The Wandering Earth

(Paperback)

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NOW A #1 BLOCKBUSTING FILM The Sun is dying. Earth will perish too, consumed by the star in its final death throes. But rather than abandon their planet, humanity builds 12,000 mountainous fusion engines to propel the Earth out of orbit and onto a centuries-long voyage to Proxima Centaurai... Cixin Liu is one of the most important voices in world Science Fiction. A bestseller in China, his novel, The Three-Body Problem, was the first translated work of SF ever to win the Hugo Award. Here is the first collection of his short fiction: ten stories, including five Chinese Galaxy Award-winners. This collection's title story, The Wandering Earth, is the biggest SF movie ever to come out of China taking the world's #1 box office ranking in February 2019. Liu's writing takes the reader to the edge of the universe and the end of time, to meet stranger fates than we could have ever imagined. With a melancholic and keen understanding of human nature, Liu's stories show humanity's attempts to reason, navigate and, above all, survive in a desolate cosmos.

Reviews

'An evocative and powerful ode to Cornwall, its magic and mysteries, and the power to start over again' Nancy Barone, author of New Hope for the Little Cornish Farmhouse -- George R.R. Martin
Wildly imaginative, really interesting... The scope of it was immense' -- Barack Obama
A milestone in Chinese science fiction * New York Times *
A marvellous mlange of awe-inspiring scientific concepts, clever plotting and quirky yet plausible characters... Exhilarating, mind-stretching' * TLS *
China's answer to Arthur C. Clarke * The New Yorker *
Complex and grandiose... this is a mind-altering and immersive experience' * Daily Mail *
Top-flight SF; smart, informative and engaging * SFX *
Liu conjures up a genuine sense of wonder * SFX *
Absolutely fantastic... The hardback is a thing of beauty and its translations are wonderful' * For Winter Nights. *
A wonderful collection and brings Cixin Liu's own unique flavour to the genre * SF Crows Nest. *
Liu uses the exotic foreignness of alien environments to lure readers into an enchanted literary escape pod. The story's backdrop might be one of spectacular beauty or entropic devastation but the distancing effect its abnormality provides is always stirring * Big Issue *
Short stories [...] allow an idea to be developed without getting bogged down with having to fill hundreds of pages and in this collection Cixin Liu has ably demonstrated the form... One of the most interesting books I have read' * Concatenation *
Liu has continued to write and publish stories which share similar ideas and offer a vision for a better world through scientific fantasy * New European *
As with other Chinese works in the genre, it is tempting to draw parallels with the Communist regime, even when the writers themselves do not - and dare not - make those analogies explicit. For Western readers, Chinese sci-fi thus offers a window into the country's hopes and fears. Especially its fears * Economist *
Beautifully written, the Sun hangs 'motionless in the sky, surrounded by a faint, dawn-like halo'. The ten other stories collected here are just as great * Wired *
Earth-shattering... While built around a hard-science outlook that acknowledges the bleakness of humanity's chances, these stories also feature a lot of the heart and hopefulness that draw readers to science fiction in the first place. Liu conjures a sense of wonder while grounding his tales in well-wrought characters. This is a masterwork' * Publishers Weekly *

Author Bio

Cixin Liu is China's #1 SF writer and author of The Three-Body Problem the first ever translated novel to win a Hugo Award. Prior to becoming a writer, Liu worked as an engineer in a power plant in Yangquan.