Is fiction meant to be an escape from the real world, or a commentary on current affairs? The award-winning writer Liu Cixin seems to be of two minds.
Earlier this year, soon after a Chinese lunar rover achieved the unprecedented feat of landing on the dark side of the moon, an adaptation of Liu’s short story “The Wandering Earth” earned nearly half a billion dollars in its first ten days of release, eventually becoming China’s second-highest-grossing film ever.
Although it was his first time in Washington, the cityscape was already familiar to him, thanks to his predilection for Hollywood blockbusters. As a result, our sightseeing trips yielded disappointments. Things were invariably bigger or smaller than he expected, and in surprising juxtapositions. The Reflecting Pool was farther from the Washington Monument than “Forrest Gump” suggested, and it looked strange without Vietnam War protesters thronging its perimeter.
Liu was born in 1963 in Beijing, where his father was a manager at the Coal Mine Design Institute and his mother was an elementary-school teacher. His father’s family came from the plains of Henan Province, in the Yellow River Basin, a region that suffered particularly dire calamities in the twentieth century.
As a child, Liu was mischievous and cheeky. Even today, he retains a fondness for ingenious pranks, and once created a poetry-writing algorithm, whose voluminous output he submitted to a literary magazine. He also had a practical bent: after developing a fascination with weapons, in grade school, he taught himself to make gunpowder. When Liu was six, China launched its first satellite and he became obsessed with space.
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