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Find out moreCixin Liu is China's #1 SF writer and author of The Three-Body Problem - the first ever translated novel to win a Hugo Award. Prior to becoming a writer, Liu worked as an engineer in a power plant in Yangquan.
Meet eleven fabulous short stories by China’s number one science fiction writer. This is the first time they have been published in English, originally written between 1999 and 2017, a number of different translators have ensured that an exquisite reading feast awaits. Cixin Liu’s foreword ensured a few raised eyebrows and smiles on my part. It is absolutely fascinating to read these stories, that: “inevitably have a strong Chinese flavour, imbued with the culture, history, and present reality of China” as well as explore the universe beyond our understanding. These are stories that are set on an epic scale, yet focus on the intimate and essential meaning of being human. I particularly enjoyed The Village Teacher, a story that pivots on an apparently small, individually brave act. This would be the perfect introduction to science fiction for anyone who has not yet dipped a toe. For lovers of sci-fi, there is plenty here to fall into and enjoy. Hold Up The Sky is a cracking collection of stories that allows your mind to look within as well as well as travel into the unknown.
So, so readable, Of Ants and Dinosaurs with the lightest and brightest of touches, made my brain itch with its creativity and klaxon alarm. Perfect for readers from young adult on, this sets itself as a “satirical fable, a political allegory and ecological warning”. In a time long long ago ants and dinosaurs joined forces to build a magnificent civilisation, when doom threatens will the dinosaurs listen to the ants? Cixin Liu is China’s number one science-fiction writer and his The Three-Body Problem was the first translated novel to win a Hugo award. I just love the cover, and the ants marching across the chapter pages had me smiling. As soon as I started to read my attention was well and truly caught. The prologue sets the scene with wonder and I read and believed without a moment's doubt. While portraying the ant and dinosaur alliance, there is very much a warning to the human race here. Deceptively simple and brilliantly clever, Of Ants and Dinosaurs just has to sit as a Liz Pick of the Month and a LoveReading Star Book, I simply adored it.
So, so readable, Of Ants and Dinosaurs with the lightest and brightest of touches, made my brain itch with its creativity and klaxon alarm. Perfect for readers from young adult on, this sets itself as a “satirical fable, a political allegory and ecological warning”. In a time long long ago ants and dinosaurs joined forces to build a magnificent civilisation, when doom threatens will the dinosaurs listen to the ants? Cixin Liu is China’s number one science-fiction writer and his The Three-Body Problem was the first translated novel to win a Hugo award. I just love the cover, and the ants marching across the chapter pages had me smiling. As soon as I started to read my attention was well and truly caught. The prologue sets the scene with wonder and I read and believed without a moment's doubt. While portraying the ant and dinosaur alliance, there is very much a warning to the human race here. Deceptively simple and brilliantly clever, Of Ants and Dinosaurs just has to sit as a Liz Pick of the Month and a LoveReading Star Book, I simply adored it.
An international collaboration involving 26 writers and illustrators from 14 different countries have transformed 15 of Cixin Liu's - 'China's answer to Arthur C. Clarke' (New Yorker) - award-winning stories into graphic novels. In the depths of mountains shrouded with ignorance and superstition, one man has dedicated his life to igniting a passion for maths and science in the hearts of the peasant children around him. Now his life is coming to its end, he draws his students around him so he can impart knowledge on them to his final breath. All the while, in a far corner of outer space, fifty thousand light-years away, an interstellar war that has waged for thousands of years is coming to an end. The victor plans to perform the full-scale extermination of any low-intelligence lifeforms that remain in what is now his solar system. In order to gauge the intelligence of a planet, the victor devises a test - posed to a group of lifeforms selected at random by a computer - of science and mathematics. On a green-and-blue planet nestled in a spiral arm of the Milky Way, the computer's selection falls to a group of children, in the depths of mountains shrouded with ignorance and superstition... Praise for Cixin Liu:'Your next favourite sci-fi novel' Wired 'Immense' Barack Obama 'Unique' George R.R. Martin 'SF in the grand style' Guardian 'Mind-altering and immersive' Daily Mail 'A milestone in Chinese science-fiction' New York Times 'China's answer to Arthur C. Clarke' New Yorker Winner of the Hugo and Galaxy Awards for Best Novel
NOW A #1 BLOCKBUSTING FILM The Sun is dying. Earth will perish too, consumed by the star in its final death throes. But rather than abandon their planet, humanity builds 12,000 mountainous fusion engines to propel the Earth out of orbit and onto a centuries-long voyage to Proxima Centaurai... Cixin Liu is one of the most important voices in world Science Fiction. A bestseller in China, his novel, The Three-Body Problem, was the first translated work of SF ever to win the Hugo Award. Here is the first collection of his short fiction: ten stories, including five Chinese Galaxy Award-winners. This collection's title story, The Wandering Earth, is the biggest SF movie ever to come out of China - taking the world's #1 box office ranking in February 2019. Liu's writing takes the reader to the edge of the universe and the end of time, to meet stranger fates than we could have ever imagined. With a melancholic and keen understanding of human nature, Liu's stories show humanity's attempts to reason, navigate and, above all, survive in a desolate cosmos.
