Liu Cixin

Science fiction can be hard to disentangle from the real
world. Futuristic tales about advanced technology and clashing
alien civilizations often read
like allegories of presentday problems. It is tempting, then, to find some kind of political message in the
novels of Liu Cixin, 57, China’s most famous science fiction writer, whose speculative and often apocalyptic
work has earned the praise
of Barack Obama and Mark
Zuckerberg. The historian
Niall Ferguson recently said
that reading Mr. Liu’s fiction is essential for understanding “how China views America and the world today.”But Mr. Liu insists that
this is “the biggest misinterpretation of my work.”Speaking through an interpreter over Skype from his
home in Shanxi Province, he
says that his books, which
have been translated into
more than 20 languages,
shouldn’t be read as com-
mentaries on China’s his-
tory or aspirations. In his
books, he maintains, “aliens
are aliens, space is space.”
Although he has acknowl-
edged, in an author’s note
to one of his books, that
“every era puts invisible
shackles on those who have
lived through it,” he says
that he writes science fic-
tion because he enjoys
imagining a world beyond
the “narrow” one we live in.
“For me, the essence of sci-
ence fiction is using my
imagination to fill in the
gaps of my dreams,” says
Mr. Liu.
In China, science fiction
has often been inseparable
from ideology. A century
ago, early efforts in the
genre were conspicuously
nationalistic: “Elites used it
as a way of expressing their
hopes for a stronger China,”
says Mr. Liu. But the
1966-76 Cultural Revolution
banned science fiction as
subversive, and critics in
the 1980s argued that it promoted
capitalist ideas. “After that, science
fiction was discouraged,” Mr. Liu re-
members.
In recent years, however, the
genre has been making a comeback.
This is partly because China’s break-
neck pace of modernization “makes
people more future-oriented,” Mr.
Liu says. But the country’s science
fiction revival also has quite a lot to
do with Mr. Liu himself.
In 2015, he became the first Asian
writer to win the Hugo Award, the
most prestigious international sci-
ence fiction prize. A 2019 adaptation
of his short story “The Wandering
Earth” became China’s third-highest-
grossing film of all time, and a movie
version of his bestselling novel “The
Three-Body Problem” is in the works.
His new book, “To Hold Up the Sky,”
a collection of stories, will be pub-
lished in the U.S. in October. (His
American books render his name as
Cixin Liu, with the family name last,but Chinese convention is to put the family name first.) Mr. Liu’s obsession with outer space began in childhood. At first, he hoped to explore it as an astronaut
or astronomer, but he settled for
reading and writing about it instead.
Early exposure to books by Jules
Verne, H.G. Wells and Arthur C.
Clarke—hidden under a bed by his
father during the Cultural Revolu-
tion—tickled Mr. Liu’s imagination
and spurred his pen.
His first book appeared in 1989,

and for years he wrote while work-
ing as an engineer at a state-owned
power plant. The publication of “The
Three-Body Problem,” in 2006, made
him famous, and after a pollution
problem shut the plant down in
2010, he devoted himself to writing
full-time.
Mr. Liu’s renowned trilogy “Re-
membrance of Earth’s Past,” pub-
lished in China between 2006 and
2010, tells the story of a war be-
tween humans on Earth and an alien
civilization called the Trisolarans
who inhabit a planet in decline. The
story begins in the 1960s, in the
years of the Cultural Revolution, and
eventually zooms millions of years
into the future. The aliens’ techno-
logical superiority and aggressive
desire to exploit Earth’s resources
have made some readers see them as
a metaphor for the colonial Western
powers China struggled against for
more than a century. But Mr. Liu
says this is too limited a view of his
intentions. What makes science fiction “so special,” he says, is that its

narratives often encourage
us to “look past boundaries
of nations and cultures and
races, and instead really
consider the fate of human-
kind as a whole.”
The English version of
“The Three-Body Problem,”
the first book in the trilogy,
differs from the original in a
small but telling way. In this
2014 translation, the story
begins with an episode from
the Cultural Revolution, in
which a character’s father is
publicly humiliated and
killed for his “reactionary”
views. The translator Ken
Liu (no relation to the au-
thor) moved the scene to
the start of the book from
the middle, where Mr. Liu
admits he had buried it in
the original Chinese because
he was wary of government
censors—particularly since the book was published on the 30th anniversary of the
Cultural Revolution. But he
is quick to say that the “en-
vironment is pretty free” for
science fiction writers. “I’ve
never heard of anyone who
couldn’t publish something
because they wrote about a
certain topic,” he says. The
rules are stricter for Chi-
nese films, he concedes, but
here too he believes things
are “loosening up.”
A common criticism of
Mr. Liu’s books is that he is
more interested in science
than in people. Mr. Liu
gamely admits that his
characters are there “to
push the plot.” But he takes
issue with the complaint,
voiced by some critics, that
he depicts female characters
as driven more by emotion than ra-
tionality. He notes that Cheng Xin, a
compassionate female scientist who
plays a central role in “Death’s End,”
the final volume of “Remembrance
of Earth’s Past,” was initially written
as a man, but Mr. Liu’s editor sug-
gested he make her a woman for the
sake of a better “gender balance.”
“Regardless of whether she was a
man or woman, the plot didn’t
change at all,” Mr. Liu says.
Mr. Liu hopes his books give read-
ers a sense of perspective. “Our real-
ity is narrow, confined, and fleeting,”
he says. “Whatever we think is im-
portant right now, in our mundane
lives, will no longer be important
against a grander sense of time and
space.” His goal, he says, is to in-
spire more people to take a moment
“to look up at the sky and cast their
eyes at what’s beyond.” The idea
that someone might gaze at the
stars because of his work is, he says,
“the definition of success.”