Liu conjures up a genuine sense of wonder

SFX

Absolutely fantastic... The hardback is a thing of beauty and its translations are wonderful'

For Winter Nights

A wonderful collection and brings Cixin Liu's own unique flavour to the genre

SF Crows Nest

Liu uses the exotic foreignness of alien environments to lure readers into an enchanted literary escape pod. The story's backdrop might be one of spectacular beauty or entropic devastation but the distancing effect its abnormality provides is always stirring

Big Issue

Short stories [...] allow an idea to be developed without getting bogged down with having to fill hundreds of pages and in this collection Cixin Liu has ably demonstrated the form... One of the most interesting books I have read'

Concatenation

Liu has continued to write and publish stories which share similar ideas and offer a vision for a better world through scientific fantasy

New European.

As with other Chinese works in the genre, it is tempting to draw parallels with the Communist regime, even when the writers themselves do not - and dare not - make those analogies explicit. For Western readers, Chinese sci-fi thus offers a window into the country's hopes and fears. Especially its fears

Economist.

Beautifully written, the Sun hangs 'motionless in the sky, surrounded by a faint, dawn-like halo'. The ten other stories collected here are just as great

Wired

Earth-shattering... While built around a hard-science outlook that acknowledges the bleakness of humanity's chances, these stories also feature a lot of the heart and hopefulness that draw readers to science fiction in the first place. Liu conjures a sense of wonder while grounding his tales in well-wrought characters. This is a masterwork'

Publishers Weekly