When he was a schoolboy, Liu Cixin’s favourite book was Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne. This might seem like a fairly standard introduction to science fiction, but Liu read it under exceptional circumstances; this was at the height of the Cultural Revolution, in his native China, and all western literature was strictly forbidden.

Now 53, Liu (western publishers present him as Cixin Liu to make it easier for readers to find his family name on the shelves) is a science-fiction writer of some renown, both in China and in the English-speaking world. His novel The Three-Body Problem won a Hugo award in 2015 and is currently being adapted into a movie, due in 2017. His sequel, The Dark Forest, was published in English in 2015, and the third book Death’s End, has just been translated and released in the UK.

But more than 40 years ago, growing up in a coal-mining city in the Shanxi province, a young Liu found the book that would alter the course of his life, hidden in an old box that once belonged to his father.

“No science-fiction novels were published, and people did not have any notion of scientific imagery,” Liu recalls. “At the time, almost all the translated novels from the west were strictly banned, so I had to read it in secret. This very book turned me into a sci-fi fan.”

It wasn’t until the late 1970s, when China experienced economic reform and the strictures on western literature were relaxed, that science fiction was translated widely into Chinese. With this came a sudden surge of Chinese authors writing in the genre – and Liu wanted to be one of them. But instead of studying literature, he got a job as a power-plant engineer in Yangquan. But what looks like a career diversion was entirely strategic: the stability of his career meant he could write, he says.

“For about 30 years, I stayed in the same department and worked the same job, which was rare among people of my age. I chose this path because it allowed me to work on my fiction,” he says. “In my youth, when I tried to plan for the future, I had wished to be an engineer so I could get work with technology while writing sci-fi after hours. I figured that if I got lucky, I could then turn into a full-time writer. Now looking back, my life path has matched my design almost precisely. I believe not a lot of people have this kind of privilege.”

A cyclist passes in front of a factory in the Chinese town of Yangquan. Photograph: Reinhard Krause/REUTERS

His first novel, The Devil’s Bricks, came out in 2002, but it wasn’t until 2006 that he had his breakthrough, The Three-Body Problem. Initially serialised in the Chinese magazine Science Fiction World, the novel takes its title from a physics question in orbital mechanics and contains three intertwining plots, set respectively during 1971 in the Cultural Revolution, in the mid-2000s and on a distant world in a three-sun system.

Technological and social changes that took centuries in the west have been come in two generations in China Ken Liu

The success of Liu’s novel is credited with inspiring a new surge in sci-fi writing; in 2012 alone, nearly 200 new titles were published in China.

Seven years after its initial publication, The Three-Body Problem was brought to a western audience by Tor Books in New York in 2013. It was translated by the Boston-based author Ken Liu (no relation). In his translator’s note, Ken writes: “The act of translation involves breaking down one piece of work in one language and ferrying the pieces across a gulf to reconstitute them into a new work in another language. When the gulf separating the two is as wide as the Pacific Ocean … the task can be daunting. The Chinese literary tradition shaped and was shaped by its readers, giving rise to different emphases and preferences in fiction compared to what American readers expect.”

What western readers expect of Chinese science fiction is a curious issue. Western eyes have a tendency to view China as a dystopia, or full of ‘eastern’ mysticism. But Ken says it’s a mistake to read Chinese SF in this way; if there’s one common theme in Chinese SF, it is “imbalance”.

“Contemporary China is a complex society in transition. The kinds of technological and social changes that took societies in the west centuries to move through have sometimes been experienced by a mere two generations in China,” he says. “The anxiety of careening out of balance, of being torn by parts moving too fast and too slow, is felt everywhere. While entrepreneurs, researchers, and megacorps in Beijing and Shanghai are pushing the boundaries of advanced technology … at rates sometimes far ahead of the west, just a few hundred miles away, children left behind in rural villages by parents who have gone to the great cities in search of low-wage jobs grow up on bare concrete floors without toys, without books, without basic nutrition, without even the support of crumbling traditional extended families and folk beliefs.”

Ken Liu, writer and translator. Photograph: Lisa Tang Liu

Liu says it’s a mistake to think that Chinese SF doesn’t share common tropes with its western equivalents. “We can safely say that all themes once explored in the American and European sci-fi genre have found their manifestation in the Chinese counterpart – things like space exploration, alien contact, artificial intelligence, and life science. Problems of modern development are also addressed, like environmental hazards and the negative effects coming from new technologies. Yet Chinese sci-fi does have its own unique themes as well, such as the attempt to re-deduce and re-display the ancient history of China from a sci-fi angle.”

The Three-Body Problem was the first full-length Chinese SF work to be translated into English, just two years ago. But a wide and burgeoning school of SF writing dates back to the end of the Cultural Revolution, arguably as far back as 1978, with the publication of short story Death-Ray on the Coral Island by Tong Enzheng, in China’s prestigious literary magazine People’s Literature.

Liu says that a national obsession with sci-fi began around 1983. “Some of the works even sold as many as four million copies. There were even debates on whether sci-fi ought to belong to the domain of science or of literature; Chinese authors made effort to pull it back to its literary origin, attempting to change the way that sci-fi had been treated as a mere tool for disseminating scientific knowledge.”

While the harsh reality that saw the young Liu having to read Jules Verne in secret is four decades gone in China, there is still the ever-present shadow of government censorship. Liu says he and his publisher were concerned about potential issues with The Three-Body Problem, which deals with the Cultural Revolution itself. “It was a sensitive topic and therefore we were worried about related contents causing trouble. However, the book has been out for 10 years now, and we have never had any censure from the authorities,” he says. “Many government officials have read the book.”

So far, Liu has “never encountered pressure or intervention from the government during my writing process and the publication of my stories”; its attention is reserved for films, he says. And with next year’s movie version, Liu’s star is set to rise even further. “This will be the first big-budget sci-fi film in China,” he says. “Many people hold high expectations for it, hoping that it will become China’s 2001: Space Odyssey or Star Wars. But personally I feel that such an expectation for the first attempt of the nation’s film industry might be unrealistic. I’d rather watch this process unfold with a calm attitude, treating it like a positive start for China’s sci-fi films.”

He remains mildly surprised by the success of The Three-Body Problem outside China. “All we had hoped for was just to let American readers become aware that there is sci-fi in China. Now that it has been embraced by readers in the UK and the US, it supports an idea I once had: sci-fi as a literary vessel is the most global, the most universal [storytelling], with the capability to be understood by all cultures. Sci-fi novels are concerned with problems faced by all of humanity. Crises in sci-fi mostly threaten humanity as a whole. This is a unique and treasurable trait inherent in the genre – that the human race is perceived as a single entity, undivided.”