Liu Cixin on Fantastic Fiction

The Three-Body Problem unfolds at the start of the Cultural Revolution and is as much about the gravitational pull of planets as it is about personal ideologies. The author Liu Cixin has worked as a computer engineer at a state-owned power generation company in Shanxi Province for 30 years. His reign in Chinese science fiction started in 1999 with an article that won him the Galaxy Award, the highest award for sci-fi in China. He continued to receive the award for another seven straight years and again received the honor in 2010.