Exporting sci-fi beyond imagination

Science fiction's universality and the digital revolution are making Chinese authors of the genre international hits. Cecily Liu reports.

Best-selling science fiction was made in the West and exported to China for over a century. This trend was reversed in 2014, however, when Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem was published in English and became the first Chinese sci-fi novel to win a Hugo Award, the Oscars of the science-fiction world.

Barack Obama took it on holiday. Mark Zuckerberg selected it for his Facebook reading club. It became a New York Times bestseller, spent 11 weeks on Germany's Der Speigel best-seller list, won literary awards in Spain and Germany, and sold more than 300,000 copies in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries alone.