Liu Cixin is widely recognized as the leading voice in Chinese science fiction. He won the Yinhe Award for eight consecutive years, from 1999 to 2006, and again in 2010. He received the Xingyun Award in both 2010 and 2011.
An engineer by profession—until 2014, he worked for the China Power Investment Corporation at a power plant in Niangziguan, Shanxi Province—Liu began writing science fiction short stories as a hobby. However, his popularity soared with the publication of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past series of novels (the first volume, The Three-Body Problem, was serialized in Science Fiction World in 2006 and then published as a standalone book in 2008). An epic story of alien invasion and humanity’s journey to the stars, the series begins with a secret, Mao-era military effort at establishing communications with extraterrestrial intelligence, and ends (literally) with the end of the universe. Tor Books published the English edition of the series from 2014 to 2016 (The Three-Body Problem, translated by Ken Liu; The Dark Forest, translated by Joel Martinsen; Death’s End, translated by Ken Liu). The Three-Body Problem was the first translated book to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and President Barack Obama praised it as “wildly imaginative, really interesting.”
Liu works in the “hard SF” tradition of writers like Arthur C. Clarke. Some have called him a “classical” writer for that reason, as his stories foreground the romance and grandeur of science and humankind’s effort to discover nature’s secrets.
“Moonlight” showcases Liu Cixin doing what he does best: presenting idea after idea in a dizzying fusillade. This is the story’s first appearance in English.