'Like Ursula K. Le Guin rewriting The Lord of the Flies for the quantum age' NPR 'Cixin Liu is the author of your next favourite sci-fi novel' WIRED Eight years ago and eight light years away, a supermassive star died. Tonight, a supernova tsunami of high energy will finally reach Earth. Dark skies will shine bright as a new star blooms in the heavens and within a year everyone over the age of thirteen will be dead, their chromosomes irreversibly damaged. And so the countdown begins. Parents apprentice their children and try to pass on the knowledge they'll need to keep the world running. But the last generation may not want to carry the legacy of their parents' world. And though they imagine a better, brighter future, they may not be able to escape humanity's dark instincts...
An international collaboration involving 26 writers and illustrators from 14 different countries have transformed 15 of Cixin Liu's - 'China's answer to Arthur C. Clarke' (New Yorker) - award-winning stories into graphic novels. It was the Ice and Snow Arts Festival that lured the low-temperature artist to Earth. Drawn by the beauty and technical skill of the sculptures displayed, the extraterrestrial visitor longed to collaborate and share its own art. But while humans learnt to craft ice into exquisite ephemera, the low-temperature artist's civilisation mastered the manipulation of whole worlds to create artworks - drawing on the seas and ice caps, and cooling their temperature to beautiful effect. Faced with the inevitable devastation and heat death of their planet, humankind must use their final breaths to fight for existence. But the artist will only speak to one human: Yan Dong, the ice sculptor whose beautiful work first drew its eye. Praise for Cixin Liu:'Your next favourite sci-fi novel' Wired 'Immense' Barack Obama 'Unique' George R.R. Martin 'SF in the grand style' Guardian 'Mind-altering and immersive' Daily Mail 'A milestone in Chinese science-fiction' New York Times 'China's answer to Arthur C. Clarke' New Yorker Winner of the Hugo and Galaxy Awards for Best Novel
An international collaboration involving 26 writers and illustrators from 14 different countries have transformed 15 of Cixin Liu's - 'China's answer to Arthur C. Clarke' (New Yorker) - award-winning stories into graphic novels. Yuanyuan was five months old when she saw bubbles for the first time. In that moment, her eyes lit up with a radiance that outshone the sun and stars, and she felt she truly saw the world for the first time. From that day on, her life's one dream was to blow the biggest bubbles possible. Yuanyuan's father doesn't approve of her dream. He fears his daughter's obsession is childish and too fleeting for his daughter, and longs for her to turn her intelligence to a calling that might help people. Their city is dying, but Yuanyuan focuses solely on blowing bigger and bigger bubbles. But when Yuanyuan learns to create a bubble the size of a city - greater even - it may be that her obsession isn't so unhelpful after all. Praise for Cixin Liu:'Your next favourite sci-fi novel' Wired 'Immense' Barack Obama 'Unique' George R.R. Martin 'SF in the grand style' Guardian 'Mind-altering and immersive' Daily Mail 'A milestone in Chinese science-fiction' New York Times 'China's answer to Arthur C. Clarke' New Yorker Winner of the Hugo and Galaxy Awards for Best Novel
An international collaboration involving 26 writers and illustrators from 14 different countries have transformed 15 of Cixin Liu's - 'China's answer to Arthur C. Clarke' (New Yorker) - award-winning stories into graphic novels. The Sun is dying. Helium will soon permeate its core, triggering a violent explosion, and its burning-hot diameter will increase until it has consumed everything that stands in its way. As long as we remain in its path, humanity stands no chance. Interstellar emigration is the only way out. Reaching a consensus on a destination has been easy: the only viable target is Proxima Centauri. It is the star closest to our own, a mere 4.3 light-years away. How to reach our new solar system is more difficult. Spaceships stand no chance in open space, and the nearest inhabitable planet lies hundreds of thousands of years away. If humanity leaves Earth behind, our continued existence is impossible. The only way to survive is to find a way to propel Earth out of its orbit. But how? Praise for Cixin Liu:'Your next favourite sci-fi novel' Wired 'Immense' Barack Obama 'Unique' George R.R. Martin 'SF in the grand style' Guardian 'Mind-altering and immersive' Daily Mail 'A milestone in Chinese science-fiction' New York Times 'China's answer to Arthur C. Clarke' New Yorker Winner of the Hugo and Galaxy Awards for Best Novel
