The reception of Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past among Portuguese-speaking readers: A corpus-based study

Remembrance of Earth’s Past, Liu Cixin’s trilogy beginning with The Three-Body Problem, has gained global recognition for its ambitious scientific vision and philosophical depth, redefining contemporary science fiction. While its reception has been explored in several linguistic and cultural contexts—including English-, Japanese-, and Spanish-speaking readerships—Portuguese-language contexts remain underrepresented in scholarship. This study addresses this gap by examining Portuguese-speaking readers’ engagement with the trilogy, seeking to understand its popularity, interpretative trends, and the thematic and linguistic patterns shaping responses. Additionally, it assesses the interplay between positive reception and critical perspectives. Grounded in Reception Theory, particularly the perspectives of Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser, the analysis investigates how readers’ expectations, interpretive strategies, and cultural frameworks shape their understanding of the work. Methodologically, it crawls the data and analyzes the Portuguese-language reviews from three major platforms—Amazon.br, Goodreads, and Skoob—spanning the period from April 2014 to March 2025. The reviews were compiled into the reader corpus and compared against the Portuguese reference corpus using Sketch Engine, a computational linguistics tool. The study employs keyword analysis to identify distinctive themes and linguistic patterns within the Portuguese comments. The findings indicate a strong and predominantly positive reception of Remembrance of Earth’s Past across Portuguese-speaking regions. Four interrelated thematic dimensions emerge from high-frequency word analysis: recognition of Liu Cixin’s authorship, engagement with scientific speculation, character complexity, and reflections on cultural paradigms. The reception of the trilogy reveals an ongoing negotiation between readers’ established literary expectations and the novel’s unique cultural-scientific framework. Through selective accommodation and cultural analogy, readers navigate potential comprehension gaps, adapting the text to their interpretative contexts. This study contributes to translation and reception studies by offering insights into the cross-cultural dynamics of literary engagement.