The Three Body Problem - Or why communists bullying astrophysicists might be a bad idea

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Absolutego

Absolutego

There's no excuse for a fool with a gun
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Apr 30, 2016
I just finished reading Death's End, the last of the books in Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy (colloquially known as the Three Body trilogy). They're Chinese science fiction books from the mid 2000's, translated into English in the mid 2010's, that is packed to the gills with interesting science fiction concepts, a hostile extraterrestrial species and their quantum AI cronies, the Sophons, amateurish sociology that is nonetheless quite entertaining and characters that are all over the place in terms of quality and personal taste,
Brief, mild spoiler synopses below:

During the Cultural Revolution, Ye Winjie is an astrophysicist who winds up working on a top secret military base studying space to avoid the Red Guard coming after subversives. In the modern day, Wang Miao, a nanotechnology professor, is roped into investigating why prominent scientists the world over are mysteriously dying, and becomes engrossed in a VR game called Three Body.
After humanity becomes aware an alien fleet is heading towards Earth, the planet deals with preparing to fight them when they reach the Solar System in 400 years. The Wallfacer program is created to empower certain humans to strategize in secret on how to defeat the aliens. Luo Ji, a Chinese sociologist, is deputized into being a Wallfacer, much to his chagrin. He then spends the next 1/3 of the book hiding in Sweden, drinking 800 year old wine, and making the UN chase down his real life waifu. Yes, this is where the character writing starts becoming so stupid it's hilarious.
Earth in the future enjoys unprecedented prosperity after Luo Ji negotiated an uneasy armistice b/t humanity and the aliens, until the planet replaces him with Cheng Xin, an aerospace engineer from the present day. Everything then goes tits up.

I left most of the sci-fi revelations vague since that's the real prize from these novels (the concept of a Dark Forest universe especially, pretty haunting to contemplate).
Has anyone else read these? What was your favorite part? What books do you think are similar that I could seek out?
 
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Good books, though extremely Chinese. Favorite part was when humans gained access to 4th dimensional space.
 
JULAY said:
Good books, though extremely Chinese. Favorite part was when humans gained access to 4th dimensional space.
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That whole sequence and the realization behind it is pretty existentially horrifying.
 
The Dark Forest hypothesis is interesting, but extremely zero sum. Typical Chinese thinking. How dare any alien race be utterly apathetic towards other species.
 
HumanHive said:
The Dark Forest hypothesis is interesting, but extremely zero sum. Typical Chinese thinking. How dare any alien race be utterly apathetic towards other species.
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Have you read the 3rd book? Apathy is precisely word I'd use to describe the Singer chapter. I will say the level of zero-sum thinking at play reaches ludicrous levels when it turns out civilizations in this universe are willingly/deliberately dropping themselves to a lower number of dimensions if it means they can kill a rival in the process.
 
I read Three Body Problem and really enjoyed it, but yes, it is very Chinese in it's thinking. What actually surprised me though, was that the author depicts the Cultural Revolution and Mao's Red Guard and being a huge waste of time and actively harmful to the betterment of the Chinese people. I wouldn't have thought such a high-profile book with such pointed criticisms of China's past would be allowed to go uncensored and certainly not translated and shared around the world.
 
Justtocheck said:
I don't know much about Chiniese way of thinking. What does it mean that it's very Chiniese? By zero-sum, does it mean that Chiniese believe that you cannot succeed unless you are fucking someone over?
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All of the characters have standard Mandarin Chinese names - if you don't have some familiarity with Mandarin it might be hard to read. Also it references a ton of Chinese culture and history. Also very in line with the modern CPC's "Communism overall good, but Cultural Revolution Bad" theme. Finishing Book 1 and it's pretty damn good tho.

The twists so far are really rewarding lol
 
I was very impressed by The Three Body Problem in parts. The prose is very bland, but that's not really it's fault when it's a translation. You basically have to write a new book from scratch to interpret it in another language with any artistry. The story also just ends on sequel bait. But the ideas and worldview in it are really interesting. Some of it, i think, was just me interpreting it through my own interests.

The first chapter is amazing, haunting.

I thought the Three Body game was a very clever mythological-style metaphor for Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions (they keep making efforts to explain the world, but the laws of science are always uncertain and change, throwing them into a panic like the world is ending), but then it was like, nope, that's all literally stuff that happened. I still wonder if it wasn't intended to be metaphorical as well as Trisolaris' backstory.

Having the villains be radical environmentalist nutjobs, self-hating people that are trying to intentionally sabotage industrial civilization and scientific inquiry, is based as hell.

The depiction of Trisolaris is probably not what I got from it, but for some personal reasons it really resonated with me as being like a story Chinese authoritarianism choking their civilization to death (these people living in an inherently unstable environment have developed a super authoritarian society that is also (typical cliche) slow at progress and culturally dead and vile.

Author makes, related to the above, a reference that seems to imply New World colonization was a necessary prerequisite for democracy.
 
The most refreshing aspect of the trilogy is the lack of psychological analysis of the characters. The very premise is that trauma can make you want to burn the world down, yet there are no annoying inner dialogues or deep dilemmas spread over dozens of pages. It's a look from the outside and a complete opposite of most of current Western fiction.

I tried to watch the Netflix series, but it just made me mad. I hate all the actors. Might give it another chance later.
 
shameful existence said:
The most refreshing aspect of the trilogy is the lack of psychological analysis of the characters. The very premise is that trauma can make you want to burn the world down, yet there are no annoying inner dialogues or deep dilemmas spread over dozens of pages. It's a look from the outside and a complete opposite of most of current Western fiction.

I tried to watch the Netflix series, but it just made me mad. I hate all the actors. Might give it another chance later.
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Try the Tencent version. The acting is surprisingly good.

 
Read the first book back in 2018 and enjoyed it quite a lot, read second and third this month in one go.
The first is by far the best of the trilogy imo, but in total this was one of the best scifi series I've ever read.
The last one definitely jumped the shark at the end, with the whole universe ending and the solar system getting flattened, and I would have preferred the main focus being the conflict between humans and trisolarians, but still top notch science fiction.
Didn't watch the netflix slop, I bet it's going to get cancelled after season 2 like every other show.
 
Really enjoyed the audiobook versions, the narrator knows/was taught how to pronounce the Chinese names and it really adds a lot. Listened to them after watching the Netflix show, and was impressed at the bleakness of a lot of it. I do enjoy deep time traversal stories.
 
JULAY said:
Good books, though extremely Chinese. Favorite part was when humans gained access to 4th dimensional space.
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YES. Including the bit where they spoke to the 4th dimensional ship.

I picked up these books after hearing about them on some podcast. Bought the first one in the series to see if I'd like it, and I had the other 2 purchased and read within a month and a half. I loved the Foundation series, and this feels like a damn good successor. Not a lot of inner-monologuing, just facts about what's happening and a lot of politicking. Good shit.
 
plgfarts said:
YES. Including the bit where they spoke to the 4th dimensional ship.

I picked up these books after hearing about them on some podcast. Bought the first one in the series to see if I'd like it, and I had the other 2 purchased and read within a month and a half. I loved the Foundation series, and this feels like a damn good successor. Not a lot of inner-monologuing, just facts about what's happening and a lot of politicking. Good shit.
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For modern day hard science fiction, they were very good reads. But as I said before, extremely Chinesed. Still, if Liu Cixin writes anything new, I'll probably read it. The man knows how to spin a tale pretty well...
 
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