Liu Cixin · 2008 · survival

Liu Cixin's 2008 novel, the first Chinese book to win a Hugo. In 1967 an astrophysicist watches her father beaten to death by Red Guards, is sent to a labour camp, and ends up at a secret installation aiming an antenna at the sky - and forty years later a nanomaterials researcher in Beijing starts to work out what she did with it.

1. 1
   Tsinghua University

   1967, and Ye Wenjie watches her father the physicist beaten to death at a struggle session for teaching relativity - with her own mother among the accusers, which is the fact the whole novel turns on.

2. 2
   The Greater Khingan

   A labour corps in Inner Mongolia felling forest, where she reads a smuggled copy of Silent Spring and starts to think that humanity may not be able to correct itself from the inside.

3. 3
   Radar Peak

   The Red Coast Base, a listening and transmitting station disguised as a weapons project - where she receives a message from a Trisolaran pacifist warning her not to reply, and replies, and gives away the position of the Earth.

4. 4
   Beijing

   Forty years on: scientists killing themselves, physics apparently ceasing to work, and a nanomaterials researcher handed a virtual reality game about a planet with three suns by a very unscientific detective.

5. 5
   The Panama Canal

   Operation Guzheng: the Earth-Trisolaris Organisation's ship Judgment Day is drawn into the cut and passed through a net of molecular filament, which slices it and everyone aboard into sections to recover a single hard drive.

6. 6
   Radar Peak

   An old woman climbs back up to the ruins of the base where she made the decision, and watches the sun go down over the wreckage of the antenna - my sunset, she says, and a sunset for humanity.