how much do you want me to tease out the implications you're making? And sometimes we have a discussion about exactly what that means and how they want it to be done."

It's no surprise that sci-fi is booming in China, where the breakneck pace of technological transformation can feel surreal. Economic growth has lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens out of poverty, and brought extreme wealth to the upper and political class, but technology has also become a tool of state oppression. Some Chinese factories have outfitted workers with devices that measure brain-wave activity to monitor their emotional fluctuations and alertness. Bird-shaped drones have been used to surreptitiously spy on citizens, and surveillance through facial-recognition technology is widespread. On social media and messaging apps, posts containing certain banned words are automatically censored. China is now also leveraging its technology to conquer the solar system: After lagging behind in the space race for decades, the nation recently made a historic landing on the far side of the moon, where it has plans to build a permanent research base, and aims to have a rover exploring Mars next year.

"In China, there's this official propaganda position that science fiction is about imagination and this is what the future is all about," Liu told an audience in New York in April, when he appeared on a panel with Chen Qiufan at the Museum of Chinese in America and spoke about the growing popularity of Chinese science fiction. "In reality, much of the most interesting science fiction is much more subversive," he continued. "It is a kind of wry commentary on what is happening in society. And because so many things are changing in China so rapidly, science fiction feels like oftentimes the most realistic way to describe what's happening."

Ken Liu was born in 1976 in Lanzhou, an industrial city in Gansu Province in Northwest China. His parents moved abroad when he was 4 - his father went to study statistics in East Germany, while his mother pursued her graduate degree in chemistry in the United States - and Liu remained in China with his paternal grandparents, both science professors who were "book hoarders," he says.

As a young boy, he was a promiscuous reader. He read his aunt's Taiwanese romance novels, his grandmother's Mandarin translations of "Sherlock Holmes" and her copy of "Romance of the Three Kingdoms," a 14th-century historical epic set during the Han dynasty. He read his grandfather's mathematics and chemistry manuals, which he didn't understand but tore through anyway. In elementary school, he came across Mandarin translations of American science fiction. He read Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and didn't realize it was science fiction, mistaking the descriptions of a post-apocalyptic urban hellscape where humans enslave androids for a realistic depiction of life in America. He was particularly struck by the notion of a world without animals, where people had robots for pets - "It seemed to fit with my idea of the U.S. as a very high-tech place," Liu recalls. He also picked up Mandarin editions of novelizations of movies like "The Empire Strikes Back" and "E.T.," which gave him a taste of American pop culture. Liu remembers being baffled by the big suburban houses in "E.T.," and by the notion of a holiday where kids dressed in costumes and got candy from strangers. "For me, it was a window into American life," he says.

Portraits of Liu's grandmother (left) and his wife's grandmother sit on a shelf in his kitchen. Liu credits his grandmother's love of origami as the inspiration for his first acclaimed short story, ''The Paper Menagerie.'' Credit... Amani Willett for The New York Times

Reading "E.T." didn't fully prepare Liu for life in America. When he was 11, he moved to Palo Alto, Calif., where his mother worked as a pharmaceutical chemist and his father worked as a statistical analyst. He didn't speak English and hadn't lived with his parents since he was a toddler. He enrolled in a public school, where he went by Ken, a name his mother picked because it was the closest English analog to his Chinese name, Yukun.

Books provided a familiar refuge. He learned English in about a year, and soon was reading novels like "A Wrinkle in Time" and "The Yearling," then moved on to American classics by authors like Faulkner and Melville, and science fiction by Orson Scott Card, Margaret Atwood and Arthur C. Clarke. He excelled in school and went to Harvard, where he majored in English and studied computer science.

When he graduated in 1998, Liu worked as a software engineer, first at Microsoft, and then at a start-up called Idiom Technologies, where he met his wife, Lisa Tang Liu. The work wasn't glamorous - he built what he describes as "back-office-database-type stuff" - but he liked it: "It was much more fun to work at that level because you're closer to the machines." Then the dot-com bubble burst, and Lisa was laid off from her job as a project manager. Liu grew disillusioned with the tech industry and began searching for something new. He went into programming because he liked rules and systems, so he decided to try another rules-based trade and went to Harvard Law School. After graduating, he clerked for a federal judge, then worked as a corporate lawyer specializing in international tax planning and real estate. It was demanding, and not particularly stimulating. Liu, who at that point had two young daughters, and had grown up apart from his own parents, didn't want to be an absent father. He became a litigation consultant specializing in patent infringement and technology cases - a job that brought him close to machines again, examining source codes and disassembling smartphones and tablets to study the underlying mechanics.

