This year alone, Liu published three major new translations: “Broken Stars,” an anthology of short fiction by 14 Chinese sci-fi writers; a translation of “The Redemption of Time,” by Li Jun, who writes under the pen name Baoshu, which takes place in the aftermath of an interstellar war; and a translation of Chen Qiufan’s “Waste Tide,” a grim dystopian novel that unfolds on a polluted peninsula on the coast of China, where impoverished migrant workers recycle the world’s electronic trash. Next year, Saga Press will publish Liu’s 624-page translation of Hao Jingfang’s novel “Vagabonds,” a meandering philosophical parable about an ideological rift between a communalistic human colony on Mars and an increasingly capitalistic Earth.

Some of the most thought-provoking science-fiction writers in China aren’t being published through traditional channels, so Liu searches internet forums and social-media messaging sites like Weibo, WeChat and the self-publishing platform Douban. He has found sci-fi stories in unusual corners of the internet, including a forum for alumni of Tsinghua University. Chinese friends send him screenshots of stories published on apps that are hard to access outside of China. As an emissary for some of China’s most provocative and boundary-breaking writers, Liu has become much more than a scout and a translator. He’s now a fixer, an editor and a curator — a savvy interpreter who has done more than anyone to bridge the imagination gap between the world’s current, fading superpower and its ascendant one.

Liu has also grown adept at navigating political minefields, finding ways to transmit writers’ political or social critiques without being too direct. Some of the writers Liu translates use the framework of science fiction to explore the dystopian consequences of China’s rapid economic and technological transformation, setting a story in the distant future or on another planet in order to tackle taboo issues like the lack of social freedoms, the exploitation of migrant workers, government land seizures, economic inequality and environmental destruction. In an odd inversion, some of the stories he has translated into English have not been officially published in China, at times because of their politically sensitive nature. “It’s a very tricky dance of trying to get the message that they’re trying to convey out, without painting the writers as dissidents,” Liu told me over coffee one day, as we sat in the kitchen of his home in Massachusetts. “A lot of Chinese writers are very skilled at writing something ambiguously, such that there are multiple meanings in the text. I have to ask them, how explicit do you want me to be in terms of making a certain point here, because in the original it’s very constrained, so how much do you want me to tease out the implications you’re making? And sometimes we have a discussion about exactly what that means and how they want it to be done.”

It’s no surprise that sci-fi is booming in China, where the breakneck pace of technological transformation can feel surreal. Economic growth has lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens out of poverty, and brought extreme wealth to the upper and political class, but technology has also become a tool of state oppression. Some Chinese factories have outfitted workers with devices that measure brain-wave activity to monitor their emotional fluctuations and alertness. Bird-shaped drones have been used to surreptitiously spy on citizens, and surveillance through facial-recognition technology is widespread. On social media and messaging apps, posts containing certain banned words are automatically censored. China is now also leveraging its technology to conquer the solar system: After lagging behind in the space race for decades, the nation recently made a historic landing on the far side of the moon, where it has plans to build a permanent research base, and aims to have a rover exploring Mars next year.

“In China, there’s this official propaganda position that science fiction is about imagination and this is what the future is all about,” Liu told an audience in New York in April, when he appeared on a panel with Chen Qiufan at the Museum of Chinese in America and spoke about the growing popularity of Chinese science fiction. “In reality, much of the most interesting science fiction is much more subversive,” he continued. “It is a kind of wry commentary on what is happening in society. And because so many things are changing in China so rapidly, science fiction feels like oftentimes the most realistic way to describe what’s happening.”

Ken Liu was born in 1976 in Lanzhou, an industrial city in Gansu Province in Northwest China. His parents moved abroad when he was 4 — his father went to study statistics in East Germany, while his mother pursued her graduate degree in chemistry in the United States — and Liu remained in China with his paternal grandparents, both science professors who were “book hoarders,” he says.