Liu Cixin won 2018 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society from the Clarke Foundation at the Sidney Harman Hall in Washington DC. (Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn)

On Friday, Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin won 2018 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society from the Clarke Foundation at the Sidney Harman Hall in Washington DC (local time Thursday evening).

Introduced as "acclaimed author of The Three Body Problem and other science fiction works, winner of the Hugo and five Chinese Galaxy Awards", Liu received the award and delivered a speech in English.

Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society was started in 2012 and is presented annually. There are two other awards given together with it. For this year, Irwin Jacobs, chairman of the Salk Institute, co-founder and former chairman of Qualcomm, co-developer of CDMA, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Lifetime Achievement, and Jill Tarter, astronomer and seeker of the answer to "Are we alone?", won the Innovator Award.

The winner for the 2017 Award for Lifetime Achievement is late theoretical physicist, cosmologist and author Stephen Hawking.

"The Clarke Awards recognize and celebrate the world's most illustrious and creative thinkers, scientists, writers, technologists, business leaders and innovators," a statement on its official website said.

"Arthur understood that humankind's most powerful tool to shape its future is its imagination. His own prolific work in science fiction and science fact seamlessly melded cognitive and creative elements together."

Sheldon Brown, director of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, University of California, San Diego, said in the awarding speech that human society faces new challenges in the 21st century, and science fiction helps to extend human knowledge. The Three Body trilogy helps us to see our problems.

It's an honor for Liu that he got the award under the name of his favorite sci-fi master. Liu said in his reception speech that Clarke was the one that led him into sci-fi world and ignited his imagination ever since the 1980s.