Re-read review: The Three Body Problem, by Cixin Liu
I quite enjoyed this book the first time I read it. It is structured as a mystery, and that along with the intriguing alien solar system and society the author creates helped pull me along. On the second read, however, since I already knew where the story was going, I found myself getting bogged down by the weaker aspects of the writing, particularly the extremely wooden characterization. Cool ideas and a poetically melancholy tone combined with unrelatable characters spouting dialog that makes them sound like androids may be a feature of Liu’s writing, as I noted the same points in the short story collection ‘To Hold Up the Sky’.
The story starts with some quite brutal scenes from the Cultural Revolution, which introduce us to a woman named Ye Wenjie, a second-generation physicist. Her father was beaten to death in a denunciation session where her mother had been forced to speak against him, and then she was sent to a lumberjack camp where she got in trouble for reading ‘Silent Spring’ and transcribing a letter noting the negative impacts of deforestation. She’s obviously been through a lot of trauma, and even this early has the thought: “To achieve a moral awakening required a force outside the human race.” I would gladly have foregone the mystery structure to follow Ye Wenjie’s story chronologically, if deeper insight had been given into her feelings, because her actions are the strangest and yet most important of anyone in the book. Alternately, we could have followed the policeman Shi Qiang, who isn’t a very nice person but who has the clearest and liveliest characterization. Unfortunately, we mostly follow another scientist named Wang Miao, who has all the personality of a piece of dry toast. To explain what I mean, and how this affected my experience of the book, I’ll need to go into **spoilers**.
The absolute best part of this story, to me, was the alien world – even though we don’t get to see it directly yet. It is part of the three-star Alpha-Centauri system, and as such is affected by the “three body problem”: the influence of three suns all exerting gravitational effects on the planet and each other makes the motion of the planet (and therefore its climate) chaotic and unpredictable. The residents have evolved to partly deal with this by dehydrating their bodies when conditions are bad, and by building protective thick-walled structures1. However, their scientists have determined that there were once eleven other planets in the system that all fell into one of the suns one by one, and that this will be their eventual fate too. The “Trisolarans” have therefore been scanning the skies to try to identify a new home. One day they get a transmission. The individual who receives it, due to a pang of conscience, sends back this message:
“Do not answer! Do not answer! Do not answer! This world has received your message. I am a pacifist in this world…There are tens of millions of stars in your direction. As long as you do not answer, this world will not be able to ascertain the source of your transmission. But if you do answer, the source will be located right away. Your planet will be invaded. Your world will be conquered! Do not answer!
Ye Wenjie, however, immediately answers.
Why does she answer, given this warning? Well, that’s an interesting question. Shortly after the ‘Silent Spring’ incident, when she thought she might die, she had been taken to Radar Peak, AKA Red Coast Base because her skills were needed for what turned out to be something like the SETI project, but with transmitting capabilities. It was she who figured out that a radio signal could be amplified by beaming it at the sun in a particular way. Her superiors shut down this suggestion at the time, since Mao was often referred to as the “red sun” and so shooting beams at the sun would be taken as an insult. However, she did it surreptitiously anyway under the excuse of testing the equipment, which was the signal the Trisolarans first detected. By the time she received the response eight years had passed, and by then it was the Cold War, and Ye was feeling very pessimistic about humanity. The main thing the message does tell her about the Trisolarans is that they have survived many disasters. Her response is: “Come here! I will help you conquer this world. Our civilization is no longer capable of solving its own problems. We need your force to intervene.”
On receiving this response, the Trisolarans begin planning their invasion. It will take 400 years for the fleet to reach earth, and they are worried human scientific progress will make us more of a threat in that time - making them more prescient than the aliens in the 'World War' series, who were expecting to face knights and got panzer tanks! So they use new sub-atomic technology to mess with us. After a few false-starts, they manage to unfold a proton into two dimensions, inscribe it with circuits that allow it to act as an AI computer, and refold it. Two such protons, entangled with ones back on Trisolaris, are shot to earth where they begin interfering with atomic physics experiments, and creating visual illusions. In theory, this should slow down the progress of physics and thereby any technologies that might arise from it.
