A Financial Times Book of the Year From the author of The Three-Body Problem, a collection of award-winning short stories – a breath-taking selection of diamond-hard science fiction. In Hold Up the Sky, Cixin Liu takes us across time and space, from a rural mountain community where elementary students must use physics to prevent an alien invasion; to coal mines in northern China where new technology will either save lives of unleash a fire that will burn for centuries; to a time very much like our own, when superstring computers predict our every move; to 10,000 years in the future, when humanity is finally able to begin anew; to the very collapse of the universe itself. Written between 1999 and 2017 and never before published in English, these stories came into being during decades of major change in China and will take you across time and space through the eyes of one of science fiction's most visionary writers. Experience the limitless and pure joy of Cixin Liu's writing and imagination in this stunning collection. Praise for Cixin Liu: 'Cixin's trilogy is SF in the grand style, a galaxy-spanning, ideas-rich narrative of invasion and war' GUARDIAN 'Wildly imaginative, really interesting... The scope of it was immense' BARACK OBAMA, 44th President of the United States 'A unique blend of scientific and philosophical speculation, politics and history, conspiracy theory and cosmology' GEORGE R.R. MARTIN 'China's answer to Arthur C. Clarke' NEW YORKER