'Cixin Liu is the author of your next favourite sci-fi novel' WIRED On his fourteenth birthday, right before his eyes, Chen's parents are incinerated by a blast of ball lightning. Striving to make sense of this bizarre tragedy, he dedicates his life to a single goal: to unlock the secrets of this enigmatic natural phenomenon. His pursuit of ball lightning will take him far from home, across mountain peaks chasing storms and deep into highly classified subterranean laboratories as he slowly unveils a new frontier in particle physics. Chen's obsession gives purpose to his lonely life, but it can't insulate him from the real world's interest in his discoveries. He will be pitted against scientists, soldiers and governments with motives of their own: a physicist who has no place for moral judgement in his pursuit of knowledge; a beautiful army major obsessed with new ways to wage war; a desperate nation facing certain military defeat. Conjuring awe-inspiring new worlds of cosmology and philosophy from meticulous scientific speculation, Ball Lightning has all the scope and imagination that so enthralled readers of Cixin Liu's award-winning Three-Body trilogy. Praise for Cixin Liu: 'Your next favourite sci-fi novel' Wired 'Immense' Barack Obama 'Unique' George R.R. Martin 'SF in the grand style' Guardian 'Mind-altering and immersive' Daily Mail 'A milestone in Chinese science-fiction' New York Times 'China's answer to Arthur C. Clarke' New Yorker Winner of the Hugo and Galaxy Awards for Best Novel
Read the award-winning, critically acclaimed, multi-million-copy-selling science-fiction phenomenon - soon to be a Netflix Original Series from the creators of Game of Thrones. Imagine the universe as a forest, patrolled by numberless and nameless predators. In this forest, stealth is survival - any civilisation that reveals its location is prey. Earth has. Now the predators are coming. Crossing light years, the Trisolarians will reach Earth in four centuries' time. But the sophons, their extra-dimensional agents and saboteurs, are already here. Only the individual human mind remains immune to their influence. This is the motivation for the Wallfacer Project, a last-ditch defence that grants four individuals almost absolute power to design secret strategies, hidden through deceit and misdirection from human and alien alike. Three of the Wallfacers are influential statesmen and scientists, but the fourth is a total unknown. Luo Ji, an unambitious Chinese astronomer, is baffled by his new status. All he knows is that he's the one Wallfacer that Trisolaris wants dead. Praise for The Three-Body Problem: 'Your next favourite sci-fi novel' Wired 'Immense' Barack Obama 'Unique' George R.R. Martin 'SF in the grand style' Guardian 'Mind-altering and immersive' Daily Mail 'A milestone in Chinese science-fiction' New York Times 'China's answer to Arthur C. Clarke' New Yorker Winner of the Hugo and Galaxy Awards for Best Novel
Read the award-winning, critically acclaimed, multi-million-copy-selling science-fiction phenomenon - soon to be a Netflix Original Series from the creators of Game of Thrones. 1967: Ye Wenjie witnesses Red Guards beat her father to death during China's Cultural Revolution. This singular event will shape not only the rest of her life but also the future of mankind. Four decades later, Beijing police ask nanotech engineer Wang Miao to infiltrate a secretive cabal of scientists after a spate of inexplicable suicides. Wang's investigation will lead him to a mysterious online game and immerse him in a virtual world ruled by the intractable and unpredictable interaction of its three suns. This is the Three-Body Problem and it is the key to everything: the key to the scientists' deaths, the key to a conspiracy that spans light-years and the key to the extinction-level threat humanity now faces. Praise for The Three-Body Problem: 'Your next favourite sci-fi novel' Wired 'Immense' Barack Obama 'Unique' George R.R. Martin 'SF in the grand style' Guardian 'Mind-altering and immersive' Daily Mail 'A milestone in Chinese science-fiction' New York Times 'China's answer to Arthur C. Clarke' New Yorker Winner of the Hugo and Galaxy Awards for Best Novel
