MACMILLAN

Ken Liu is, more than anything, a writer. He's won a number of awards for genre fiction, and his latest book, The Wall of Storms, just dropped this week. But for the purposes of this month's WIRED Book Club, Liu is the translator of The Three-Body Problem, by the hugely popular Chinese writer Liu Cixin. After puzzling through the book's exploration of physics and alien species, we spoke to Liu about how he brought the novel to English-speaking audiences—and how his version might actually be an improvement on the original. Blasphemy, you say? Read on.

What’s the difference between translating and writing?

My metaphor for translation has always been that translation is really a performance art. You take the original and try to perform it, really, in a different medium. Part of that is about interpretation and what you think the author's voice really is. I spend a huge amount of energy thinking about how to re-create the voice of the author in a different language and for a different culture.

How did you define Liu Cixin’s style as you began translating?

I didn't, actually. I don't believe in reducing a style and a voice down to a set of descriptions, so I've never done that. What I do is I absorb Liu Cixin's book. I try to get into it and understand what that voice is.

What challenges did this book present?

One of the things about writing hard sci-fi is that, if you're trying to write speculatively, it's very easy for research to outpace where you are. The Three-Body Problem was published in 2006. By the time I was doing the translation, the original didn't have the latest up-to-date info. So I did the fact-check and wrote to Liu Cixin, and we discussed how we were going to handle it. We changed the text a little bit to address the new research. I'm sure some of it is now outdated again. If we ever do an updated extended edition, perhaps we should fix that.

How would you describe the state of genre fiction in China right now?

That's a question I get asked a lot, and my answer disappoints people. Here's why: If you asked 100 American authors to summarize the state of American genre fiction, you’ll get 100 different answers. That's what it's like in China. Labels like "Chinese Science Fiction" or "Western Science Fiction" summarize a vast field of work, all of which are diverse and driven by individual authors, with individual concerns. If you ask, "Is most Chinese science fiction like Liu Cixin?" the answer is no. If you say, "Do they write completely different than him?" the answer is also no. Because it's just too nuanced to be able to summarize like that.

If you asked 100 American authors to summarize the state of American genre fiction, you’ll get 100 different answers. That's what it's like in China. Ken Liu

Contemporary Chinese culture must driving some of that diversity, right?

China is a society undergoing a huge amount of transformation and change. Really, centuries of what we call progress in the West has taken place in China in a matter of two decades. You have some of the most interesting mobile application advancements happening in some of China's big tech cities, but you go just a few hundred kilometers away and you're inside a mountain village where people are so poor that it might as well be 1850. It's not surprising that the science fiction coming out of China is diverse. You have Han Song who writes surreal stories that are very skeptical and challenging to the notion of progress and of Chinese economic development. He is viewing China as a massive dystopia. But then, at the same time, you read Xia Jia, who is a scholar and writes these beautiful stories about how traditional Chinese values nonetheless persist in the technological age—reverence for the elderly, of family persistence, of communitarianism, all these things.

Were there any big changes you made to the translation of The Three-Body Problem?

The first book, as originally published in Chinese, actually comes in a different order. It starts out with the police and army officers asking Professor Wang to join them at the Battle Command Center. All the Cultural Revolution episodes happen as flashbacks. That gave the original Three-Body Problem a very Japanese thriller/detective story kind of feel. But Liu Cixin had always intended for the story to actually start with the Cultural Revolution chapters. He had switched the order only because of concern about whether or not that content would be sensitive. We decided to restore the chapter order, and I like the new structure a lot more. The Cultural Revolution parts are no longer just kind of throwaway flashback exclamations. They are actually the foundation of the story.

It certainly gives American readers footing for the rest of the story ...

That's not how Chinese fans saw it! When I restored the chapter order, a lot of Chinese fans thought that was a mistake. They all thought that starting with the Cultural Revolution would bore American readers.

Was that an issue you struggled with generally?

There’s inherent cultural imbalance whenever you're translating from Chinese to English. Educated Chinese readers are expected not only to know about all the Chinese references—history, language, culture, all this stuff—but to be well-versed in Western references as well. A Chinese reader can decode an American work with far greater facility than an American reader can decode a Chinese work, on average.

Seems like a problem for the sections about the Cultural Revolution.

Most Americans have very little understanding of what happened—and if they do have some understanding, what they have is very fragmented and biased and incomplete. To really understand Ye's motivation, you have to know quite a bit about what the Cultural Revolution is and what it meant to people who went through it.

How did you deal with that?

There is a general dislike among American publishing for footnotes in translation. I think the theory is that somehow footnotes interrupt the flow and we don't want to make the reader feel like they don't know something. So rather than try to explain, we just prefer not to, or try to cut out the stuff that's confusing. I refused to do that. I wanted to give readers enough information so that they could then go to Wikipedia or Google it.

Why is the Cultural Revolution so key to the story?

There are two historical events Liu Cixin could think of that would cause somebody to be so utterly disappointed by human nature that Ye's willing to trust a higher power from outside to redeem humanity: The Holocaust and the Cultural Revolution. I think another way to read the book is that the Cultural Revolution, in some ways, is an instance of a Chaotic Era. I read the whole Trisolaran cycle of Chaotic Periods and Stable Eras as mirroring our own history. We may not have three suns around which our planet revolves, but almost every major change of our history comes as a result of some unpredictable confluence of events. Who could have predicted the Mongols would tear through Asia? Who could've predicted Alexander the Great? No one could have predicted Hitler. History is filled with black spots.