Throughout his shape-shifting professional odyssey, Liu wrote fiction, though he never imagined he could make a living from it. Eventually, he published his short fiction in sci-fi magazines, and won acclaim for his strange, surreal stories, which sometimes take place on distant planets or intergalactic spaceships heading for habitable worlds, but often center on strained family bonds. His 2011 story, "The Paper Menagerie," about an American boy whose mother, a Chinese immigrant, makes him delicate origami animals that come to life, won the Hugo, the Nebula and the World Fantasy Award, making Liu the first author to sweep the genre's three major awards for a single work. Four years later, he published "The Grace of Kings," an epic fantasy novel that drew on both Western mythology and epics and on historical legends about the Han dynasty. In 2017, he quit his job as a litigation consultant to focus on writing.

Liu and I first met on a freezing day in early March in Stoughton, a small town outside Boston where he lives with his wife, Lisa, now a photographer, and their two daughters, who are 7 and 9. Liu - who at 43 is wiry and energetic, with a close buzz cut, thick eyebrows and a round, boyish face - met me at the train station, and had absent-mindedly left his Airpods in his ears. As we trudged through piles of snow on unplowed sidewalks, we talked about a screen adaptation of one of his stories, and his forthcoming translation of Hao Jingfang's novel, which he compared to Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Dispossessed." The novel unfolds in 2201, a century after a human colony on Mars declared independence from Earth, where society has become increasingly technocratic and capitalistic. Liu told me that he isn't sure how American sci-fi fans will respond to the book, which is more of a philosophical thought experiment than a plot-driven space odyssey. "It's not the sort of thing popular American taste favors," Liu says. "It will be valuable for American readers to be exposed to it."

At his home - a small, cheerful house that's full of his daughters' drawings and Lego creations - Liu showed me his office: a dark, cavelike room on the basement floor, cluttered with classic sci-fi and fantasy works by Le Guin, Neil Gaiman, and Tolkien, books in Mandarin by contemporary Chinese authors, computer-programming manuals, a Classical Chinese dictionary, copies of Chinese epics like "Journey to the West" and "Romance of the Three Kingdoms," an annotated edition of Confucius' Analects and shelves of Chinese sci-fi magazines and anthologies. Near his desk, he keeps his four Hugo Awards, two for his own short fiction and two for translations.

Liu told me that he never set out to be a translator, a profession that doesn't pay especially well. "Translation seemed incredibly boring and technical," he says. In fact, it was a Chinese writer who first discovered Liu, not the other way around. In 2009, Chen Qiufan read one of Liu's short stories, "The Algorithms for Love," in an online English-language sci-fi magazine, and sent Liu an email to say how much he liked it. They kept in touch, and a year later, Chen asked Liu for his opinion on an English translation of one of his stories, which he had commissioned from a translation company. Liu wasn't impressed and offered to edit it, but ended up redoing the translation from scratch.

Liu at home. Credit... Amani Willett for The New York Times

The story, "The Fish of Lijiang," takes place in a future China, where corporations manipulate their employees' sense of the passage of time in order to boost workers' productivity. Liu's translation was published in the sci-fi magazine Clarkesworld in 2011, and won the Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Award for short fiction the following year.

Liu realized there was a growing appetite for Chinese science fiction. As he read more of it, he was stunned to discover a huge and diverse body of literature - works that ranged from hard sci-fi, surreal horror and cyberpunk to dystopian alternate histories, political satires and chuanyue time-travel tales, a popular sub-subgenre in which a modern-day protagonist is transported back in time, often to a Chinese dynastic period. "I had no idea there was a vibrant science-fiction community in China," Liu says.

At the time, few people outside China did. Before the success of "The Three-Body Problem," Western publishers and literary agents were largely oblivious to the proliferation of sci-fi in China. "Ken Liu was basically working by himself," says Mingwei Song, an associate professor at Wellesley College who specializes in modern Chinese literature. "Only a few people outside China saw the rise of science fiction there. After his translations, it suddenly became visible."

