"I wrote about the worst of all possible universes in Three Body out of hope that we can strive for the best of all possible Earths," Liu said in the preface in The Three-Body Problem.

A perfect match

"The Three-Body Problem is a book that intends to explore humanity's own feelings about itself. Do we think of ourselves as a force of evil, or a force for good? It's still unclear what the book's ultimate judgment on this question is, but if thinking in 11 dimensions doesn't make your mind melt and you're looking for a hard science fiction book to read, then The Three-Body Problem would probably be a good choice for you," said Joao Eira, a science fiction fan studying physics at the University of Coimbra in Portugal.

Eira expressed that he was anxious to read the next volume coming in May. "I am a bit wary of what's to come in the next two books of the trilogy. The speculative scientific fantasy in which Liu dabbles in The Three-Body Problem is now deeply rooted in the narrative that will play out in The Dark Forest, the sequel, and yet I still find myself wanting to find out what happens next," he said.

Putting aside the original's sheer quality, the Harvard-educated Chinese-American translator Ken Liu appears in retrospect to have been the perfect candidate to bring Liu's world to an English-speaking readership. Before moving to the United States, Liu spent his early childhood in China, which meant he was able to master the fundamentals of the Chinese language. Ken Liu now is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer in Boston. He is a winner of the Nebula, Hugo and World Fantasy awards. All of this has enabled him to be able to reconstruct Three Body from the ground up in English.

"When I was asked to translate The Three-Body Problem, I was incredibly honored, but also full of trepidation: Translating another writer's work is a heavy responsibility. It's almost like being asked to care for someone's child," said Ken Liu. He believes that in moving from one language, culture, and reading community to another some aspects of the original would almost certainly be inevitably lost." But if the translation is done well, some things are also gained--not the least of which is a bridge between the two readerships," he stressed.

Market contender

Unlike other science fiction books in China, whose readers mostly comprise high school and college students, the Three Body trilogy somehow gained the attention of IT entrepreneurs, and they debated and discussed the various details from the books on Internet forums (such as the Dark Forest Theory of the cosmos--an answer to the Fermi Paradox--and the dimension-reduction attack on the Solar System launched by aliens). Three Body soon became a rising star of China's mainstream literary world. The book's sphere of influence has even spread to people with professional scientific backgrounds, such as scientists and engineers.

Li Miao, a cosmologist and string theorist, has written a book entitled The Physics of Three Body. Many aerospace engineers also became fans, a distinctly rare occurrence in the world of science fiction of life-imitating art. Fans also compose songs to pay tribute to Three Body on the Internet, and an ever burgeoning number of readers expressing their yearning for a movie adaptation--some of whom have even gone to the trouble of creating fake trailers out of clips from other movies.

Liu Cixin has by now sold the rights to option the trilogy to be adapted as a TV show, film or online game. It is expected that Three Body fans might see a movie within a few years.

"The experience of Three Body has given science fiction writers and critics cause to re-evaluate Chinese science fiction and China," said Liu Cixin in his preface.

Although Chinese science fiction is relatively unknown in the world, it has a long history in the country and the Chinese culture has provided a fertile breeding ground for both writers and readers, all of whom now believe the genre has a bright future.

Chinese science fiction was born at the turn of the 20th century, at a time when Chinese intellectuals were entranced by and curious about Western science and technology, and thought of such knowledge as the only hope for saving the nation from poverty, weakness and general backwardness. Many works popularizing and speculating about science were published, including science fiction novels. During the period between the mid-1990s and now, Chinese science fiction experienced a renaissance. New writers and their fresh ideas have little connection to older-generation writers.

Lu is one of the fan-writers who number themselves among the new breed. He started to write short science fiction stories in high school and has won an award in the field. "My major at university was Chinese literature. But I taught myself advanced physics courses such as general relativity and string theory because I believed they were necessary for my future writing projects," Lu said. "Chinese science fiction has been faced with a difficult task to strike a balance between science and fantasy. I am confident that it will have a bright future. And the publication of the English version of the Three Body trilogy is a beginning of introducing Chinese science fiction to the world at large."

According to Liu Cixin, the China of the present is a bit like America during science fiction's Golden Age, when science and technology infused writers with a sense of wonder regarding the future, presenting both great crises and grand opportunities.

"Science fiction is a literature of possibilities. The universe we live in is also one of countless possibilities," Liu Cixin said.