Yuanyuan’’s Bubbles: Liu Cixin Graphic Novels #4

Liu Cixin is the most prolific and popular science fiction writer in China, as well as a senior engineer. For his grand narratives and superb imagination, Liu is recognized as a leading voice in Chinese science fiction. He is a multi-award winner with Hugo, Locus, Ignotus, Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis, Seiun Award and many others. He is also a nominee for the Nebula Award. In 2018, he received Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society.

Liu rose to international acclaim with his Three-Body Trilogy (The three-body problem, The Dark Forest, Death’s End), which was translated into English and published by Tor Books between 2014 - 2016. His novels received extensive coverage by international media outlets, including the New Yorker, New York Times, The Guardian, Spiegel, and El Mondo, and were highly praised by celebrities such as former U.S. President Barack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg, Kim Stanley Robinson, and George R.R. Martin. Since its initial publication, the Chinese edition of The Three-Body Trilogy has sold over 7,000,000 sets/21,000,000 copies. The series has been translated into twenty-six languages, including English, Spanish, German, French, Italian and Russian, and the sales of all foreign editions totaled 2,000,000 copies as of December 2019.

Since his writing debut in 1999, Liu has published over forty long- and short-form works of fiction, along with many non-fiction articles and critiques. He is a nine-time winner of the China Galaxy Award, and in 2015 earned the Xingyun Lifetime Achievement Award.

The French writer Valérie Mangin, born in 1973, had first integrated the very elitist École nationale des Chartes of Paris in the early 90’s. She succeeded, becoming a specialist of Latin historic period, specialist of antic History and being an historian of Arts. But she still couldn’t accept to soon embrace a career of curator of some prestigious national museum. Her meeting with the one who would later become her husband, Denis Bajram (Universal War One / UW2), helps her to jump from official History to Stories.

The writings of the 60 different stories she published, though taking the appearance of classical adventures, are in fact giant games she invented on History, politics and Culture. She like to play with all codes of popular literature, as well as historical facts, to give us original points of view and provide us to discover again well known events, such as the antic Rome in Chroniques de l’Antiquité galactique, or the conceptual jigsaw puzzle of Trois Christs, the sophisticated autofiction of Abymes, the dark fantasy of le Club des prédateurs (with Steven Dupré), or the great epic story of Alix Senator, (translated in more than 10 languages now). With her husband, she contributed to the birth of the official professional organization of French comic-book artists (SNAC-BD), and to the États Généraux de la Bande Dessinée, helping the professionalization of this artistic domain.

The Belgium artist Steven Dupré started his career as a professional cartoon artist in 1986 with the series Wolf which he drew and wrote on a daily basis for the Flemish newspaper « Het Volk ». 20 volumes were published, until he created the much-acclaimed and prize-winning children comic Sarah & Robin. (Standaard uitgeverij, 5 volumes). He then made the leap over the language-frontier existing in his trilingual country to write (in French) and draw the trilogy Coma, for Éditions Glénat. On the concept-series Pandora Box (Éditions Dupuis) for the third volume (Gluttony), he collaborated with the writer Alcante, with whom he later drew a volume of the series Interpol, Bruxelles. He is better known as artist for the comic book adaptations of the French television series Kaamelott, written by Alexandre Astier (éditions Casterman, 8 volumes published). In 2011 he won with his series Midgard the bronze Adhemar, the cultural prize of the Flemish government for comic artists.. (éditions Casterman, 2 volumes). With Valérie Mangin as the writer, he drawn both volumes of Le Club des prédateurs. Then he joined Alcante again as a writer, working on comics for youngsters with the adaptation of the novels of the Canadian writer Daniel Brouillette L’incroyable histoire de Benoit Olivier (Kennes éditions, 3 volumes). By the end of this year the 9th volume of Kaamelott will be released, as well as his interpretation of the flemish classic Suske en Wiske (Standaard uitgeverij). His work is mostly available in French and Dutch languages, and some of them are translated now into Indonesian, English, Servo-Croatian and Finnish.