Cixin Liu

Author

Cixin Liu is a Chinese author and one of the most important science fiction writers in the world. His Three-Body Problem trilogy — known in China as Remembrance of Earth's Past — brought Chinese science fiction to a global audience and won the Hugo Award, making Liu the first Asian author to receive the prize. Born in Beijing in 1963,... Liu grew up in Shanxi province during the Cultural Revolution — a period of upheaval that left a deep mark on his fiction. He studied Hydraulic Engineering at North China University of Water Conservancy and Electric Power and spent most of his career working as a computer engineer at a power plant in Niangziguan, writing science fiction in his spare time for years before achieving recognition. The Three-Body Problem, published in Chinese in 2006 and translated into English by Ken Liu in 2014, is set against the backdrop of the Cultural Revolution and imagines first contact with an alien civilisation from a planet in a chaotic three-body star system. The novel's combination of hard science, political history, and cosmic-scale imagination was unlike anything in Western science fiction, and it became an international bestseller. Barack Obama called it "wildly imaginative" and "really fun." The sequels — The Dark Forest and Death's End — expanded the scope to encompass the fate of the entire universe, introducing concepts that have entered the vocabulary of science fiction fans worldwide, including the "dark forest" theory of interstellar civilisation. The trilogy has sold over 30 million copies worldwide and been adapted into a Netflix series and a Chinese television production. Liu's other works include Ball Lightning, The Wandering Earth (adapted into a hugely successful Chinese film franchise), and numerous short stories that demonstrate his extraordinary range and imaginative ambition. His writing is characterised by the scale of its ideas — Liu thinks in terms of centuries, galaxies, and civilisational epochs — and by a willingness to confront the bleakest implications of scientific and political logic. His fiction is intellectually exhilarating and occasionally terrifying. The audiobook editions of the Three-Body trilogy have been widely praised, with narrators capturing the epic scope and intellectual intensity of Liu's vision. The audiobooks are a compelling way to experience one of the most ambitious science fiction sagas of the twenty-first century. Cixin Liu lives in China. His books and audiobooks are essential for anyone who wants science fiction that thinks bigger than you thought possible. Read more Show less