Chinese 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.
But a decade ago, few in the UK had heard of Liu and The Three-Body Problem, which begins as a contemporary murder mystery and gradually builds into a story of alien contact. When it was first published here, Nic Cheetham, managing director of Liu’s UK publisher Head of Zeus, remembers being unsure if anyone would turn up for a book signing with the author in a London bookshop.
“When we got to the store there were literally hundreds of people waiting for the signing, the majority of them Chinese students”, the publisher said. “Liu had a film crew with him, filming him for a documentary on Chinese TV. We only realised then how big he was in China. He’s like a rock star over there.”
Liu was motivated to have his books translated into English partly “to let people in the United States and the English-speaking world know that China also has science fiction novels.”
“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.
“But now, the novel has sold more than 3m copies in the English-speaking world, exceeding the total sales of all the literary works exported by China since the founding of the country. This is something that neither the publisher nor I had expected”, Liu says.
Cheetham had been looking to publish some non-western science fiction for some time when he came across The Three-Body Problem, which had just been bought by the US publisher Tor. He read it and was immediately convinced.
“It was in a way more like golden age western science fiction than what was being published over here at the time,” he says. “It was more interested in the big picture than character-driven stuff. It had been a bit of a surprise that it took off in China, because it was reaching an audience that didn’t really have any science fiction reference points.”
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.
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By the late 1970s, economic reforms in China relaxed some of the strictures on imported fiction, and some science fiction was being translated into Chinese, which kickstarted production of homegrown sci-fi books. It took Liu until the turn of the millennium to realise his ambition, first with his debut novel The Devil’s Bricks in 2002, then with the serialisation in the magazine Science Fiction World of what would become The Three-Body Problem. More than two decades on, Liu is still not really sure what was behind its success.
“Frankly speaking, I don’t know even know the reasons for the success of The Three-Body Problem trilogy. I don’t find the reasons given by some researchers, such as the novels have helped the west to understand China and so on, to be convincing. I don’t think that the success of The Three-Body Problem in the west is due to the fact that the novels are Chinese science fiction novels, but rather the fact that they are science fiction novels that treat human beings as a whole.”
Back in 2016, there were plans for a big budget movie of The Three-Body Problem, which never materialised, although a second attempt to bring the story to the screen, the Chinese TV series, Three-Body, came out early last year and was popular in China. But when Netflix came calling, Liu was delighted about the chance to reach the streaming service’s huge global audience – and particularly by the news that David Benioff and DB Weiss were to be at the helm, as Game of Thrones was “one of the best film and TV adaptations” the author had ever seen.
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. He was quoted as saying: “Would you rather they be hacking away at bodies at train stations and schools in terrorist attacks? If anything, the government is helping their economy and trying to lift them out of poverty.”
Does he regret what he said? Was there any fear that Netflix might pull out because of the pressure from US politicians?
“Netflix adapted my book on the basis of the content of the book itself, which is a normal cultural exchange and should not be confused with other things that have nothing to do with the book,” says Liu. “I believe that writers should have the freedom to express their political opinions” and “the freedom to give voice to a wide range of opinions from different quarters, which I exercised in the New Yorker interview.”
With millions set to watch 3 Body Problem on Netflix, what does Liu hope viewers and new readers might take away from the story?
He says he would like people to “realise what the greatest uncertainty facing humanity is”, which, in his mind, is the potential for life on other planets, and the possibility that we could meet our extraterrestrial counterparts at some point. “I hope they realise that there’s this one thing that may not happen for the next 10,000 years, or it may happen tomorrow morning,” he says. “And that once it happens, our world and our lives will change completely. I hope that the series of 3 Body Problem will make people look up at the starry sky from their busy and trivial lives, even if it’s just for a moment.”
Liu Cixin’s quotes were translated into English by Chi Hui Lin
