Liu Cixin

Liu Cixin (born 1963) wrote The Three-Body Problem while working as a computer engineer at a power plant in Shanxi province; in 2015 it made him the first Asian writer to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel. His Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy became a global phenomenon — adapted as Netflix’s 3 Body Problem, with a Chinese film version in the hands of director Zhang Yimou — and made him the face of Chinese science fiction worldwide.

The rational optimist

Liu embraced the tools early. In a May 2023 live-streamed interview he revealed he had used ChatGPT to help compose a public speech — “I was running out of time… and it did very well” — while waving off dystopian framing: “ChatGPT, of course, will make an impact on human existence and society, but its influence won’t result in AI-ruled humans like what happens in science fiction.”

Accepting an honorary doctorate at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in late 2025, he went further than almost any working novelist: having fed his own story ideas into DeepSeek, he judged its prose more fluent than his — a startling admission from a Hugo winner, and one consistent with his view that the human brain holds no special magic a large language model cannot eventually match.

His equanimity extends to the endgame itself: if AI one day surpasses humanity completely, he has said, “the only thing left for us to do is to accept its existence and try to survive” — the cosmic fatalism of the Dark Forest, applied to the technology in his own study.