For Liu, the discovery felt more personal. He got the same giddy feeling he had as a boy when he first read Chinese translations of American science fiction, a sense that he had entered a portal into another world. Reading science fiction written in his native language gave him new insights into his former home, a place that had changed almost beyond recognition since he left.

Liu's approach to translation is unorthodox - perhaps because he came to it somewhat late in his eclectic career. Strict fidelity to the source material is not his chief goal, nor is producing a smooth, Americanized version. "It's not a sentence-by-sentence or word-by-word recreation," he says. "It's about, how do I recreate the overall effect?"

Rather than glossing over cultural and colloquial nuances that would be lost on most Western readers, he tries to highlight them. To the irritation of his publishers, he sometimes resorts to footnotes to explain unfamiliar terms or episodes from Chinese history, rather than omitting or Anglicizing them. In his recent anthology, "Broken Stars," he used footnotes to explain the principles of Chinese alchemy, to describe how an agrarian rebellion against the Tang Dynasty in the ninth century led to the dynasty's demise, and to unpack a rather layered "inside joke for Chinese sci-fi fans."

Some cultural references remain untranslatable. In his introduction to "The First Emperor's Games," a satirical story by Ma Boyong that hinges on the delightfully absurd premise that China's first emperor was a video-game addict, Liu notes that "much of the humor of the story depends on knowledge of Chinese internet culture and ancient Chinese history, so liberal use of Wikipedia may be necessary for some readers."

The only times Liu got evasive during our conversations were when I asked him about the political implications of his translation work. Dissident writers have been jailed in China, and Liu often worries for the safety of the authors he works with.

"These writers are very creative and courageous in doing what they do, but as somebody who is not subject to the same constraints and the same kind of pressures that they are under, I try not to bring them trouble with what I'm saying," Liu told me when we were sitting in his kitchen, speaking quickly and somewhat urgently, but taking, as he often does, extreme care with his words. "As a translator, it's very easy to slip into the role where you feel like you're explaining, or are in a superior position to the author to say what you think they meant to say, or to say what you think ought to be said. I think it's very dangerous. When you're translating somebody from a different culture, who is subject to a different political system and who is writing for a different audience than you are, you have to be very careful about not substituting your voice for the author's voice and not taking away the author's prerogative to tell the story she wants to tell."

Sometimes the writers Liu works with feel they have more freedom in an English translation to draw pointed parallels to contemporary Chinese society. When Ma Boyong published his 2005 short story, "The City of Silence" - which takes place in the year 2046 in a repressive country where censorship is so extreme that citizens can only use words from a list of approved, "healthy" phrases - he set the story in an alternative New York to avoid directly evoking China's suppression of free speech. For the English version, Liu and Ma worked together to restore what Ma originally wanted to convey, and New York was changed to "the Capital of the State," making the similarities to China's censorship apparatus more explicit.

Recently, rising political tensions with and within China have made Liu's translation projects even more delicate. This year marked the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, a grim milestone that brought fresh crackdowns on free speech, as state censors have grown even more vigilant, all against the backdrop of a trade war with the United States and mass protests in Hong Kong. Some writers who once felt bold enough to tackle political and social issues, however obliquely, have been reluctant to publish their work, or have started self-censoring to avoid trouble.

"The political climate inside China has shifted drastically from when I first started doing this," Liu says. "It's gotten much harder for me to talk about the work of Chinese authors without putting them in an awkward position or causing them trouble." Liu usually travels to China at least once a year to network and meet new writers, and has attended the Chinese Nebula and Galaxy Awards, the country's most well known science-fiction prizes. But this year he was denied a long-term visa, without explanation, prompting him to cancel his planned trip.

In another alarming setback, when his American publisher tried to send copies of his recent translations to writers in China, the shipments failed to arrive. It was unclear whether the books were seized or simply disappeared into a bureaucratic black hole. Liu finally managed to get copies distributed through visiting Chinese friends, each of whom carried a few copies back in their suitcases. In April, when I met Liu at the Museum of Chinese in America, he seemed irritated by the cumbersome workaround, which he called "preposterous."

