《死神永生》英文版
In 1970s, science fiction was translated widely into Chinese. With this came a sudden surge (激增) of Chinese authors writing in the genre—and Liu wanted to be one of them. But instead of studying literature, he got a job as a power-plant engineer in Yangquan. But what looks like a career diversion was entirely strategic: the stability of his career meant he could write, he says.
20世紀70年代，西方科幻小說被大量翻譯成了中文，隨之突然爆發了一場中國作家創作科幻小說的熱潮。劉慈欣也想成為其中一員。但他並沒有去研究文學，而是在陽泉的一個發電廠找了份工作，當了工程師。這看上去好像是南轅北轍，實際上卻完全是很講求戰略的一步：有了一份穩定的工作就意味著他可以寫作了，劉慈欣說。
「For about 30 years, I stayed in the same department and worked the same job, which was rare among people of my age. I chose this path because it allowed me to work on my fiction,」 he says. 「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 figured that if I got lucky, I could then turn into a full-time writer. Now looking back, my life path has matched my design almost precisely. I believe not a lot of people have this kind of privilege (榮幸).」
「我在同一個部門同一個崗位幹了大概有30年，這在我的同齡人中間是非常少見的。我選擇走這條路是因為這樣我就能寫小說了，」他說，「年輕那會兒我試圖規劃未來的時候，我就曾想過以後當工程師，這樣我就能幹與技術有關的工作，同時在下班後寫寫科幻小說。我盤算著如果幸運的話，我到時可以變成全職作家。現在回頭看看，我走的人生道路跟我規劃的幾乎完全一致。我覺得並不是很多人都能有這個福分。」
His first novel, The Devil’s Bricks, came out in 2002, but it wasn’t until 2006 that he had his breakthrough, The Three-Body Problem. Initially serialised in the Chinese magazine Science Fiction World, the novel takes its title from a physics question in orbital mechanics and contains three intertwining (纏繞在一起的) plots, set respectively during 1971, in the mid-2000s and on a distant world in a three-sun system.
他的第一部長篇小說是《魔鬼積木》，早在2002年就出版了，但直到2006年發表《三體》之後(編著：這裡指的是第一次發表時間，正式作為書出版是在2008年)，他才取得了突破。這部小說最初是以連載的形式刊登在中文雜誌《科幻世界》上。小說的名字源自軌道力學裡的一個物理問題，情節方面包含三個相互交織的故事，背景分別設定在1971年、2005年前後和一個擁有三個太陽的遙遠世界。