Shaping a shared future across the Pacific

Abstract The Three-Body trilogy by Liu Cixin, a milestone of contemporary Chinese science fiction (SF), celebrates the tenth anniversary of its historic Hugo Award win in 2025. The trilogy has attracted worldwide attention through its translations and represents a key moment in the global circulation of Chinese literature over the past decade. This paper adopts a socio-discursive perspective to examine the translation, dissemination, and reception of the trilogy in the English-speaking world, situating it within broader debates on cross-cultural literary exchange and the global circulation of SF. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the study argues that the trilogy’s global success resulted from the coordinated efforts of a heterogeneous network of human and non-human actors, including the author, editor, translators, publisher, literary agent, critics, fandom, as well as social media platforms, all of which collectively shaped both the translation and its reception through continuous negotiations and interactions. This collaborative process not only brought the novel series commercial success and literary recognition on the world stage, but also enabled Chinese SF and its futuristic discourse to establish legitimacy and challenge dominant interpretive frameworks within the Anglophone literary fi ld. The analysis further illustrates how translators, guided by an ethos of harmonizing diversity, carefully balanced the cultural distinctiveness of the source text with narrative vitality for English-speaking readers. In addition, the study examines the extended network of literary reception. Reviewers from both the professional SF community and the general readership, media outlets, and other stakeholders played a key role in shaping the trilogy’s global significance and in positioning Chinese SF within broader intercultural dialogue. Ultimately, the enduring impact of the trilogy lies in the poetics of SF itself, which offers a narrative platform for imagining a shared future for humanity beyond cultural and national boundaries. By tracing these processes, the paper demonstrates how SF can serve as both a vehicle for cross-cultural understanding and a site where literary, cultural, and translational forces converge to produce global literary phenomena.