wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel)#Plot
In which I present the Wikipedia page for The Three-Body Problem in audio (in fact, the whole of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy), and the stock art fever dream version that “AI” selected for each sentence:
The audio/video presentation covers the whole series, because I truly cannot stand the idea of someone encountering this book and leaving unaware that there is so much more.
That’s an inelegant start, but you must understand if you don’t already. You just must.
This book doesn’t especially need anyone shilling for it, but unless people are reading it at the national birth rate and paying it forward, there are more and more people who will have not read this book.
Plus Netflix is on the case, combining characters in an accessible way and folding concurrent events from The Dark Forest and Death’s End into the story. This is wise for that audience and medium, but I hope it promotes curiosity about the books in some.
You may worry that a non-chronological story makes the books even more strange to digest, but they handle clear story movements, dramatic escalations in the tale of Earth awakening to the answer to the Fermi Paradox, and whether we can hold our own.
But we start with The Three-Body Problem, which does not tell us a word of Swordholders or spells. (This is an author you let cook. Here, I tease you on purpose before you are ready.)
The book is especially slow and cerebral, a resemblance it has with the Tenet-made series, streaming on Amazon’s Prime service at time of writing. That series is usually faithful to the book to a fault, and is subtitled only. I’m here for it, but there’s no getting around how slow it is.
There is a hallucination mystery, but its significance is very hard to measure, and then the book gets into the titular three-body problem in the video game simulator setting, but that’s already going too fast.
Liu is doing something else while we fret over his slow pacing. At top, the story is about our first encounter, but more correctly, it’s about how we have been utterly handled by the enemy for decades already, and how we can still be this wrong about the truth. They keep our science out of reach, because it will take multiple centuries for them to fly to us, and they are taking no chances.
These aliens, the Trisolarans, have come a very, very long way in their planetary history, considering their planet. Our primary character Wang, who suffers the hallucinations, helps us discover ETO, which is named before we understand what it is. Wang is being courted. ETO lets him join their fractured coalition when he astutely solves their recruitment game with piecewise precision, though still cannot predict the Stable eras. The announcement is that it cannot be solved, a statement that is its own eulogy for humanity, a self-contained explanation for why our story will have ended when they come for us.
How are we talking about the aliens already? When did we even get introduced?
The deeply troubled future of humanity begins with this premise, demonstrated in the opening act of the book:
Completely sane people have established themselves as Trisolaran loyalists, and that’s already that. The aliens aren’t here (yet), but their dutiful agents are. Their motives are colorful. Ye Wenjie’s father was beaten to death, and Ye sent to a labor camp by association. She loathes what humanity is and what it does, and she’s got receipts. When Ye receives an uncharacteristically generous reply from a blind first contact with an alien, a warning to stop talking even secretly, she presses the issue, single-handedly sending humanity towards a surreal fate that compounds tremendously as the books go on.
And all of this before the present day. The fleet is already coming.
I find ETO’s factions very compelling, though they are dry on the page. The simulation game is earnest in its exploration of a solution. Trisolarans are smart, as it happens, and they allowed humanity to play with their physics video game toy until we learned why doom was already on its way. Even so, the Trisolarans want that problem solved. There is plenty to show later that Trisolaris is invaluable to them. We just have the nicer world, and we’re in implicit contest with one another. In an ideal world, they want both.
The dread of The Three-Body Problem arises from the unstoppable, and remains true for two sequels. This is cultural horror fiction rendered through translation, and it defies easy comparisons. This book delivers your first unmitigated dose of reality when humanity begins to cooperate to defend itself against ETO’s more flagrant displays of independence from humanity, such as the human-staffed ocean ship serving as an international colony. You learn the extent of the remotely-operated Trisolaran collaboration, and the whys of humanity’s irrevocable status as prey.
This truth alone can kill us.
From space, without communications equipment, you would behold a timeline where a planet suddenly withers, and also thrives later, and the Trisolarans weren’t even there yet. Truth kills many people in this series. Only sometimes is there warning.
Netflix may mix the books for a chronological experience, but the books are already neatly organized another way, featuring first the revelation of the invasion and humanity’s crippled state, humanity’s astonishing attempts to beat Trisolaris despite sabotage, and finally, the results of our methods as we grow wiser about our place in the universe.
I toss minor shade on Revelation Space for not being my favorite paradox universe. My favorite will continue to be this one for a while. It the end, it dices, packages, and ships humanity to its fate, and it is something to behold.
Character likability comes up in discussion of this series, but here it’s significant to witness the tableau of it all, what these characters are within the tapestry. Liu explores his characters with tragic deliberateness that may sing more in retrospect, but the series is then fittingly named Remembrance of Earth’s Past.