But later, when I asked if he felt he was being blacklisted by the Chinese government because of his translation work, Liu deflected and declined to speculate. "I don't want to magnify the problem," Liu told me, as we sat in a cafe a few blocks from the museum. "If the authors want to say something daring, then I will honor that, but I'm not going to impose my own politics on them. There's a lot of room to say what you want to say if you leave things ambiguous."

In his recent anthology, "Broken Stars," Liu published his translation of a dystopian novella by Baoshu, titled, "What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear." In the narrative, history runs backward, and China devolves from a superpower into an impoverished, unstable country, as the protagonist grows older and lives through pivotal events in reverse chronological order, witnessing the 2008 Beijing Olympics, then the Tiananmen protests, the Cultural Revolution, the years of famine and the Japanese occupation. The story's narrator, "a rising star of science fiction," at one point makes a metafictional observation about the risk he's taking by writing about politically taboo subjects, noting that some critics claim "that my work was an example of capitalist liberalism and contained metaphors criticizing the Communist Party."

Baoshu's novella was never printed in China. Liu's English version is the only officially published edition. When I asked Liu about whether publishing an English version was risky for Baoshu, he paused, weighing his words carefully, and finally said simply, "I'm glad I can bring this work out."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Chinese Sci-Fi Conquered America (Published 2019)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Feature The translator Ken Liu has done more than anyone to bridge the gap between Chinese science fiction and American readers. Ken Liu outside his home in Stoughton, Mass. Credit... Amani Willett for The New York Times In the fall of 2012, Ken Liu received an intriguing offer from a Chinese company with a blandly bureaucratic name: China Educational Publications Import and Export Corporation, Ltd.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
English translations of foreign-language science fiction are becoming more common, still, they face an uphill battle. The American market is already crowded with books written by native English speakers, and it takes a conscientious reader to seek out treasures that originate from other parts of the world - that is, if they're even translated in the first place.

When the other part of the world is, say, China, the effort becomes even more complicated. But China has a thriving science fiction scene, and Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem is stunning, elegant proof. Published in China in 2006 and newly translated by award-winning Chinese-American author Ken Liu, the novel is the first installment of a trilogy that asks one of the oldest questions in SF: What would it mean for the human race to come in contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence? From there, though, it transcends expectation - not to mention borders.

The Three-Body Problem spans multiple decades and characters, but it zooms in on Ye Wenjie and Wang Miao, two scientists in the very near future. Wenjie is an astrophysicist with a haunted past; she's the daughter of a physicist who was executed during the Cultural Revolution for daring to teach the "reactionary" idea of general relativity. Miao is a nanotech engineer, and he's been swept up in a virtual-reality, online video game called Three Body that's so deeply metaphysical, it's begun to resemble a cult.

Either of these premises alone would be make for a rich SF novel, but Cixin Liu is only getting warmed up. By the time the book hits its peak, it's unveiled a conspiracy that spans solar systems - one that not only threatens to alter the human race, but the very building blocks of physics that we've evolved to understand.

Cixin Liu clearly loves golden-age SF authors like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke; accordingly, The Three-Body Problem turns a boilerplate, first-contact concept into something absolutely mind-unfolding. While in the virtual world of Three Body, Miao confronts philosophical conundrums that border on the psychedelic, all while remaining scientifically rigorous. The way the book's alien race seeks to assert its presence on Earth is nothing short of awe-inspiring.

This is hard SF, full of lovingly lengthy passages of technical exposition about everything from quantum mechanics to artificial intelligence. But Cixin Liu supports all of that braintwisting theory with empathetic characters and a strong action-thriller backbone. That's a lot to set up, and The Three-Body Problem flounders somewhat until it finds its footing. The story begins slowly despite its many chronological leaps forward, and it takes a while to untangle exactly who or what the focal points of the plot are supposed to be. Once it's up and running, though, it's gripping.

For all its universal appeal, The Three-Body Problem is set against a specific backdrop, one that most English-language readers only know from a distance. Many of its major points hinge on the knowledge of Chinese history and culture - and while Ken Liu's translation is clear, tasteful, and lyrical, there's a lot of exposition to chew on. It's worth every ounce of effort. The book's well-earned suspense hinges on moral dilemmas that resonate far beyond its nationality or even its heady, abstract physics. At what point does science become dogma, and what point does that same dogma become religion?

