“The dream is about wanting to overtake the Western countries and become a very powerful modern China while still preserving these old elements,” she added. “This is what we who write science fiction in China have to grapple with.”

The “Three-Body” tomes chronicle a march of the human race into the universe set against the recent past, the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution. It is a classic science-fiction story in the style of the British master Arthur C. Clarke, whose work Mr. Liu says he grew up reading. “Everything that I write is a clumsy imitation of Arthur C. Clarke,” he said.

The first book in the series explores the world of the Trisolarans, an alien civilization on the brink of destruction. When a secret military project in China attempts to make contact with aliens, the Trisolarans capture the signals and decide to invade Earth. Back in China, people split into two camps: those who welcome the aliens and those who want to fight them.

The series is likely to be a change of pace for science-fiction fans in the United States, where many leading contemporary writers in the genre are rejecting classic alien-invasion plots in favor of those that take on real-world issues like climate change or shifting gender roles.

“I don’t think the demand for this kind of classical golden age science fiction has necessarily gone away,” Liz Gorinsky, an editor at Tor Books, said of the decision to introduce the series to American readers. “The ‘Three-Body’ series sort of scratches the same itch that harkens back to the kinds of books people read when they were kids.”

Some experts link the popularity of the “Three-Body” series to a growing confidence among Chinese about their country’s growing role on the world stage.

“There have always been science-fiction stories that contemplated China as a leader in the world,” said Wu Yan, a science-fiction scholar and professor at Beijing Normal University. “People may have liked them, but, in their hearts, they didn’t truly believe them, or they thought it was really far off in the future. Now, with the ‘Three-Body’ series, people think, ‘Wow, it really could be possible that China might be given a say in the fate of humankind.’ ”