Liu, Cixin

From philosophy to science to history, this winning audio has it all. Sci-fi fans and audiences of the Netflix series will devour this.

This 2006 Chinese best seller finally gets an English translation from Nebula and Hugo Award winner and author Ken Liu. Along with the unusual setting, the novel includes a lot of discussions of high-level physics (sometimes helpfully couched within the video game), as the aliens come from a world with three suns and the unpredictable motions of the trisolaran system threaten their continued existence. It's not an easy sell to Western readers, but the translator provides helpful footnotes explaining the unfamiliar historical and cultural references. Fans of hard sf likened to the work of Arthur C. Clarke will look forward to the rest of the series. [See Eric Norton's sf/fantasy feature, "A Multiplicity of Realms," LJ 8/14.]