The Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy launched Liu Cixin into international prominence, but the books that made him famous represent only a portion of his career. Before the Hugo Award, before the Netflix deal, before most Western readers had heard his name — or watched the Netflix adaptation — Liu Cixin had been writing science fiction for two decades — producing novels, novellas, and short stories that explored the same obsessions the trilogy would later amplify to civilizational scale. For fans who finish Death's End and find themselves wanting more of his particular way of seeing the universe, the back catalog is rich, strange, and deeply rewarding.
Ball Lightning: The Hidden Prequel
Of all Liu Cixin's standalone novels, Ball Lightning has the most direct connection to the trilogy. Published in Chinese in 2004 — three years before The Three-Body Problem — it follows Chen, a physicist consumed by the atmospheric phenomenon that killed his parents on his fourteenth birthday. The ball lightning he spends his career pursuing turns out to be something stranger than any conventional physics can explain: evidence that macro-scale quantum objects exist, particles the size of houses that exist in superposition until observed.
The connection to the trilogy becomes explicit when a weapons scientist named Lin Yun recruits Chen into a military program. The macro-electron weapons that appear in The Dark Forest as an established technology — related to the sophon technology that defines the trilogy's physics blockade — are here shown in their experimental origin, developed by characters who don't yet know what universe they're contributing to.
Ball Lightning reads somewhat differently from the trilogy — it's tighter, more focused on a single obsession, and its emotional core is built around grief rather than civilizational dread. But its exploration of what it means to pursue a scientific question past the point of reasonable return feels continuous with Liu Cixin's deeper themes. Reading it before or after the trilogy adds a different texture to both.
The Wandering Earth: Moving the Planet
Before the 2019 film adaptation made it the highest-grossing non-English-language science fiction movie ever made, The Wandering Earth was a short story — a novella, really — that proposed a distinctive answer to the problem of a dying sun: don't flee in spaceships. Move the whole planet.
The premise is audacious and the execution characteristically rigorous. Liu Cixin details the engineering of fusion-powered thrusters capable of shifting Earth's orbit, the social structures that evolve under permanent artificial lighting, the psychological cost of a civilization that will not live to see its journey completed. The story covers multiple generations, each inheriting a project they didn't begin and won't finish.
The Wandering Earth illuminates the planet engine sequences in Death's End in unexpected ways. When you've read the short story, the emotional weight of a civilization choosing to drag its home rather than abandon it makes more sense — and the failure of that strategy in the trilogy feels more costly.
Supernova Era: Children Inheriting the World
Supernova Era is Liu Cixin's most openly political novel, and also one of his strangest. A supernova close enough to Earth to bathe the planet in lethal radiation kills every adult on the planet — but only adults. Children under thirteen are immune. The novel follows what happens in the year before the last adults die, as they desperately try to transfer civilization's accumulated knowledge to the young, and then what happens after, when children are left to run a world they didn't make and can barely understand.
The result is darker than it might sound, and more interesting. Liu Cixin doesn't sentimentalize childhood: his child nations rapidly develop their own political philosophies and eventually engage in forms of conflict that are, in some ways, more disturbing than adult warfare precisely because they are less constrained by accumulated institutional restraint. The novel raises questions about civilization as an inheritance — what transfers between generations, what is lost, and whether the structures adults build can survive being handed to people who haven't yet understood why they exist.
Supernova Era is not a trilogy reader's obvious next stop, but it rewards those who want to see Liu Cixin's ideas in a different key.
The Short Story Collections: Where the Ideas Are Sharpest
Liu Cixin's short fiction is where his range is most visible. Two major collections have been translated into English: The Dark Forest (not the novel — a collection sharing its name) and To Hold Up the Sky. These gather his most acclaimed shorter work, and reading them reveals the breadth of concerns that the trilogy compressed into its cosmological framework.
Some essential pieces:
"The Wandering Earth" — the short story that became the film, discussed above.
"Mountain" — a first contact story told from the perspective of a civilization that evolved in the deep ocean, whose conception of the universe has no room for the concept of a sky. When they finally reach the surface and look up, the discovery transforms their understanding of reality completely. It is one of Liu Cixin's most purely beautiful stories.
"The Dark Forest" — a compact dramatization of the theory that would power an entire novel, told through a single character discovering the universe's logic in a conversation with an ant. The compression makes the idea hit harder than any explanation.
"Sun of China" — a rare Liu Cixin story centered on economic aspiration rather than civilizational scale, following a migrant worker whose career eventually places him in space as the operator of a solar reflector. Its emotional register is warmer than most of his work.
"Cheng Xin" — readers of the trilogy will find this short piece, which explores an alternate fate for the character, an eerie companion to Death's End.
How the Works Connect
Reading across Liu Cixin's bibliography, certain preoccupations emerge consistently. He is interested in the relationship between technological progress and existential risk. He is fascinated by the tension between individual lives and civilizational scales of time. He returns repeatedly to the question of what survival costs — and whether what survives is still the thing that wanted to survive.
The Dark Forest theory is his most famous idea, but it is not his only one. Ball Lightning asks what happens to a person who pursues a question past the point of professional or personal sustainability — explored in depth in Ball Lightning: The Hidden Prequel. Supernova Era asks what civilization is for, if not for the people who built it. The Wandering Earth asks whether loyalty to a home can survive the destruction of everything that made it home.
These are not the same question, but they are closely related. Liu Cixin is a writer with a consistent anxious imagination — one that looks at human achievement and sees both genuine wonder and the shadow of what could go wrong.
Where to Start
For trilogy readers wanting to extend their time in Liu Cixin's universe, the recommended path is straightforward: Ball Lightning first, for its direct technological connection to The Dark Forest; then the short story collection To Hold Up the Sky, for its range; then The Wandering Earth story before rewatching the film. Supernova Era is worth reading but can wait.
What you'll find across all of it is a writer who was already, fully formed, before the trilogy made him famous. The Three-Body books didn't create Liu Cixin's vision of the universe. They just gave it the largest possible stage.