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Background
The author, Liu Cixin, was born in Beijing in June, 1963. He was a engineer before writing science fiction. In 1989 he wrote Supernova Era and China 2185, but neither book were published at that time. Liu's first published short story, Whalesong, was published in Science Fiction World in June 1999, and in the same year his novel With Her Eyes won the Galaxy Award. In 2000 he wrote The Wandering Earth and received the Galaxy Award again. The Wandering Earth was adapted into a film in 2019. When the short story Mountain appeared in January 2006, many readers wrote that they hoped he would write a novel. Therefore, he decided to concentrate on novel-length texts rather than on short stories.[citation needed] The other two famous novels besides The Three-Body Problem series are Supernova Era and Ball Lightning. When he was not otherwise busy, he wrote three to five thousand words a day, and each of his books took about one year to complete.

Inspiration
Liu Cixin was born in 1963. When he was 3 years old, his family moved from the Beijing Coal Design Institute to Yangquan in Shanxi Province due to his father's job change. He also spent part of his childhood in the countryside of his ancestral hometown Luoshan County, Henan Province. April 25, 1970, was a pivotal moment for Liu. Looking back on his science-fiction journey, he recalls the day when China's first satellite, Dong Fang Hong 1, was launched, and as he stood by the pond looking up at the starry sky, he felt an indefinable sense of longing.

A few years later, one summer evening, Liu Cixin found an entire box of books under his bed in his home in Yangquan, there was an anthology of Tolstoy, Moby-Dick, Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. The first book he read was Journey to the Center of the Earth, about which his father told him: "It's called science fiction, it's a creative writing based on science". This was his first encounter with science fiction: "My persistence stems from the words of my father". At that time, these books could only be read privately by individuals; "I felt like being alone on an island, is a very lonely state".

The reverence, or even fear, of the Universe, is one of the main prompting force of Liu's writing. According to him, as humans, we will stand in awe of the scale and depth of the universe. His novels also focus on the curiosity of the unknown. Liu Cixin says he cannot help thinking about the future world and lifestyle of human beings, and he tries to invoke readers’ curiosity with his books. He also believes that the humans should be treated as an entirety.

Themes
The Three-Body Problem shares some similarities with science novels of the Golden Age of Science Fiction - it is of both the depth of thoughts and rigorousness of science. The cutting-edge science theories and knowledges in the book, with the Liu's excellent writing skills, does not burden readers much. Also, just like those novels, The Three-Body Problem is more of a hard science fiction than many other books today. However, like many writers of the Golden Age of Science Fictions, Liu does not emphasize on the development of characters much.

Conflicts and improvement coexists in the world described in the book, and Liu hold a complex attitude towards people under the situation. At the beginning of the book, Liu describes the Great Culture Revolution as "time of madness." The intellectual were under persecution - some were killed and others were exiled in outlying countrysides. The novel shows his sympathy of these people; however, he also sympathizes those who conducts the persecutions, the youth who were misled and abandoned by their leaders.