Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Translated by Joel Martinsen On his fourteenth birthday, right before his eyes, Chen's parents are incinerated by a blast of ball lightning. Striving to make sense of this bizarre tragedy, he dedicates his life to a single goal: to unlock the secrets of this enigmatic natural phenomenon. His pursuit of ball lightning will take him far from home, across mountain peaks chasing storms and deep into highly classified subterranean laboratories as he slowly unveils a new frontier in particle physic...

A new anthology of Chinese short-fiction by award winning author Ken Liu. Here are sixteen short stories from China's groundbreaking SFF writers, edited and translated by award-winning author Ken Liu. In Hugo award-winner Liu Cixin's 'Moonlight', a man is contacted by three future versions of himself, each trying to save their world from destruction. Hao Jingfang's 'The New Year Train' sees 1,500 passengers go missing on a train that vanishes into space. In the title story by Tang Fei, a youn...

Half a century after the Doomsday Battle, the uneasy balance of Dark Forest Deterrence keeps the Trisolaran invaders at bay. Earth enjoys unprecedented prosperity due to the infusion of Trisolaran knowledge. With human science advancing and the Trisolarans adopting Earth culture, it seems that the two civilizations can co-exist peacefully as equals without the terrible threat of mutually assured annihilation. But peace has also made humanity complacent. Cheng Xin, an aerospace engineer from t...

From the author of The Three-Body Problem, a collection of award-winning short stories - a breath-taking selection of diamond-hard science fiction. In Hold Up the Sky, Cixin Liu takes us across time and space, from a rural mountain community where elementary students must use physics to prevent an alien invasion; to coal mines in northern China where new technology will either save lives of unleash a fire that will burn for centuries; to a time very much like our own, when superstring compute...

Here are thirteen short stories from the new frontiers of Chinese science fiction, selected and translated by Hugo, Nebula, Locus and World Fantasy Award-winner Ken Liu. Hao Jingfang's Hugo-Award-Winning Folding Beijing takes place in a near-future dystopia where the title city's buildings fold into and out of the earth, allowing three different strata of society to spend part of the day above ground. Xia Jia's Night Journey of the Dragon-Horse describes a post-apocalyptic world where machine...

A satirical fable, a political allegory and an ecological warning from the author of The Three-Body Problem. In a sunlit clearing in central Gondwana, on an otherwise ordinary day in the late Cretaceous, the seeds of Earth's first and greatest civilization were sown in the grisly aftermath of a Tyrannosaurus' lunch. Throughout the universe, intelligence is a rare and fragile commodity - a fleeting glimmer in the long night of cosmic history. That Earth should harbour not just one but two inte...

Illustrated by JOK It was the Ice and Snow Arts Festival that lured the low-temperature artist to Earth. Drawn by the beauty and technical skill of the sculptures displayed, the extraterrestrial visitor longed to collaborate and share its own art. But while humans learnt to craft ice into exquisite ephemera, the low-temperature artist's civilisation mastered the manipulation of whole worlds to create artworks – drawing on the seas and ice caps, and cooling their temperature to beautiful effec...

The future is coming. It knows no bounds, and neither should science fiction. They say the more things change the more they stay the same. But over the last hundred years, science fiction has changed. Vibrant new generations of writers have sprung up across the globe, proving the old adage false. From Ghana to India, from Mexico to France, from Singapore to Cuba, they draw on their unique backgrounds and culture, changing the face of the genre one story at a time. Prepare yourself for a journ...

translated by Joel Martinsen Imagine the universe as a forest, patrolled by numberless and nameless predators. In this forest, stealth is survival - any civilisation that reveals its location is prey. Earth has. Now the predators are coming. Crossing light years, they will reach Earth in four centuries' time. But the sophons, their extra-dimensional agents and saboteurs, are already here. Only the individual human mind remains immune to their influence. This is the motivation for the Wallface...

Ken Liu's well-crafted, thought-provoking and award-winning short stories are high water marks of contemporary speculative fiction. This collection includes sixteen of his best science fiction and fantasy stories from the last five years - plus a new novella. In addition to these seventeen selections, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories also features an excerpt from book three in The Dandelion Dynasty series, The Veiled Throne. Paperback: 432 PagesProduct Dimensions: 129 x 198 mmISBN: 978183893...

Ken Liu is one of the most original, thought-provoking and award-winning short-story writers of his generation. This is the first collection of his work – sixteen stories that invoke the magical within the mundane, by turns profound, beguiling and heartbreaking. Included here are: The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary (Finalist for Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon Awards), Mono No Aware (Hugo Award winner), The Waves (Nebula Award finalist), The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species (Nebula and St...

