The Three-Body Problem is the first novel in the groundbreaking, Hugo Award-winning series from China's most beloved science fiction author, Cixin Liu.
Set against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion. The result is a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision.
Same book, opposite verdicts, and that's half the fun. Reason reads the opening struggle session as a portrait of mob pressure and persecuted science, newly familiar in the age of online pile-ons. Nick Richardson in the London Review of Books, writing about the whole trilogy, reads Liu's politics as conservative and objects to how it handles gender.
The engineering is less disputed. Liu worked as a power-plant computer engineer, and the title names a real physics problem: three bodies pulling on each other, chaotic for most starting conditions, no general solution. It drives the plot instead of decorating it. Ken Liu's translation adds footnotes that teach Chinese history as you go, and Kirkus credited them with making that context easy to take in.
Kirkus gave the English edition a strongly positive review, hearing Clarke and Niven but crediting the Chinese setting and the footnotes for setting it apart. It won the 2015 Hugo for Best Novel and was a Nebula nominee. George R. R. Martin, voting for the Hugo, thought it deserved a spot on the ballot but not his top vote, finding the middle sagged and the ending unsatisfying.
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3 books in catalog
Speculative fiction exploring first contact with alien civilizations and cosmic-scale engineering achieved global prominence through the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, beginning with the novel The Three-Body Problem. Written by Cixin Liu, these works introduced hard scientific concepts and sweeping galactic timelines to an international audience.
Born in Beijing on June 23, 1963, Cixin Liu graduated from North China University of Water Resources and Electric Power before working as a computer engineer at a power plant. His engineering background provided a technical foundation that informed his rigorous approach to scientific principles and mechanical structures in his fiction.
Over his literary career, Liu became the most widely published science fiction writer in the People's Republic of China, earning China's Galaxy Award multiple times as well as the Chinese Nebula Award. The 2014 English translation of The Three-Body Problem by Ken Liu expanded his readership globally, leading to the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel—making it the first translated novel from an Asian author to receive the award.
Liu's writing combines hard science fiction with grand philosophical questions regarding human survival in an indifferent cosmos. His narratives frequently feature complex physics, orbital mechanics, macroscopic technological constructs, and detailed theoretical science.
Rather than focusing strictly on individual protagonists, his stories analyze macro-historical developments, social order under existential stress, and the long-term choices required of civilizations spanning centuries and millennia.
Remembrance of Earth's Past