Read the award-winning, critically acclaimed, multi-million-copy-selling science-fiction phenomenon - soon to be a Netflix Original Series from the creators of Game of Thrones. Half a century after the Doomsday Battle, the uneasy balance of Dark Forest Deterrence keeps the Trisolaran invaders at bay. Earth enjoys unprecedented prosperity due to the infusion of Trisolaran knowledge and, with human science advancing and the Trisolarans adopting Earth culture, it seems that the two civilizations can co-exist peacefully as equals without the terrible threat of mutually assured annihilation. But peace has made humanity complacent. Cheng Xin, an aerospace engineer from the 21st century, awakens from hibernation in this new age. She brings knowledge of a long-forgotten program dating from the start of the Trisolar Crisis, and her presence may upset the delicate balance between two worlds. Will humanity reach for the stars or die in its cradle? Praise for The Three-Body Problem: 'Your next favourite sci-fi novel' Wired 'Immense' Barack Obama 'Unique' George R.R. Martin 'SF in the grand style' Guardian 'Mind-altering and immersive' Daily Mail 'A milestone in Chinese science-fiction' New York Times 'China's answer to Arthur C. Clarke' New Yorker Winner of the Hugo and Galaxy Awards for Best Novel
Read the award-winning, critically acclaimed, multi-million-copy-selling science-fiction phenomenon - soon to be a Netflix Original Series from the creators of Game of Thrones. Half a century after the Doomsday Battle, the uneasy balance of Dark Forest Deterrence keeps the Trisolaran invaders at bay. Earth enjoys unprecedented prosperity due to the infusion of Trisolaran knowledge and, with human science advancing and the Trisolarans adopting Earth culture, it seems that the two civilizations can co-exist peacefully as equals without the terrible threat of mutually assured annihilation. But peace has made humanity complacent. Cheng Xin, an aerospace engineer from the 21st century, awakens from hibernation in this new age. She brings knowledge of a long-forgotten program dating from the start of the Trisolar Crisis, and her presence may upset the delicate balance between two worlds. Will humanity reach for the stars or die in its cradle? Praise for The Three-Body Problem: 'Your next favourite sci-fi novel' Wired 'Immense' Barack Obama 'Unique' George R.R. Martin 'SF in the grand style' Guardian 'Mind-altering and immersive' Daily Mail 'A milestone in Chinese science-fiction' New York Times 'China's answer to Arthur C. Clarke' New Yorker Winner of the Hugo and Galaxy Awards for Best Novel
Read the award-winning, critically acclaimed, multi-million-copy-selling science-fiction phenomenon - soon to be a Netflix Original Series from the creators of Game of Thrones. 1967: Ye Wenjie witnesses Red Guards beat her father to death during China's Cultural Revolution. This singular event will shape not only the rest of her life but also the future of mankind. Four decades later, Beijing police ask nanotech engineer Wang Miao to infiltrate a secretive cabal of scientists after a spate of inexplicable suicides. Wang's investigation will lead him to a mysterious online game and immerse him in a virtual world ruled by the intractable and unpredictable interaction of its three suns. This is the Three-Body Problem and it is the key to everything: the key to the scientists' deaths, the key to a conspiracy that spans light-years and the key to the extinction-level threat humanity now faces. Praise for The Three-Body Problem: 'Your next favourite sci-fi novel' Wired 'Immense' Barack Obama 'Unique' George R.R. Martin 'SF in the grand style' Guardian 'Mind-altering and immersive' Daily Mail 'A milestone in Chinese science-fiction' New York Times 'China's answer to Arthur C. Clarke' New Yorker Winner of the Hugo and Galaxy Awards for Best Novel
Read the award-winning, critically acclaimed, multi-million-copy-selling science-fiction phenomenon - soon to be a Netflix Original Series from the creators of Game of Thrones. Imagine the universe as a forest, patrolled by numberless and nameless predators. In this forest, stealth is survival - any civilisation that reveals its location is prey. Earth has. Now the predators are coming. Crossing light years, the Trisolarians will reach Earth in four centuries' time. But the sophons, their extra-dimensional agents and saboteurs, are already here. Only the individual human mind remains immune to their influence. This is the motivation for the Wallfacer Project, a last-ditch defence that grants four individuals almost absolute power to design secret strategies, hidden through deceit and misdirection from human and alien alike. Three of the Wallfacers are influential statesmen and scientists, but the fourth is a total unknown. Luo Ji, an unambitious Chinese astronomer, is baffled by his new status. All he knows is that he's the one Wallfacer that Trisolaris wants dead. Praise for The Three-Body Problem: 'Your next favourite sci-fi novel' Wired 'Immense' Barack Obama 'Unique' George R.R. Martin 'SF in the grand style' Guardian 'Mind-altering and immersive' Daily Mail 'A milestone in Chinese science-fiction' New York Times 'China's answer to Arthur C. Clarke' New Yorker Winner of the Hugo and Galaxy Awards for Best Novel
