Author profile

Liu Cixin: books, review, and bibliography

Liu Cixin writes science fiction about contact, deterrence, impossible physics, and choices that can decide whether whole civilizations survive.

Born 1963science fiction writerwriter

Biography source

View 1 reviewed book

Biography and criticism

Huge ideas, long explanations, and thin characters

His best scenes make an abstract scientific idea visible. The tradeoff is that the people can start to feel like pieces placed where the idea needs them.

An engineer in China's science-fiction revival

Liu Cixin was born in Beijing in 1963, grew up in Shanxi, studied engineering, and worked at a power plant while writing science fiction. He became a major figure in Chinese speculative literature before English translation brought The Three-Body Problem and the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy to a broad international audience. Ken Liu translated the first volume, whose story begins partly during the Cultural Revolution.

The trilogy starts as a scientific mystery, then moves into first contact, deterrence, technology that changes dimensions, and threats to entire civilizations. A decision made by one person can set conditions that last for centuries.

The huge machine and the people inside it

Liu's ideas include a computer made from people, a fleet traveling for centuries, and a solar system facing physics its inhabitants cannot fight. He often stops to explain how those ideas work. The explanations can be more interesting than the characters, who sometimes seem placed where the thought experiment needs them. The trilogy's gendered contrast between hard and soft choices is also a real weakness.

The Dark Forest works through deterrence most forcefully, while Death's End keeps increasing the physical scale and danger. The Wandering Earth stories offer shorter examples of Liu's engineering imagination. Start with The Three-Body Problem, but expect the mystery to grow into a long argument about what civilizations will do when they cannot know another civilization's intentions.

Hard Science Fiction Science Fiction

Where to begin

The Liu Cixin book reviewed here

Reviewed on this site

The Three-Body Problem

4.4 / 5

The Three-Body Problem is stronger as a collision of scientific and historical ideas than as intimate drama, but those ideas generate genuine cosmic unease.

Bibliography

Books by Liu Cixin

Reviews and book guides open on Book Review Guide. The full list comes from the linked bibliography source.

Reviewed

Liu Cixin reviews and guides

20164.4 / 5

The Three-Body Problem

Book 1 of the Remembrance of Earth's Past Trilogy

The Three-Body Problem is stronger as a collision of scientific and historical ideas than as intimate drama, but those ideas generate genuine cosmic unease.

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