Cixin Liu

Liu Cixin was born in Beijing. His father was a manager at the Coal Mine Design Institute while his mother taught elementary school. During the Cultural Revolution, Liu’s father joined the Communist Party, but Liu’s paternal uncle joined the Nationalists. After the Communist side achieved victory, Liu’s father came under scrutiny because his brother was a Nationalist, which led Liu’s father to lose his job and be sent to work in coal mines in the Shanxi Province. Liu has said that a childhood encounter with Jules Verne’s novel A Journey to the Center of the Earth was pivotal in shaping his future career as a writer. Liu went on to attend the North China University of Water Conservancy and Electric Power and then became a computer engineer at the Niangziguan Power Plant. While working as a computer engineer, Liu would write at night. He published his first book, The Devil’s Bricks, in 2002 and followed that with two novels before publishing the novel The Three-Body Problem. The Three-Body Problem was first published in serial form in the magazine Science Fiction World in 2006 and was published as a book in 2008. The Three-Body Problem is the first book in Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, for which Liu is best known. The second book in that trilogy is The Dark Forest and the third is Death’s End.