Retrospect your heart out. Some books are that conceptually big, and to me the characters that carried the batons along the way were anybodies, selected for viewpoints because of what they’ll do, set on a much more important background story of life in the universe. This trilogy doesn’t just report to us that humanity is coming around to Dark Forest thinking, it shows us. There is much horror to unpack as you examine incidents like the demise of Starship Earth, wherein, more or less the moment there was no longer a planet to call home, they devoured each other. We are not unlike our enemies when survival is on the line.
Ye Wenjie may have sent the message, but we were always in a dark forest, and we never had the hiding gene.
Reasons why this book has commanded my attention for a while:
I’ve never been so absolutely blasted by an author who then drops an irresistible dark matter theory for desert in the third book, Death’s End. The series just does not stop, and here in book one, the Sophon revelation is strong enough concept that it could fuel much more science fiction than Liu has committed to print. Villainy is sci-fi has been hard to shape for a long time. We’ve seen space opera make its attempts, and more serious dramas that portray Man Versus Nature like in the film Gravity (2013). When science fiction resorts to aliens and their tech, we often get Alien(s) and their tech. The Three-Body trilogy is about a cosmic free-for-all that rewards thinking outside the 3d box. In this book and the next, there is grand mastery on the author’s part in the portrayal of how the Trisolarans beat us on the fundamentals, not lasers that glow the bad color.
Each installment escalates the crisis beyond prediction, but the foundation of this book never cracks. It is amended by flashbacks in service of other future characters, but it stands strong. Liu takes us through the unknown in a mesmerizing way, and if you can allow this first book to start with the mundane, you will forgive it later.
Although the promise of broken physics is real, Liu lets us see what hard sci-fi can still do. Any other sci-fi of this scope is competing with this introduction to Remembrance of Earth’s Past. This holds for the rest of the trilogy so, so well, despite going so so far.
All told, experience this trilogy somehow. The Netflix version is fine, and it’s moving fast enough I think they’ll do the whole trilogy without too much trouble, but it’s worth cracking your head open on this story if you want the original majesty of something so impossibly unique and put together. It’s generational fiction from now on.
I used a Wikipedia quote in the video presentation that a new edition of the audiobook was recorded by the Netflix version’s Rosalind Chao, and if you want this story but need some comforting familiarity, please go for it, and then go further.
The Wikipedia text lyrics follow, for the first book only:
During the Cultural Revolution, Ye Wenjie, an astrophysics graduate from Tsinghua University, sees her father get beaten to death during a struggle session by Red Guards from Tsinghua High School. Ye is branded a traitor and is forced to join a labor brigade in Inner Mongolia, and is later sentenced to prison, where she is recruited by Yang Weining and Lei Zhicheng, two military physicists working under Red Coast, a secret Chinese initiative to use high-powered radio waves to damage spy satellites.
After working with them for some time, she learns that the stated purpose is a front for Red Coast's true intention: the search for extraterrestrial life. Ye discovers the possibility of amplifying outgoing radio waves by using microwave cavities within the Sun and sends an interstellar message to test her theory, but tells no one else. Eight years later, now in a loveless marriage with Yang, Ye receives a message from a concerned alien pacifist from the planet Trisolaris in Alpha Centauri,[a] warning her not to respond or else the inhabitants of Trisolaris will be able to deduce the Solar System's location (based on the time it takes them to receive her response to their messages) and invade Earth. Disillusioned by the political chaos and having come to despise humankind, Ye responds anyway, inviting the Trisolarans to come to Earth to settle its problems. She murders Yang and Lei to keep the alien message secret.
Some time later, with the end of the Cultural Revolution and Ye's return to Tsinghua as a professor, Ye encounters Mike Evans, a hermit and the son of the CEO of the world's largest oil company. Evans is a radical environmentalist and anti-speciesist. Seeing that Evans is direly angry at humanity as well, Ye confides in him and tells him about the events at Red Coast. Evans uses his inherited financial power to hire men and purchases the Judgment Day, a giant ship which he converts into a mobile colony and listening post. Upon receiving messages from Trisolaris, validating Ye's story, Evans announces the creation of the militant and semi-secret Earth-Trisolaris Organization (ETO) as a fifth column for Trisolaris and appoints Ye its leader. According to the messages, the Trisolaran invasion fleet has already departed, but will not reach Earth for 450 years.
