AT A TIME when the crumbling leadership of the fading West is doing all it can to bring about a shooting war with China, and the media instructs us daily to hate and fear everything from that country, it’s mildly surprising to see launching a major series based on one of this century’s biggest Chinese bestsellers.

I don’t imagine author Cixin Liu is shocked, though. Every chapter of his multiaward-winning trilogy demonstrates that he grew up in an educational system which understands that contradictions are an engine of human history. The law of unintended consequences is one of his principle plot devices.

Scientists in Three-Body Problem (the first volume) find a solution for the Fermi Paradox, the puzzle which asks “Since the universe must be full of life, where are all the aliens?”

It turns out there’s a very good reason why other planets don’t make contact; unfortunately, by the time humanity figures it out, we’re already heading for catastrophe. Be warned, this is not the most cheerful First Contact story you'll ever read.

Obvious influences on Liu from Western SF include the aeon-spanning epics of Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov, but there’s enough Clifford D Simak in there as well to humanise the narrative. A less predictable influence is Arthur Conan Doyle.

Through the first two volumes of the trilogy in particular, the plot proceeds largely by posing apparently insoluble, end-of-the-world conundrums for the human race, reminiscent of locked-room mysteries in crime fiction, which Liu’s protagonists resolve using a Sherlock Holmes mixture of imaginative logic and timely luck. And, of course, out of each solution arises the next deadly locked room.

The info-dumps in this trilogy are longer, more frequent and more blatant than is generally considered polite in Western fiction. That may be inevitable, since, even by the standards of traditional hard SF, there’s a hell of a lot of science here.

Liu gives all of it a rigorous, firmly materialist treatment — not only the disciplines concerned with nuts, bolts and lab coats, such as cosmology, time travel (through hibernation) and interstellar travel, but also areas such as philosophy and game theory, sociology and economics.

Remembrance has sometimes been reviewed and discussed as a political novel, though I wonder if that’s only because of where it comes from: the enemy’s artefacts, cultural or otherwise, must be framed in the context of that enmity, rather than taken at face value as things in themselves.

Objectively, what the Chinese Revolution has achieved, in mere decades, especially against illiteracy and absolute poverty, must rank as one of the most astonishing events in human history. But there is little sense of that in Liu’s writing. Some Western readers will be disappointed, so desperate are we — like many of Liu’s characters — to receive a message in a bottle from a more hopeful future.

Any attempt to uncover “the politics” of the trilogy is further complicated by its having been written in China under one form of censorship, and adapted in the West under another. For instance, the English translation, and the Netflix version, begin in the sectarian madness of the Cultural Revolution.

In the Chinese edition, Liu reportedly placed this scene in a less prominent position so as not to excite the censors unnecessarily. Later, a group of US senators tried to get the Netflix production halted after the author made remarks in an interview which were mildly supportive of some of his government’s policies.

It’s hard to think of anything in the western SF canon which quite matches Remembrance for scope, scale and ambition. I loved it. At times I was baffled, incredulous, irritated, lost in mathematical theory so far beyond my reach that I might as well have been reading the untranslated edition, but (or perhaps I mean “so”) I never stopped loving this milestone of 21st century science fiction for a single page.

Cixin Liu’s 3 Body Problem trilogy is published by Head of Zeus, £29.89.