Liu reluctantly agreed to the change, but felt the novel was diminished. The author confessed, the brutality of Mao Zedong’s revolution was also central to the story he wanted to tell, but his Chinese publisher worried that the opening scenes were too politically charged and would never make it past government censors, so they were placed later in the narrative to make them less conspicuous. When Liu proposed this radical change to the author he was prepared to be overruled. In a move that was unusually invasive for a translator, he suggested pulling up the historical flashback, which was buried in the middle of the narrative, and turning it into the novel’s beginning. Studying the novel’s chaotic timeline, Liu pinpointed what he felt was the story’s natural beginning: the scenes of political violence and oppression during the Cultural Revolution, a traumatic moment that triggers the interstellar clash that follows. The story careered around in time, bouncing between present-day China and Beijing in 1967, near the start of the Cultural Revolution. As he began translating, Liu was confronted by what seemed like a more fundamental problem: The narrative structure didn’t make sense. It was seeking an English-language translator for The Three-Body Problem. In the fall of 2012, Ken Liu received a commission from China Educational Publications Import and Export Corporation, Ltd.
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