In the last ten years or so, few works of science fiction have made as big of a splash as Liu Cixin's Hugo Award-winning novel The Three-Body Problem. First published in the People's Republic of China in 2008, a translation in English appeared several years afterward, and the book has since gone on to become a global best-seller.
Indeed, The Three-Body Problem has been transformative for Chinese science fiction as a whole. Long a publisher of short stories, Liu followed up his novel with two sequels – The Dark Forest (2008) and Death's End (2010) – and within the span of a few years, his reputation as a writer and global ambassador of Chinese literature was cemented. Apart from that,...