Chinese · b. 1963
Liu Cixin worked as a computer engineer at a power plant in China's Shanxi province while writing the science fiction that would make him the most internationally famous Chinese novelist of the twenty-first century. His Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy—The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, The Wandering Earth—thinks at civilizational and cosmic scales, treating physics as plot and game theory as character motivation. The Three-Body Problem became the first translated novel to win the Hugo Award. Barack Obama read it during his presidency and called Liu's imagination 'immense.' Liu's work has been adapted into films, TV series, and a major Netflix production.