Liu Cixin Books in Order

A poor village boy leaves home for the city, drifting from menial work to a job on a gigantic orbital solar mirror called the Sun of China. His long journey becomes a reflection on ambition, spaceflight and the pull of the small road back home.

An alien crystal warns that a vast "Devourer" fleet will soon strip the solar system of all matter, casually promising to raise humans as livestock. As its reptilian envoy toys with world leaders, Earth has to decide whether negotiation, resistance or sheer denial is even possible.

After ball lightning kills his parents, Chen devotes his life to understanding the phenomenon. His research with a driven army officer turns mysterious "macro-electrons" into devastating weapons, forcing him to choose between scientific curiosity and the human cost of his work.

Ants and dinosaurs form an improbable symbiotic civilization in the deep past, trading precision for strength. As pollution, weapons and mistrust escalate, their shared world hurtles toward catastrophe in a fable that mirrors modern debates about technology, class and ecological collapse.

During China's Cultural Revolution, astrophysicist Ye Wenjie secretly contacts the unstable world of Trisolaris. Decades later, nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao uncovers a deadly conspiracy through a baffling VR game and a global breakdown of fundamental physics.

With a Trisolaran invasion fleet four centuries away and Earth's science under constant sophon surveillance, humanity creates the Wallfacer Project, giving four men power to plan in total secrecy. Reluctant strategist Luo Ji discovers a terrifying "dark forest" logic that might be the only deterrent to extinction.

A starship pilot returns to a ruined solar system and discovers that humanity has survived only by shrinking itself to microscopic scale. The tiny "micro-era" people describe their brutal war with full-sized humans, leaving him with one quiet but staggering ethical choice.

A tired traveler borrows experimental glasses that let a distant astronaut experience his vacation through his senses. As he learns where she is truly trapped, their shared glimpses of mountains and meadows become a bittersweet act of companionship and farewell.

In the final volume of the trilogy, aerospace engineer Cheng Xin inherits stewardship of humanity’s fragile peace with Trisolaris. Her choices pull her from near future politics to far future cosmic conflicts, revealing just how harsh the dark forest universe can be.

In a near future lab, a fetus can speak and remember every moment of his mother's life thanks to an experiment that activates inherited memories. Their tender conversations slowly reveal how crushing another person's entire past can be for a brand new mind.

A remorseful mountaineer exiles himself to life at sea, only to be drawn up a colossal "mountain" of water raised by visiting mechanical aliens. As they recount their own perilous ascent from a planet's core, he reconsiders what it means to keep climbing.

Billions of frail old men descend from the sky claiming to be humanity’s creators and asking to move in with their descendants. One family’s uneasy hospitality becomes a wry, moving look at aging, gratitude and what children owe the generations that made them.

Decades after a visionary plan to drill a tunnel through Earth’s core collapsed in scandal, its disgraced inventor is dragged back to answer for the fallout. A final test of the gravity powered transit system becomes both a thriller and a meditation on risk and responsibility.

A petty breakup program written during a financial crisis mutates over the decades into a runaway "curse" that weaponizes ubiquitous smart technology against one unlucky man. Liu folds dark comedy, self parody and a cautionary tale about networked life into a single escalating disaster.

When a nearby star goes supernova, radiation dooms everyone over thirteen and leaves children in charge of the planet. As adults race to train their successors, the next generation builds a strange, often chilling new world on the ruins of the old.

This collection gathers eleven of Liu’s short stories, from a village teacher whose physics lessons decide Earth’s fate to cosmic performances played on the surface of the Sun. It offers a compact tour of his big idea science fiction in many different tones.

This short novel expands the saga of civilized dinosaurs and ingenious ants, from a toothache that sparks cooperation to nuclear brinkmanship between mismatched allies. It reads like a playful deep time fable that doubles as a sharp warning about power, technology and environmental damage.

At an ice sculpture festival, a mysterious alien "low temperature artist" arrives and begins freezing Earth’s oceans to create a gleaming ring of ice in orbit. Sculptor Yan Dong is the only human it will talk to, and the only one trying to save a drying world.

A dying teacher in a remote mountain village keeps drilling his students in basic science, unaware that far above Earth a galactic war is judging humanity’s intelligence. His tiny classroom becomes the unlikely key to the planet’s survival.

When the Sun threatens to engulf the planet, humanity mounts thousands of giant engines to push Earth out of the solar system toward a new star. One family witnesses riots, political upheaval and the raw cost of trying to turn an entire world into a starship.

Ever since she first saw soap bubbles, Yuanyuan has dreamed of blowing the biggest ones in the world, to her practical father's dismay. As their polluted city declines, her strange talent for enormous, delicate bubbles turns out to be exactly what people need.

During the bombing of Yugoslavia, two scientists try to shield the country by nudging atmospheric "sensitive points" so storms will hide it from pilots. Their grand chaos theory experiment collides with very personal tragedy, asking how much one life is worth against the course of history.

In a world already visited by humanity’s creators, a group of billionaires begins acting strangely, hiring a hit man to kill the homeless before suddenly showering them with money. His mission unravels into a biting parable about class, capitalism and how a richer civilization might judge ours.

In ancient China, King Zheng is entranced by courtier Jing Ke’s explanation of pi and orders him to compute its digits using hundreds of thousands of soldiers as a living calculator. The resulting "human computer" becomes a gripping parable about power, belief and the cost of ambition.

Blending six stories with thirteen essays, this volume pairs early fiction about cybernetic whales and chaos theory weather hacks with Liu’s reflections on science fiction, fandom and his own career, offering both ambitious concepts and a candid creative diary.

This first volume of a graphic adaptation of "Taking Care of God" follows village girl Zhihan after an elderly stranger literally falls from the sky. As more ancient "gods" arrive and move into human homes, caring for one’s creators proves far messier than anyone expected.