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Technological and social changes that took centuries in the west have been come in two generations in China Ken Liu

Initially serialised in the Chinese magazine Science Fiction World, the novel takes its title from a physics question in orbital mechanics and contains three intertwining plots, set respectively during 1971 in the Cultural Revolution, in the mid-2000s and on a distant world in a three-sun system. His first novel, The Devil’s Bricks, came out in 2002, but it wasn’t until 2006 that he had his breakthrough, The Three-Body Problem. I believe not a lot of people have this kind of privilege.”Ī cyclist passes in front of a factory in the Chinese town of Yangquan. Now looking back, my life path has matched my design almost precisely. I figured that if I got lucky, I could then turn into a full-time writer. “In my youth, when I tried to plan for the future, I had wished to be an engineer so I could get work with technology while writing sci-fi after hours. I chose this path because it allowed me to work on my fiction,” he says. “For about 30 years, I stayed in the same department and worked the same job, which was rare among people of my age. But what looks like a career diversion was entirely strategic: the stability of his career meant he could write, he says. But instead of studying literature, he got a job as a power-plant engineer in Yangquan. With this came a sudden surge of Chinese authors writing in the genre – and Liu wanted to be one of them. It wasn’t until the late 1970s, when China experienced economic reform and the strictures on western literature were relaxed, that science fiction was translated widely into Chinese. This very book turned me into a sci-fi fan.” “At the time, almost all the translated novels from the west were strictly banned, so I had to read it in secret. “No science-fiction novels were published, and people did not have any notion of scientific imagery,” Liu recalls. But more than 40 years ago, growing up in a coal-mining city in the Shanxi province, a young Liu found the book that would alter the course of his life, hidden in an old box that once belonged to his father.