![]() ![]() I figured that if I got lucky, I could then turn into a full-time writer. “In my youth, when I tried to plan for the future, I had wished to be an engineer so I could get work with technology while writing sci-fi after hours. I chose this path because it allowed me to work on my fiction,” he says. “For about 30 years, I stayed in the same department and worked the same job, which was rare among people of my age. But what looks like a career diversion was entirely strategic: the stability of his career meant he could write, he says. But instead of studying literature, he got a job as a power-plant engineer in Yangquan. With this came a sudden surge of Chinese authors writing in the genre – and Liu wanted to be one of them. ![]() It wasn’t until the late 1970s, when China experienced economic reform and the strictures on western literature were relaxed, that science fiction was translated widely into Chinese. ![]() This very book turned me into a sci-fi fan.” “At the time, almost all the translated novels from the west were strictly banned, so I had to read it in secret. “No science-fiction novels were published, and people did not have any notion of scientific imagery,” Liu recalls. But more than 40 years ago, growing up in a coal-mining city in the Shanxi province, a young Liu found the book that would alter the course of his life, hidden in an old box that once belonged to his father. ![]()
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