1. They can also make their bodies reflective, which is how and why the first computers on the planet were actually arrays of people doing a kind of semaphore signaling. Neat!
All this content is great, and if I were to adapt this book, that is more the order in which I would tell the story: going back and forth between the Trisolarans and Ye Wenjie, as they are the ones actually doing the most important actions. While this would sacrifice much of the mystery, it could effectively build tension instead.
The actions of Ye make more sense when laid out in linear order as well, although even then description of her mental state is sparse enough that we have to rely on inference. Ye eventually marries base engineer Yang Weining, and though she doesn’t love him – “her heart was like ashes from which the flame of love could no longer be lit” – she seems to respect him. Yet she is not only willing to murder him in order to also kill their boss Lei Zhicheng (the only other person who found out about the alien message, and who would have also figured out that she replied), even years later she seems to feel no remorse. She does comment that “the entire human race would pay an unprecedented price for this goal. This was a very insignificant beginning”. This sounds pretty psychopathic - it is pointed out how lonely, purposeless, and alienated she feels – and incompatible with the wording of her reply. Between sending the reply and killing her husband, she learns that she is pregnant. Ye over time seems to build up her initially vague hope that the Trisolarans will teach humanity a better way. This is possibly wishful thinking due to interactions with poor but eager physics students, and with her daughter, that finally thaw her heart. But I don’t see that she has access to any actual information that suggests the aliens have helpful intentions. This makes her continued efforts to try to get other people to think favorably about the Trisolarans seem a bit delusional.
This issue of unclear character motivation compounded by time-skips applies to other characters. The Trisolaran “listener” who decides to try to save earth talks about how Trisolaran culture is authoritarian, caring only about survival, with no art or love. That’s persuasive to us, but how does this guy even know what those concepts are or that earth has them? About halfway through the book we get a line about Yang regarding Ye:
When he handed the stack of paper to this woman he loved with all his heart, he saw her smile. The smile was so sad that his heart trembled.
That would be a good glimpse into his character and state of mind…except that it comes completely out of left field! I actually flipped back through the book to try and find any indication that Yang even liked her. But no. He recruited her, because she had the right scientific background. And then he turned kind of rude and hostile. And now this. It would be one thing if he suddenly said “I love you”, surprising Ye as well as the reader; but if we can see into his head here, why couldn’t we do that earlier? And Yang is dead – so is it Ye who added this to the narrative? Another man, Evans, is interested in conservation and what he calls “pan-species communism.” But while he has access to familial wealth, through which he could have a huge amount of influence2, he instead writes off humanity entirely.
2. He claims 45 billion dollars of oil company money is useless, because surely 45 billion has already been spent on conservation. Umm…has it? In total, maybe, but in an actual coordinated effort toward education or reshaping the economy or anything like that? I don’t think so…
Actually, that’s an odd theme in this book: Wealthy, educated, successful people being the ones welcoming aliens they believe to be hostile to humanity. Now, maybe this is still an idea that plays well in China, even if you are apparently now allowed to criticize the Cultural Revolution3. However, I tend to find this unlikely for the same reason that you don’t get many wealthy people joining revolutions: Their lives are just too comfortable to risk seriously upsetting, regardless of professed ideology. Even when it comes to philanthropy, they typically only give away what they couldn’t possibly spend on themselves in the first place. Bill Gates apparently still has $131 billion, even after spending $40 billion through his foundation…none of that on anything that really changes the systems that allowed him to be rich in the first place! There are occasional exceptions: The Countess Constance Markievicz almost got executed for taking part in the Irish Easter Rising of 1916 - but that sort of thing is A) rare, and B) typically involves an intent to help people rather than inviting the entire human species to be murdered. While I can’t rule out a few people like Evans, there just seem to be way too many on board with his plan4! Even in my most misanthropic teenage conservationist phase – where I wondered if society advancing beyond a hunter-gatherer stage was a mistake – that would never have crossed my mind. Also, it is implied that that ordinary people are too naïve and uneducated to understand humanity’s brokenness, which is also odd on several levels. Surely those at the bottom actually experience more human cruelty - as Ye did at the beginning! And if “the masses are dumb and useless” is a message that plays well with the local censors…well, the revolution really is dead! Of course, it is the antagonists who tend to say that most clearly, so perhaps those common folk are the wise ones after all? The idea that some would venerate and welcome the aliens, assuming they must be coming to help, on the other hand, is entirely plausible, since that is a common theme in UFO enthusiast circles today.
