Liu Cixin

Liu Cixin is a Chinese science fiction author whose The Three-Body Problem became the first Asian novel to win the Hugo Award and introduced Western readers to a sweeping, cosmologically dark vision of the universe.

Liu Cixin worked for decades as a computer engineer at a power plant in Shanxi province while writing science fiction on the side. His Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, beginning with The Three-Body Problem, became the highest-selling science fiction series in Chinese history before being translated into English by Ken Liu and winning the Hugo Award in 2015 — a landmark moment for non-Anglophone SF. The novel begins during the Cultural Revolution and expands into a first-contact scenario with implications that span centuries.

The Three-Body Problem is a work of genuine intellectual ambition. Liu’s central preoccupations — the Fermi paradox, the sociology of alien civilizations, the physics of game theory at cosmic scale — give the novel a speculative grandeur that distinguishes it from most first-contact fiction. His “Dark Forest” solution to the Fermi paradox, developed across the trilogy, is one of the more original ideas in recent science fiction: the proposition that any civilization capable of space travel has a rational incentive to destroy any other civilization before being destroyed. It is a bleak hypothesis rendered with persuasive logic.

Liu’s characterization is frequently weak by Western literary standards — his protagonists are more vehicles for ideas than fully realized people, and female characters in particular receive thin treatment. His historical sections during the Cultural Revolution have also been read differently depending on where you sit politically: some find them a courageous indictment, others find them ambiguous to the point of apology. But for readers who prize conceptual reach and cosmological scope in their science fiction, The Three-Body Problem is an essential and disorienting read.