Perhaps no one knows the power of imagination better than Chinese writer Liu Cixin. Until four years ago, Liu worked full-time as a computer engineer at a power plant in Shanxi province. He only wrote science fiction in his spare time. But it was during this time that Liu's imagination took flight. He did what he might never have the chance to do in real life—wander in space, fight with aliens, and visit planets light-years away.
But even with such a powerful imagination, Liu, 55, probably hadn't expected that he would become the first Asian to win the Hugo Award, science fiction's highest prize, in 2015. Perhaps neither did he think that former US president Barack Obama would read his novel The Three-Body Problem, nor that on Nov. 9 in Washington DC, he would win the 2018 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society. It's the first time a Chinese writer has ever won the award.
In his acceptance speech, Liu said that he owed his imagination to Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008), a famous UK sci-fi author. He said that reading Clarke's 1968 classic novel 2001: A Space Odyssey in the early 1980s had a great effect on him.
“My mind opened up like never before. I felt like a narrow river finally seeing the sea, " Liu said. "That night, in my eyes, the starry sky was completely different from the past. For the first time in my life, I was awed (使……敬畏) by the mystery of the universe. ”
But no matter how far away Liu's imagination takes him, somehow his novels always stay rational.
In The Three-Body Problem, for example, Liu tells a tale of aliens invading Earth. But unlike other alien stories, Liu talks more about relationships between civilizations, rules of survival, and the meanings of life. And in The Wandering Earth, Liu looks ahead to the day when our solar system comes to an end and humans have to look for a new place to live. However, all his visions and solutions are based on "hard science". Liu's works aren't simply daydreams.