Cixin Liu doesn't pose that question so much as let it play out in a sweeping drama that risks the highest stakes imaginable - and some that can barely be imagined at all. If The Three-Body Problem (and the next two books in the series, whose translations are in the works) helps bridge the gap between Eastern and Western SF, it will have performed a great duty for the literary world. But as a science-fiction epic of the most profound kind, it's already won.

Jason Heller is a senior writer at The A.V. Club.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'Three-Body Problem' Asks A Classic Sci-Fi Question, In Chinese

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
English translations of foreign-language science fiction are becoming more common, still, they face an uphill battle. The American market is already crowded with books written by native English speakers, and it takes a conscientious reader to seek out treasures that originate from other parts of the world - that is, if they're even translated in the first place.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.embed_code
Tweets by liu_cixin

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Liu Cixin [writing in English under the name, Cixin Liu] is a science fiction writer from China; a nine-time winner of the Chinese Galaxy Award (Chinese Hugo) and the Xing Yun Award (Chinese Nebula), and the first Asian to win a Hugo Award, in 2015, for his work, The Three-Body Problem (translated by sci-fi author, Ken Liu, and published by Tor Books).

Now a sci-fi film has been finished for The Three-Body Problem and set for release in 2017.

So who is Liu Cixin? He was born in 1963 in Yangquan, China, during that country's Cultural Revolution-a major influence in his life. His parents worked in a mine in Shanxi, but sent Liu to live in his ancestral home in the Henan province to escape the violence in the country. Liu was educated at the North China University of Water Conservancy and Electric Power, graduating in 1985, and then worked as a computer engineer.

He's an engineer by training, but what was the spark for Liu to write speculative science fiction?

As a scientist, a longtime reader of science fiction, and now myself a science fiction author, I embrace the idea that science and art are two sides to the same coin. In Liu's novels, physics becomes poetry and his characters reveal vulnerable souls, lost in a shifting world they can't truly grasp, but who remain determined to be true to themselves.

His characters travel through a procession of spectacular worlds, strung like pearls along a silk cord, harkening back to the intricate creations built by sci-fi writer, Arthur C. Clarke. Josh Rothman of The New Yorker wrote a lovely article on Liu Cixin.

Through his writings, Liu Cixin reveals an amazing mind, using science as both a physical and creative force, imagining worlds in which humans are never sure where the fate of the universe will leave them.

Cixin Liu Interview with K.E. Lanning
You were born during the turbulent time of the Cultural Revolution in China. Your parents worked in the mines of Shanxi, but you were sent to live in the Henan province to escape the violence. Can you tell us about growing up in that difficult period in China and how it affected you as a writer?
As a child, I witnessed a great deal of violence and persecution as well as social unrest during The Cultural Revolution. These are all mass movements, which, at some point, made individuals uncontrollably crazy, just like Gustave Le Bon in The Crowd as he was described in the book. This experience has made me understand the complexity of human nature and society-I've realized that the future of human civilization is also full of danger and uncertainty. Such understanding is manifested in my science fiction novels like The Three-Body Problem.
Do you feel that you are a driven person and what specifically drives you?
I was quite curious about the unknown world and was full of yearnings for the vast universe, and it was this wonder and desire that drove me to write science fiction. I've tried to describe the relationship between man and nature and the universe, using imagination to expand my existence.
Physics is the elemental language of the universe and you weave it into your writing like poetry. Can you discuss your love of physics and the role it plays in your works?
Physics is the science to understand the fundamentals of the world and it explores the deepest mysteries of nature and the universe. The world described by modern physics has already moved far beyond our common sense and intuition, even beyond our imagination, and this is, of course, the richest resource for science fiction. I've tried to turn the magical world as demonstrated by modern physics into vivid stories. Most of my stories were based on and imagined along the lines of physics and cosmology.
What are the primary influences specifically in your writing, such as authors you've read?
The writer who has influenced me the most is Arthur C. Clarke. His 2001: A Space Odyssey revealed the breadth and depth of science fiction imagination and thinking. Clarke also wrote Rendezvous with Rama, showing the ability for science fiction to create an imagined world. The entire work is like the Creator's giant blueprint depicting an intricate world in which each brick is delicately done. Another influential writer to me is George Orwell, whose 1984 provides a panoramic description of a possible future societal state, showing the ability of science fiction literature to reflect the reality from an angle unavailable to traditional realism.
World building seems to be a central thread through your stories-what is the impulse of creating these intricate worlds?
When I was just a reader of science fiction, what attracted me most to the science fiction genre was the multitude of imagined worlds it had created, which expanded the narrow breadth of my life. Now that I have become a science fiction writer myself, "world building" has become a primary direction for writing.
Western culture experienced the rise of the individual during the Renaissance, but in Chinese culture, responsibility for the greater good of society carries more weight than the individual. Through your characters, this strand appears to carry through your work. Can you discuss this?
The liberation of humanity after the Renaissance is, of course, a huge progress for human civilization. In the modern world, it is the trend for the development of human society to be people-centered, and this is certainly a bright direction. Even in China, where there still exist various problems in this regard, it is also the general direction of development.