Read the award-winning, critically acclaimed, multi-million-copy-selling science-fiction phenomenon - soon to be a Netflix Original Series from the creators of Game of Thrones. Imagine the universe as a forest, patrolled by numberless and nameless predators. In this forest, stealth is survival - any civilisation that reveals its location is prey. Earth has. Now the predators are coming. Crossing light years, the Trisolarians will reach Earth in four centuries' time. But the sophons, their extra-dimensional agents and saboteurs, are already here. Only the individual human mind remains immune to their influence. This is the motivation for the Wallfacer Project, a last-ditch defence that grants four individuals almost absolute power to design secret strategies, hidden through deceit and misdirection from human and alien alike. Three of the Wallfacers are influential statesmen and scientists, but the fourth is a total unknown. Luo Ji, an unambitious Chinese astronomer, is baffled by his new status. All he knows is that he's the one Wallfacer that Trisolaris wants dead. Praise for The Three-Body Problem: 'Your next favourite sci-fi novel' Wired 'Immense' Barack Obama 'Unique' George R.R. Martin 'SF in the grand style' Guardian 'Mind-altering and immersive' Daily Mail 'A milestone in Chinese science-fiction' New York Times 'China's answer to Arthur C. Clarke' New Yorker Winner of the Hugo and Galaxy Awards for Best Novel
A Financial Times Book of the Year From the author of The Three-Body Problem, a collection of award-winning short stories - a breath-taking selection of diamond-hard science fiction. In Hold Up the Sky, Cixin Liu takes us across time and space, from a rural mountain community where elementary students must use physics to prevent an alien invasion; to coal mines in northern China where new technology will either save lives of unleash a fire that will burn for centuries; to a time very much like our own, when superstring computers predict our every move; to 10,000 years in the future, when humanity is finally able to begin anew; to the very collapse of the universe itself. Written between 1999 and 2017 and never before published in English, these stories came into being during decades of major change in China and will take you across time and space through the eyes of one of science fiction's most visionary writers. Experience the limitless and pure joy of Cixin Liu's writing and imagination in this stunning collection. Praise for Cixin Liu: 'Cixin's trilogy is SF in the grand style, a galaxy-spanning, ideas-rich narrative of invasion and war' GUARDIAN 'Wildly imaginative, really interesting ... The scope of it was immense' BARACK OBAMA, 44th President of the United States 'A unique blend of scientific and philosophical speculation, politics and history, conspiracy theory and cosmology' GEORGE R.R. MARTIN 'China's answer to Arthur C. Clarke' NEW YORKER
A Financial Times Book of the Year From the author of The Three-Body Problem, a collection of award-winning short stories - a breath-taking selection of diamond-hard science fiction. In Hold Up the Sky, Cixin Liu takes us across time and space, from a rural mountain community where elementary students must use physics to prevent an alien invasion; to coal mines in northern China where new technology will either save lives of unleash a fire that will burn for centuries; to a time very much like our own, when superstring computers predict our every move; to 10,000 years in the future, when humanity is finally able to begin anew; to the very collapse of the universe itself. Written between 1999 and 2017 and never before published in English, these stories came into being during decades of major change in China and will take you across time and space through the eyes of one of science fiction's most visionary writers. Experience the limitless and pure joy of Cixin Liu's writing and imagination in this stunning collection. Praise for Cixin Liu: 'Cixin's trilogy is SF in the grand style, a galaxy-spanning, ideas-rich narrative of invasion and war' GUARDIAN 'Wildly imaginative, really interesting ... The scope of it was immense' BARACK OBAMA, 44th President of the United States 'A unique blend of scientific and philosophical speculation, politics and history, conspiracy theory and cosmology' GEORGE R.R. MARTIN 'China's answer to Arthur C. Clarke' NEW YORKER
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