The hidden mind: a best-selling Chinese science fiction series on how to survive aliens and authoritarians comes to America.

• Author: Suderman, Peter
• Position: Cixin Liu's "The Three-Body Problem"

THE THREE-BODY TRILOGY--a wild science fiction saga that attempts to tell the complete story of humanity's future, from its first encounter with intelligent alien life to its near-extinction to its eventual transcendence beyond this dimension--is a global literary sensation. The series sold 500,000 copies in China and won its author, Cixin Liu, a handful of Galaxy Awards before crossing over into the American market a decade later.

The opening book of the series, The Three-Body Problem, became the first translated novel to win a Hugo Award, given at WorldCon each year and considered science fiction's greatest honor. Accepting the award on the author's behalf in 2015, translator Ken Liu (no relation) noted the historical nature of the event and the appropriateness of the forum. "It's WorldCon," he said. "And this is the award for world science fiction."

Cixin Liu deserves more than this belated nod. Border-crossing books are invigorating speculative fiction--and bringing with them the realization that American parochialism has unduly constrained our vision of the future and of the capabilities of the human mind.

THOUGH ALMOST INCOMPREHENSIBLY massive in scope, Cixin Liu's sprawling series starts small, on Earth, in his own country's recent history. The Three-Body Problem begins during the Cultural Revolution, and it depicts a family shattered as the country erupts in violent chaos. The family patriarch, Ye Zhetai, is an astrophysicist who is forced into a "struggle session"--a form of mental and physical humiliation in which politically disfavored individuals were required to publicly confess to crimes that in many cases they did not commit.

Liu describes how so-called "reactionary academics" responded under pressure. "Those who survived that initial period gradually became numb as the ruthless struggle sessions continued. The protective mental shell helped them avoid total breakdown." And he describes those who were broken by the process. "The constant, unceasing struggle sessions injected vivid political images into their consciousness like mercury, until their minds, erected upon knowledge and rationality, collapsed under the assault. They began to really believe that they were guilty, to see how they had harmed the great cause of the revolution."

In this case, Ye Zhetai is forced to deny fundamental scientific facts about the nature of physical reality; when he fails, the mob kills him. It's a chilling depiction of the way that authoritarian regimes seek to control the lives of their subjects by controlling truth itself--as well as a dramatic reminder that the individual mind, and its connection to objective reality, is the last redoubt in the face of violent coercion.

It is difficult to imagine these passages being written by a Western author. Cixin Liu, who until recently worked full time as a software engineer at a power station in the city...