But what needs to be pointed out is the fact that the worlds described by science fiction are invented by the author. In the science fiction stories that I have written, there is a huge difference between the fictional world I have crafted and the real world. The fictional worlds I create are worlds in which humanity is in crisis or facing calamity, and some worlds are on the verge of extinction.

A social system is inseparable from the environment in which a society finds itself. Under such circumstances, there would need for a suitable and adaptable system. To face a calamity, it might be possible that collectivism may once again become a mainstream view on values.
Your trilogy, Remembrance of Earth's Past, though primarily dystopian, has elements of hope, as it claws through the social and political side of human nature and our place in the universe. Is that correct and can you discuss this?
As to the future of humanity, I'm essentially an optimist. I believe that with the advancement of technology, mankind has a hopeful future. But this optimistic view is based on reason: on one hand, whether the future will be bright or be dark depends largely on the choices we make today. I think human beings are capable of finding a reasonable and correct choice for the direction of their development. Underlining that truth, the world walked away from destroying itself in a nuclear war during the last century.

But there also exists the possibility of a wrong choice. Human civilization may face all kinds of crises, which might come from changes of the Earth's environment or from outer space, i.e., encountering extraterrestrial civilizations.

In Death's End It's fantastic that The Three-Body Problem Can you give us a hint of what is next for you? has been made into a film. How do you feel about seeing your work adapted to the screen? How involved were you in the adaptation of the screenplay? , I felt a strong sense that much of the character development of Cheng Xin and Yun Tianming stem directly from you as a person. Can you comment on that?
Therefore, the future in my eyes is bright, although it is full of all kinds of challenges and pitfalls. A positive future can only be obtained through human effort, striving towards the greater good.

The Three-Body Problem Trilogy

The characters in my novels have little to do with my own life. When I was portraying these characters, I rarely put myself into them. They are more like some kind of signs or symbols and their character development is mainly dictated by the need of the story.

I am naturally pleased that my own novels can be made into films, but in China, we still lack experience in making science fiction movies, especially those big-budget science fiction films such as The Three-Body Problem. It's a challenge to be successful the first time. Therefore, I take it calmly, viewing it only as a good start for Chinese science fiction movies. I have participated a lot in the shooting of the film, mainly in the areas where a science fiction writer excels, such as script production, or design of concept for special effects and other things.
In the Author's Universe: Sci-Fi Authors from a Writer's Point of View is a series by author K.E. Lanning. Read more about her here.
I am working hard at writing my next novel, and my plan is to make the new novel different from The Three-Body Problem in terms of its theme.

With an allegorical spotlight, Liu Cixin's trilogy of The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death's End, illuminate the deep political and social issues in our world, in a desire to make sense of our common humanity and our place in the universe.

In a lyrical quote from Death's End, Liu writes:

"The ultimate fate of all intelligent beings has always been to become as grand as their thoughts."

But the question remains-what if someone out there in the universe answers our call?

