Photo: Netflix Hard science fiction only rarely rouses the mainstream. That’s understandable. Such books are intimidating. With their quarks and parsecs and quantum theories, they’re a literary world away from the human-scale struggles of most general fiction. Chinese hard science fiction would seem to face an even steeper road to readership. Add stark cultural and political differences to an already forbidding genre, and popular wisdom would suggest the writer has no chance of success in the West. Step forward, Liu Cixin. His trilogy, “Remembrance of Earth’s Past,” has shattered this paradigm. Together, the three books have sold over nine million...