Translated by Ken Liu Set in the universe of the New York Times bestselling Three-Body Problem trilogy, The Redemption of Time continues Cixin Liu’s multi-award-winning science fiction saga. This original story by Baoshu--published with Liu’s support--envisions the aftermath of the conflict between humanity and the extraterrestrial Trisolarans. In the midst of an interstellar war, Yun Tianming found himself on the front lines. Riddled with cancer, he chose to end his life, only to find himsel...

Translated by Joel Martinsen Tonight, a supernova tsunami of high energy will finally reach Earth. Dark skies will shine bright as a new star blooms in the heavens and within a year everyone over the age of thirteen will be dead, their chromosomes irreversibly damaged. And so the countdown begins. Parents apprentice their children and try to pass on the knowledge they'll need to keep the world running. But the last generation may not want to carry the legacy of their parents' world. And thoug...

translated by Ken Liu 1967: Ye Wenjie witnesses Red Guards beat her father to death during China's Cultural Revolution. This singular event will shape not only the rest of her life but also the future of mankind. Four decades later, Beijing police ask nanotech engineer Wang Miao to infiltrate a secretive cabal of scientists after a spate of inexplicable suicides. Wang's investigation will lead him to a mysterious online game and immerse him in a virtual world ruled by the intractable and unpr...

The Time Traveller's Almanac is the largest, most definitive collection of time travel stories ever assembled. Gathered into one volume by intrepid chrononauts and world-renowned anthologists Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, here is over a century's worth of literary travels into past and the future. The anthology covers millions of years of Earth's history - from the age of the dinosaurs to strange and fascinating futures, through to the end of Time itself. The Time Traveller's Almanac will reacquai...

Illustrated by Zhang Xiaoyu In the depths of mountains shrouded with ignorance and superstition, one man has dedicated his life to igniting a passion for maths and science in the hearts of the peasant children around him. Now his life is coming to its end, he draws his students around him so he can impart knowledge on them to his final breath. All the while, in a far corner of outer space, fifty thousand light-years away, an interstellar war that has waged for thousands of years is coming to ...

The Sun is dying. Earth will perish too, consumed by the star in its final death throes. But rather than abandon their planet, humanity builds 12,000 mountainous fusion engines to propel the Earth out of orbit and onto a centuries-long voyage to Proxima Centaurai... Cixin Liu is one of the most important voices in world Science Fiction. A bestseller in China, his novel, The Three-Body Problem, was the first translated work of SF ever to win the Hugo Award. Here is the first collection of his ...

Illustrated by Stefano Raffaele The Sun is dying. Helium will soon permeate its core, triggering a violent explosion, and its burning-hot diameter will increase until it has consumed everything that stands in its way. As long as we remain in its path, humanity stands no chance. Interstellar emigration is the only way out. Reaching a consensus on a destination has been easy: the only viable target is Proxima Centauri. It is the star closest to our own, a mere 4.3 light-years away. How to reach...

Translated by Ken Liu AD2201. Just over a century ago, the Martian colonies declared their independence. After a brief conflict, Earth and Mars cut ties, carving separate trajectories into the future, viewing each other with suspicion and even hatred. Five years ago, a group of Martian students were sent to Earth as goodwill ambassadors from the Red Planet. Now the young men and women are coming home, escorting a delegation of prominent Terrans to see if the two worlds can bridge the void tha...

Translated by Ken Liu Mimi is drowning in the world's trash. She's a 'waste girl', a scavenger picking through towering heaps of hazardous electronic detritus. Along with thousands of other migrant workers, she was lured to Silicon Isle, off the southern coast of China, by the promise of steady work and a better life. But Silicon Isle is where the rotten fruits of capitalism and consumer culture come to their toxic end. The land is hopelessly polluted, the workers utterly at the mercy of thos...

Artificial intelligence in 100 stories. To ready us for the inevitable, here are 100 of the best short stories ever written - most of them by humans - about robots and artificial minds. Read them while you can, learn from them, and make your preparations... From 1837 through to the present day, from Charles Dickens to Cory Doctorow, this collection contains the most diverse collection of robots ever assembled. Anthropomorphic robots, invertebrate AIs, thuggish metal lumps and wisps of manufac...

Illustrated by Steven Dupré Yuanyuan was five months old when she saw bubbles for the first time. In that moment, her eyes lit up with a radiance that outshone the sun and stars, and she felt she truly saw the world for the first time. From that day on, her life's one dream was to blow the biggest bubbles possible. Yuanyuan's father doesn't approve of her dream. He fears his daughter's obsession is childish and too fleeting for his daughter, and longs for her to turn her intelligence to a cal...