From Words to Winners : Investigating Liu Cixin’s Bestseller Textual Features with Computational Methods

Sammanfattning

This study investigates the textual factors behind the global success of Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem trilogy by comparing its themes, plot, and style with his non-bestselling works. Using digital humanities’ distant reading approach, it analyzes all English translations of Liu’s novels (approximately 1.24 million words) with digital tools: Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for topic modeling, TextBlob for sentiment analysis, and spaCy for stylometric analysis. Findings show minimal textual differences. The trilogy’s themes lean slightly toward hard science fiction, its plot aligns with typical bestseller patterns, and its style is highly consistent with non-bestsellers. Its exceptional market success is largely attributed to contextual factors, including Tor Books’ strategic publishing, the 2015 Hugo Award, cross-cultural narratives, reader engagement, and film/TV adaptations, amplified by a positive feedback loop. This study confirms the potential and limitations of digital humanities in single-author bestseller research and, using the trilogy as a case study, discusses how textual quality and market mechanisms together drive bestseller success.