My sincere thanks to Liu Cixin for this interview, to Desirae Friesen at Tor Books, and to Hongchu Fu, for aiding in translation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
In the Author's Universe: Interview with Sci-Fi Author Cixin Liu

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Liu Cixin [writing in English under the name, Cixin Liu] is a science fiction writer from China; a nine-time winner of the Chinese Galaxy Award (Chinese Hugo) and the Xing Yun Award (Chinese Nebula), and the first Asian to win a Hugo Award, in 2015, for his work, The Three-Body Problem (translated by sci-fi author, Ken Liu, and published by Tor Books).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Liu Cixin is the award-winning Chinese author behind the Three-Body trilogy. In China, he has won the prestigious Galaxy Award multiple times, and when the first volume of the series, The Three-Body Problem, was translated into English by Ken Liu and published by Tor, it was met with overwhelming critical acclaim and won the 2015 Hugo for best novel. The third volume in the trilogy, Death's End, (also translated by Ken Liu) came out this year, and a film of The Three-Body Problem is forthcoming.

Preston Grassmann spoke to Liu Cixin for Futures to discuss his writing, his inspirations and Chinese science fiction. (Interview: Preston Grassmann, Chinese translation: Ken Liu).
Throughout The Three-Body Problem there is a compelling interplay between the historical setting and the high-concept ideas (unique forms of energy transmission, a fascinating alien race, the physics problem referred to in the title, to name only a few). What inspired you to set this story in the context of the Cultural Revolution?
The Cultural Revolution provides the necessary background for the story. The tale I wanted to tell demanded a protagonist who gave up all hope in humanity and human nature. I think the only episode in modern Chinese history capable of generating such a response is the Cultural Revolution. It was such a dark and absurd time that even dystopias like 1984 seem lacking in imagination in comparison.
In a previous discussion, you mentioned that Chinese science fiction is currently going through a Golden Age, similar to that of the United States in the early half of the twentieth century. During that era, writers such as Clarke and Asimov were envisioning galactic-scale futures and optimistic views of human endeavour. The Three-Body Problem could certainly be seen as a worthy successor of that tradition. Do you see a similar grand-scale view of the future in other fiction being produced now in China?
Few works of contemporary Chinese science fiction hold a positive view of scientific development and an optimistic attitude towards the future. Like most current American science fiction, most Chinese science fiction concerns itself with the negative effects of scientific advancement and the dark future that will result. In this respect, I'm somewhat of an oddball among Chinese writers. Earlier in my career, others criticized me and mocked me for my optimism. Among Chinese intellectuals, it's fashionable to emphasize the problems created by new technology and science. But it's worth reflecting on the fact that my science-positive works have been more influential. I think it shows that intellectual elites in China are out of touch with the majority of Chinese people, who make up the bulk of science-fiction readers.
There is a high level of scientific detail throughout The Three-Body Problem. In particular, I'm thinking of the human-formation computer, the complex puzzles of the game, and the technology of signal/energy transmissions. How much research goes into your work before you begin writing? What were some of the most difficult challenges you faced in working out the technical details?
I write science fiction because I love science, and I want to give the beauty of science literary expression. Ideas about science and technology thus form the core of my stories. But I do think there's a difference between science-fictional thinking and scientific thinking. The 'science' portrayed in science fiction is mixed with a large dose of imaginative speculation, and is no longer, strictly speaking, science at all, but a fictional projection of science. Thus, what you call 'scientific details' are really 'science-fictional details'.

For example, the initial inspiration for writing The Three-Body Problem came from a paper about the three-body problem in classical mechanics, which involves the motion of three bodies under mutual gravitational attraction and is unpredictable under current mathematics and physics. I read the paper and suddenly thought: what if the three bodies were three suns? How would intelligent life on one of the planets in such a system develop? This was a good science-fictional idea - based on solid science but also evocative of interesting stories. But to go back to real science, we have not, to date, discovered any trinary star systems in which the stars move in this chaotic manner.

