Liu Cixin: ‘I’m often asked – there’s science fiction in China?’

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Author of sci-fi epic The Three-Body Problem – newly serialised by Netflix – on ‘the greatest uncertainty facing humanity’ and how finding a secret copy of a Jules Verne novel inspired his career

hinese author Liu Cixin’s science-fiction novels have sold millions of copies all over the world, and have won him numerous awards, including the global Hugo award for science fiction in 2015. Now, the English translation of the first book in Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, The Three-Body Problem, is back in the Amazon bestsellers charts, after the release of a TV adaptation by the creators of Game of Thrones.

“When I’ve travelled to the US or Europe and talked to people about science fiction, I’ve often encountered the question, ‘There’s science fiction in China?’” the author tells me via email, where we are conducting our conversation with the help of a translator. Science fiction was a rarity in China when Liu was growing up because most western books were banned. Living in a coal mining town in Shanxi province as a young man, he found a book hidden in a box that once belonged to his father. It was Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne, and Liu read it in secret, and in doing so forged a lifelong love of science fiction.

There has been some pushback to the series, however. In 2020, five Republican US senators called on Netflix to reconsider plans to adapt the book after Liu gave an interview to the New Yorker magazine in which he appeared to not condemn the Chinese government internment of Muslim Uyghur people in Xinjiang.

 

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