Chinese science fiction novelist, born in 1963 and raised in Yangquan, Shanxi, who wrote most of his fiction while working as a computer engineer at the Niangziguan power plant. He won China’s Galaxy Award eight times between 1999 and 2006, and the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015 for The Three-Body Problem, the first translated novel to take it. The Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy runs from that book through The Dark Forest to Death’s End.
Why he appears in this wiki
Not as a witness and not as a researcher, but because one hypothesis in the Fermi Paradox literature is attributed to him by name. The Dark Forest Hypothesis entered the field through a novel rather than a journal and is now argued on its merits by people who have not read it, which is unusual enough to be worth recording. He also states the ethic in his own voice rather than a character’s: the postscript to the first volume argues that toward anything beyond the solar system humanity should be vigilant and assume the worst, which is a position on METI held by an author and not a plot device.
What his fiction is and is not
His method is to deliver an abstraction as a physical demonstration, which is why his books travel and why they are quoted in arguments they were not written to settle. None of it is evidence. The trilogy’s premises are chosen for what they let him build, and where the novels put numbers to a claim, as with the sun as a signal amplifier, the numbers are worth checking rather than citing.
Connections
The Three-Body Problem · Dark Forest Hypothesis · Sophon · Trisolaris · METI · Fermi Paradox