The jacket for Cixin Liu’s new novel carries a blurb from none other than Barack Obama: “Wildly imaginative, really interesting … The scope of it was immense.” What the publishers rather disingenuously neglect to specify is that this and the other glowing review snippets are not for the present book at all, but for the multi-award-winning, global phenomenon that was his Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, beginning with The Three-Body Problem (first published in English in 2014). Those novels are indeed a monumental and wondrous achievement: a mind-bending hard-sci fi epic peopled by vivid and lovable characters, in which the story just happens to explain why we have the laws of physics we observe.
Admirers of that sensational triptych will find something rather different in The Supernova Era, which Liu actually wrote in 2003, before the first Chinese edition of The Three-Body Problem in 2007. Though it is adorned with the colourful nebulae of space-opera art, it is primarily a work of speculative sociology.
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