Cixin Liu (1963– ) is a Hugo Award–winning, highly influential Chinese writer of science fiction. Liu continues to work as a senior engineer at the Niangziguan power plant for the China Power Investment Corporation and has had a career as an engineer since graduating from the North China Institute of Water Power and Hydroelectric Engineering. His best-known novels in China include The Three-Body Trilogy (2006, 2007, 2010), Era of the Supernova (1999), Lightning Ball (2005), and short stories such as “The Wandering Earth” (2000) and “The Village Schoolteacher” (2001). An English-language collection of his short stories, The Wandering Earth, appeared in 2013 but does not represent the true depth and breadth of the author’s work. The English translations of The Three-Body Problem (2014) and its sequel, The Dark Forest (2015), do a better job of being representative but still do not fully encompass the scope of his work.
Liu began writing in 1989, according to an essay by Kun Kun in Peregrine 2 (2011), while a computer programmer. “I was in my early twenties and had just graduated from university. I lived in single dorms and didn’t have a girlfriend. I had nothing to do in the evenings apart from playing cards and mahjong. In one night I lost a month’s wages—800 yuan. That was the moment I suppose. I thought—I can’t go on like this. I had to find something to fill the evenings. If I couldn’t make money at least I shouldn’t lose any. Then I thought of writing a science-fiction novel.”
Also according to Peregrine, “in the early 1990s Cixin Liu wrote a software program in which each intelligent civilization in the universe was simplified into a single point. At its height, he programmed 350,000 civilizations within a radius of one hundred thousand light years and made his 286 computer work for hours to calculate the evolution of these civilizations. Although the final conclusion of the program was somewhat naïve, it formed the basis and shape of his world view.”
In China, his works have frequently appeared in a variety of newspapers and journals. He has also repeatedly topped bestseller lists. One of his book signings, at the Chengdu Book Tower, had to be ended prematurely because too many people had come to see him and the bookshelves were stripped bare of his novels. Liu was even invited by the editor in chief of People’s Literature to submit a short story to that magazine, the first time in over twenty years that it had published science fiction.
Liu is a nine-time winner of the Galaxy Award, which is the most prestigious prize for science fiction writing in China, and also the World Chinese Science Fiction Association’s Xingyun (Nebula) Award for best writer. The Three-Body Problem, originally published in Chinese in 2007, reached the shortlists for numerous major English-language awards in 2015, including the Nebula Award, and won the Hugo Award—a first for a Chinese writer, or, for that matter, any Asian writer.
An essay in the journal Renditions 77/78 noted that Liu’s fiction is “filled with grand majestic scenery and vivid imagination, combining abstract fantasy with concrete modern technology to highlight the beauty and significance of science.” That is certainly true of “The Poetry Cloud,” which is one of the most brilliant and inventive stories in this anthology. In it, Liu performs the nearly impossible feat of combining and reinventing several science fiction tropes in a joyful, kinetic, and genius-level narrative performance.