The society attracts numerous scientists, minor government officials, and other educated people who are disappointed with world affairs. They assemble a private army and build small nuclear weapons. However, Evans retains control of most resources and starts to alter and withhold alien messages from Ye and others. The society splits into factions, with the Adventists, led by Evans, seeking complete destruction of humanity by the Trisolarans, and the Redemptionists, led by Shen Yufei, seeking to help the Trisolarans to find a computational solution to the three-body problem, which plagues their planet. A third, smaller faction, the Survivors, intend to help the Trisolarans in exchange for their own descendants' lives while the rest of humanity dies.
In the present day, Wang Miao, a nanotechnology professor, is asked to work with Shi Qiang, a cunning detective, to investigate the mysterious suicides of several scientists, including Ye's daughter Yang Dong. The two of them notice that the world's governments are communicating closely with each other and have put aside their traditional rivalries to prepare for war. Over the next few days, Wang experiences strange hallucinations and meets with Ye. Wang sees people playing a sophisticated virtual reality video game called Three-Body (which is later revealed to have been created by the ETO as a recruitment tool) and begins to play. The game portrays a planet whose climate randomly flips between Stable and Chaotic Eras. During Chaotic Eras, the weather oscillates unpredictably between extreme cold and extreme heat, sometimes within minutes.
The inhabitants (who are portrayed as having human bodies) seek a way to predict Chaotic Eras so they can better survive. Unlike humans, they have evolved the special ability to "dehydrate", turning themselves into a roll of canvas. They do this in order to lie dormant when the Chaotic Eras occur, saving valuable resources that otherwise would have been wasted. A second individual is required to rehydrate their body, as self-rehydration is not possible. Characters resembling historical figures, including Aristotle, Mozi, and Isaac Newton, fail to produce a model for the planet's climate, as multiple civilizations grow and are wiped out by large-scale disasters. It is Wang who ultimately happens upon the insight that explains the climate of Three-Body, and wins the acclaim of the others. The planet is part of a system with three suns, whose distances from the planet and thus their appearance and disappearance in the sky are chaotic and hard to predict. When two suns are far away and Trisolaris orbits the third, the climate enters a Stable Era. When the planet is too close to two suns, the climate is disrupted, causing a Chaotic Era. If it is close to all three suns, a planet-wide firestorm occurs. If all three suns are distant, the planet enters an ice age. Eventually, at a future time impossible to predict, Trisolaris will collide with one of the suns and be consumed. The game shows the Trisolarans building and launching colony ships to invade Earth, believing that the stable orbit will allow unprecedented prosperity and let them escape the destruction of their planet.
Wang is inducted into the ETO, and informs Shi of one of their meetings. This leads to a battle between the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and the society's soldiers, as well as Ye's arrest. The PLA works with the Americans, led by Colonel Stanton, to ambush Judgment Day as it passes through the Panama Canal. To prevent the crew from destroying records of their communications with the Trisolarans, the team follows Shi's suggestion to use Wang's nano-material filament in a fence, which will quickly cut the ship apart and kill everyone aboard but will not damage the computer systems beyond repair. From the Trisolaran communications, several revelations are discovered. The Trisolarans possess advanced femtotechnology that allows them to create 11-dimensional supercomputers called "sophons" which, when viewed in three dimensions, occupy the volume of a proton. Two of these sophons have already been laboriously manufactured and sent to Earth. The Trisolarans do not have faster-than-light travel for spacecraft, but they are able to launch individual sophons at a relativistic speed towards Earth where they have the power to cause hallucinations, spy on any location, transmit the information gathered to Trisolaris using quantum entanglement, and disrupt the operation of particle accelerators. The Trisolarans fear humanity will develop technology advanced enough to fight off the invasion by the time the fleet arrives, and have decided that disrupting the accelerators to give random results will paralyze Earth's technological advancement.
Once several sophons have arrived, they plan to fabricate visual miracles and other hallucinations on a massive scale to make humanity distrust its own scientists. The Trisolarans detect that humanity has made these discoveries via sophons and beam to the eyes of the PLA one final message, "You're bugs!", then cease all communications. Now in custody, Ye is allowed to visit the old Red Coast base, and reflects upon her past choices, noting that humanity from now on will never be the same. Shi finds Wang and his colleagues in a depressed drinking binge, and sobers them up by driving them to his hometown village in Northeastern China. Shi reflects on how despite all the advances humanity has made with pesticides and even genetic engineering, the simple-minded locust still manages to survive and thrive. With renewed hope, Wang and Shi return to Beijing to help plan the war against the Trisolarans. Now old and weak, Ye Wenjie returns to the top of Radar Peak, once the location of the Red Coast SETI base of operations. As she watches the blood red sun set in the west, she remarks the sight as a "sunset for humanity".
