What lies beyond

Top: Liu Cixin says he is not a literary writer and ordinary people's life inspires him a lot. Above: Liu's work, the Three Body trilogy - Ball Lightning, Dark Forest and Dead End - are much sought after by science fiction fans. Provided to China Daily

China's most prolific and popular sci-fi writer says he writes for the masses and is simply driven by a never-ending curiosity

Liu Cixin is self-effacing to a fault. When we met him on a gloomy December morning in offices of Science Fiction World in Chengdu, he spoke in a mild voice, hardly ever meeting the eye. His reserved demeanor is quite unlike that of some of the characters he creates ?the vainglorious artist, the mercenary scientist or the astrophysicist Ye Wenjie in Three Body: Earth Past, who, on an impulse, connects with aliens, daring them to attack Earth.

Given that Liu is an eight-time winner of the Galaxy Award for science-fiction writing and recently won the first Xingyun Awards given by the World Chinese Science Fiction Association, jointly with fellow writer-critic Han Song, a hint of vanity would not be out of place.

But Liu, widely acknowledged as the face of China's sci-fi writing, keeps trying to tone down the halo surrounding a much sought-after writer. He writes for the masses, he says, and is concerned, primarily, about popularizing science. His work is more in line with racy sci-fi flicks, he says.

"I am not a literary writer," he reiterates. "If my writing seems invested with such elements I would give the credit to the translator (in this case, Joel Martinsen)," he says.

Most of his peers engaged in writing, documenting and critiquing sci-fi in China at this moment disagree. Their disagreeing voices have been especially loud since his latest book, the much-awaited final volume of the Three Body trilogy, was launched on Nov 27. Dead End, in which the aliens of the Three Body stellar system and the humans who have been bracing themselves to resist the alien attack hurtle toward the inevitable clash, is being hailed as a stunning work, powered by an extraordinary artistic vision.

"His stories provide readers with a scene of the whole universe. The imagination is splendid even as it incorporates touching details," says Yao Haijun, vice-editor-in-chief of Science Fiction World magazine. Human beings are as much in focus as science in Liu's work, Yao adds.

"The third book of Three Body has surpassed the first two. And it has also crushed all our previous science fiction stories into powder," says fellow writer Han Song, marveling at the scale of the story in which the author flattens solar systems and makes universes disintegrate and vanish into thin air, reappear and multiply as if he were a magician shuffling a pack of cards.

The Three Body trilogy is a massive work of 880,000 Chinese characters, of which the third volume, which Liu took a year to write, accounts for 360,000. "That's not much," Liu says. "I write from 11 pm to 2 am every night. Sometimes I have to allow the publishing even if I'm not too happy with my work," implying the perennial demand of the market on his time.

He has retained his day job as a computer engineer with a State-run power plant in a remote part of North China's Shanxi province, although he probably does not need it any more to earn a living. Rather, it helps him stay grounded, enabling him to "gaze at the unblemished sky" as many of his co-workers do. A lot of them are not too awed by his fame as a writer, and that helps. They talk to him freely, expressing their ideas about the future of the planet.

It is the commoners that Liu - who with modesty counts himself as one, similar to the village schoolmaster who gets embroiled in a mission to save Earth or the window cleaner who finds himself thrown into space in Chinese Sun (2002) - figures in his fiction and it is people like them, he insists, who he writes for.

"Science fiction is, generically, a popular form," says Liu. It is the new generation of writers, born in the 1980s, who have introduced "elite concepts" to sci-fi, he says.

Born in the late 1950s, Liu, the child of a soldier-turned-mine-worker and a primary school teacher, grew up during the "cultural revolution" (1966-1976) years, trying to get his hands on anything in print.

"Science fiction was pretty much all that I got to read in those times, most of these being translations from works by foreign authors," he says. His favorites included Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. When he published his first short story, in 1991, it was primarily about reaching popular science to a mass audience. "There weren't that many writers writing in this genre in Chinese at that time."

He is still a voracious reader of sci-fi fiction from abroad. In fact, he is translating a work by the American writer Paul William Anderson, but denies getting "influenced or inspired" in any way. He is driven purely, he says, by a curiosity toward nature, and his reading of science as part of his academic (he majored in water power engineering from North China University of Water Resources and Electric Power) and professional life.

His skepticism about military research - which is essentially about inventing ways to kill people precisely and professionally - came through in the novel Ball Lightning.

In a world that's getting too crowded, Liu has proposed rather radical alternative survival strategies. He feels it's time to explore the possibility of finding or creating habitable spaces beyond Earth, that it's time for the present-day Christopher Columbuses (buoyed by their enthusiastic patrons and governments) to set off on a space hunt.

"The key to a wonderful life is a fascination with something," says the protagonist's father in Liu's novel Ball Lightning, minutes before he reaches out to touch a galloping ball of lightning and is reduced to a pile of ashes.

That's a maxim Liu Cixin swears by. The man who loves risky aviation sports like hang-gliding and floating in gas-propelled balloons - although his engineer wife and 10-year-old daughter do not particularly approve of these acts of derring-do - is captivated by the idea of what lies beyond Earth as we know it.

For him, the worlds of miners, window cleaners, wage laborers and schoolteachers also have an enduring, even mysterious, charm.