My biggest challenge is creating interesting stories from the latest results of fundamental scientific research. Take physics as an example. Compared with classical physics, contemporary physics is extremely abstruse. Not only is the maths complicated, but its theories are far from the daily experience of the average person. When given a proper explanation, even an illiterate person can understand Newton's three laws of motion, and special relativity only requires middle-school mathematics. But it's almost impossible for a person in the street to truly grasp advanced theories in contemporary physics. The Universe revealed by contemporary science is even more marvellous and rich than the Universe of classical science, and far grander. This is a vast field for science fiction to explore, and perhaps will revive the genre from its recent signs of exhaustion.
You worked with Ken Liu on the first and last book in this series. Can you tell us how this translation project began and how you first met?
China Educational Publications Import and Export Corporation (CEPIEC) first approached me about translating the Three-Body trilogy and publishing the books in the United States. They acquired the English rights and selected Tor Books as the American publisher. For more than a century, China has imported a large amount of science fiction from Europe and America, but The Three-Body Problem is the first Chinese science-fiction novel to be published in the United States. None of us had high expectations for the project, and it was enough for us if some American readers saw the book and realized that China had science fiction as well.

The first time I met Ken was at the Chinese Nebula Awards in November 2014, but before then, I had already read many of his stories, which I enjoyed and admired. I feel fortunate that he became the translator for two of the books in my trilogy.
In previous interviews, you mentioned Arthur C. Clarke as an influence on your work. Who are some of the writers in the field that you currently enjoy reading?
As I mentioned, I like Ken Liu's work. He has created a new science-fictional aesthetic that combines the restraint, depth and refinement of Eastern culture with the expansive imagination of modern science fiction. I'm also a big fan of Ted Chiang, whose Tower of Babylon is among the most powerful pieces of science fiction I've ever read. I also enjoy works by Robert Sawyer, Ray Bradbury, Neil Gaiman and Paolo Bacigalupi.

To be sure, American science fiction has always evolved and changed, and contemporary American science fiction is very different from fiction from the 'Golden Age'. As a traditional science-fiction fan, most contemporary works cannot give me the same kind of awe I experienced when I first read 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous with Rama.

I hold fast to Asimov's sentiment: "I hope that when the New Wave has deposited its froth and receded, the vast and solid shore of science fiction will appear once more." But based on current trends in the evolution of the field, I very much doubt that his words will come true; they serve only as comfort.
Aside from writing, you also work as an engineer. How do you manage to balance the two careers? Do you keep a rigorous writing schedule?
Most science-fiction writers in China do not write full time because the market for the genre is too small. I work at a state-owned power plant, and although parts of the year are very busy, I can find time the rest of the year to write. Many other writers are not nearly as lucky. The demands of their day jobs leave no time for the kind of sustained effort required for novels, and they are forced to write only novellas and short stories.

I don't hold to a rigorous writing schedule. I've always followed this principle: write only when I have a creative idea that makes me excited and demands to be written. If I can't even be excited by an idea, readers will surely be bored as well. But it's very hard to get an idea like that, and so I often go through long periods without writing anything - I'm in the middle of just such a bottleneck right now.
Can you tell us about your writing process?
First, I have to come up with a new speculative idea that moves me profoundly. For example, the unpredictable motion of three suns and the civilization that would arise in such a planetary system. Then I plan out a story around this seed. Finally, I create the characters to serve the story. My method of composition inevitably leads to stories in which the speculative idea is the core, the kind of stories seen as appealing to hardcore fans.
Are there any forthcoming projects or publications that we can look forward to seeing in the near future?
I plan to tell stories that are very different from the Three-Body trilogy. For example, I've spent a lot of time planning a novel about the future of energy. As a power-plant engineer, I'm familiar with the field.

I also want to write a novel about near future life in China, one that offers a panoramic view of Chinese society in the coming decades. The protagonist is a labourer at the bottom of the social pyramid in urban China, and I want to show this person gradually progressing into a new life as Chinese society develops, ultimately taking the journey into space. I even have a title for the novel, Extraordinary World, which is a reference to Lu Yao's influential realist work, Ordinary World.

I've always been deeply interested in stories about the struggle between humanity and powerful cosmic forces. The Three-Body trilogy is about a war between humans and aliens, but I want to tell a story of humans fighting against forces far more powerful than alien civilizations. There are many choices within this framework, and I haven't decided exactly which way to go yet.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Three-Body Problem and beyond - a Q&A with Liu Cixin

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Liu Cixin is the award-winning Chinese author behind the Three-Body trilogy. In China, he has won the prestigious Galaxy Award multiple times, and when the first volume of the series, The Three-Body Problem, was translated into English by Ken Liu and published by Tor, it was met with overwhelming critical acclaim and won the 2015 Hugo for best novel.