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Liu Cixin's War of the Worlds (2019)

A leading sci-fi writer takes stock of China’s global rise.

Still, the kind of reader he attracts suggests otherwise: Chinese tech entrepreneurs discuss the Hobbesian vision of the trilogy as a metaphor for cutthroat competition in the corporate world; other fans include Barack Obama, who met Liu in Beijing two years ago, and Mark Zuckerberg. Earlier this year, soon after a Chinese lunar rover achieved the unprecedented feat of landing on the dark side of the moon, an adaptation of Liu’s short story “The Wandering Earth” earned nearly half a billion dollars in its first ten days of release, eventually becoming China’s second-highest-grossing film ever. It was scrutinized more closely again in the years immediately after the Tiananmen protests, when he was beginning work on “Supernova Era.” The genre has now been steadily thriving for a couple of decades, but it’s not inconceivable that the political winds could change again, as Xi Jinping’s government seeks to establish increasingly rigid cultural control.

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