Fi Conquered America
Alexandra Alter
The translator Ken Liu has done more than anyone to bridge the gap between Chinese science fiction and American readers.
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In the fall of 2012, Ken Liu received an intriguing offer from a Chinese company with a blandly bureaucratic name: China Educational Publications Import and Export Corporation, Ltd. It was seeking an English-language translator for a trippy science-fiction novel titled “The Three-Body Problem.” Liu — an American computer programmer turned corporate lawyer turned science-fiction writer — was a natural choice: fluent in Mandarin, familiar with Chinese sci-fi tropes and culture and a rising star in the genre. Liu had only translated short fiction at the time, though, and capturing the novel in all its complexity seemed daunting.

“The Three-Body Problem” was unlike anything Liu had ever read. A mind-bending epic set in Beijing, Inner Mongolia and on a distant planet, the novel was full of heady technical passages about quantum theory, nanotechnology, orbital mechanics and astrophysics, intertwined with profound moral questions about the nature of good and evil and humanity’s place in the universe.

But as he began translating, Liu was confronted by what seemed like a more fundamental problem: The narrative structure didn’t make sense. The story careered around in time, bouncing between present-day China, as a panic builds among scientists and government officials over a coming alien invasion, and Beijing in 1967, near the start of the Cultural Revolution, when an astrophysicist watches helplessly as her father, a physics professor, is killed by members of Mao’s Red Guard for being a “reactionary academic authority.” The astrophysicist loses faith in humanity and uses a high-power radio transmitter to broadcast a defiant message to aliens in a nearby solar system, an act that has dire consequences.

Studying the novel’s chaotic timeline, Liu pinpointed what he felt was the story’s natural beginning: the scenes of political violence and oppression during the Cultural Revolution, a traumatic moment that triggers the interstellar clash that follows. In a move that was unusually invasive for a translator, he suggested pulling up the historical flashback, which was buried in the middle of the narrative, and turning it into the novel’s beginning.

When Liu proposed this radical change to the author, a rising figure in China’s burgeoning science-fiction scene named Liu Cixin, he was prepared to be overruled. Instead, the author instantly agreed. “That is how I wanted it originally!” Liu recalls him saying.

As it turned out, the Cultural Revolution had torn Liu Cixin’s family apart. He was just 3 when the political upheaval began, and still remembers hearing gunshots at night and seeing trucks full of men wearing red armbands patrolling the city where he lived in Shanxi province. When the situation there became too volatile, his parents, who worked in a coal mine, sent him away to live with relatives in Henan. The brutality of Mao Zedong’s revolution was also central to the story that Liu Cixin wanted to tell in “The Three-Body Problem.” But his Chinese publisher worried that the opening scenes were too politically charged and would never make it past government censors, so they were placed later in the narrative, he says, to make them less conspicuous. Liu reluctantly agreed to the change, but felt the novel was diminished. “The Cultural Revolution appears because it’s essential to the plot,” Liu Cixin told me during a Skype interview through an interpreter. “The protagonist needs to have total despair in humanity.”

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