The 2014 Xingyun (Nebula) Award for Global Chinese Science Fiction was announced Sunday, with the best saga novel prize awarded to a story about a world trapped in an endless loop.

Ruins of Time, written by Baoshu from Chinese mainland, tells of a world where everything, except the memories of some people, would return to a fixed point-in-time every 20 hours, as a result of a disastrous experiment that distorted time.

American Chinese writer Ken Liu won special contribution prize for translating Chinese science fiction, including best-seller The Three-Body Problem, into English.

Smart Life by Ping Zongqi from Taiwan won the prize for best short story.

More than 2,000 sci-fi writers and readers from China and abroad attended the event in Beijing, held by Guokr.com, a website dedicated to popularizing science, this year.

Though seen as an important way to popularize science and promote imagination, sci-fi has yet to break into the mainstream in China.

The annual event, the only international awards for Chinese-language sci-fi writers, was organized by the World Chinese Science Fiction Association, which is based in Chengdu, capital of southwest China's Sichuan Province. It was launched in 2010.