3. Such criticism makes up some of the most interesting and dark passages in the book, as well as one of the funniest: A draft broadcast to the stars that is in the CR language, with a follow-up that starts “This is utter crap! It’s enough to put up big-character posters everywhere on the ground, but we should not send them into space.”
4. The book notes: “The most surprising aspect of the Earth-Trisolaris Movement was that so many people had abandoned all hope in human civilization, hated and were willing to betray their own species, and even cherished as their highest ideal the elimination of the entire human race, including themselves and their children.” But lampshading the issue isn’t the same as explaining it or making it plausible!
At this point you may be wondering: “So what’s going on with this Wang Miao guy you said was the main POV character?” Good question! He is there for three purposes: To play the “Three Body” video game and infiltrate Ye’s organization; to demonstrate the games the aliens can play with people’s eyes; and to hand over some nanotech wire that is used to take out the faction that that welcomes the destruction of humanity. But he is neither very interesting nor very important, ultimately.
The video game is the means by which Ye’s organization recruits its elite members. They say other people aren’t interested. However, on this second read, I was surprised they got anyone to keep playing long enough who wasn’t an actual physicist! It isn’t very gamelike – you spend most of your time being talked at by characters with the names of famous scientists and philosophers but who clearly weren’t meant to really be them (this is an alternate world where humans can dehydrate themselves, after all). Based on the name of the game/book, I knew immediately that the odd day-night cycles were due to this world having three suns but I wouldn’t have been able to offer any concrete suggestions about how to predict the dynamics - so in this game I would have just been standing there watching the NPCs talk! A businessman or an English professor would be even more likely to get bored and log off. Even if you were engaged in the story, there’s nothing in it that leads to the thought: “These people are better than us. I would be honored to have them as my overlords!” You might have some sympathy for their plight, but the game tells you nothing about their society being more moral or environmentally conscious or anything. Seeing the game through the eyes of someone who did have that reaction – rather than Wang, who doesn’t – might have helped.
Possibly the author made Wang so boring to explain why he doesn’t kill himself when a countdown starts projecting itself on the photos he takes and the background radiation of the universe (though this is an illusion). Several scientists, including Ye’s daughter, have already killed themselves…though, again, this seems odd to me in terms of motivation. If I found evidence that, say, Natural Selection or photosynthesis were not operating in the expected manner, I would be incredibly interested in that! Even in this case, where particle accelerators are giving different results, I can’t believe multiple physicists would immediately jump to the conclusion that they will never figure out why, that the universe makes no sense, and that they have therefore wasted their lives. They’d be more likely to think “If I can solve this, I’ll probably win the Nobel prize!” and work on it even harder. But if you did have such an extreme reaction, you’d either have to be of a much more nervous or volatile personality than Wang or really terrified of professional disgrace.
In terms of the nanomaterial, the government not only already knows about the properties of the stuff Wang is working on, policeman Shi Qiang – in retrospect – already knows what he wants to do with it: “That stuff is really strong, right? Do you think it could be used to commit crimes?...If criminals steal some and make it into a knife, can’t they slice a car in half with one stroke?” He’s the one who comes up with the idea to basically make a giant egg-cutter out of the nanowires and use it to slice up the ship of the anti-human party as it comes through the Panama canal (the US and other international authorities are on board with the plan at this point, BTW!) as a way of killing everyone on board before they can delete the servers5. It is unclear how Wang’s participation is really necessary here, though, except as a consultant.
5. Luckily for them, all the pieces fall on land – Given what happened to my computer when I spilled wine on it, I would think being dumped in the Panama Canal after being cut in bits would only further damage the server!
Overall impression: A ton of great ideas and some heartbreaking or funny moments, and the mystery aspect pulls a first-time reader forward quite effectively. However, if you like your sci-fi to feature interesting character dynamics (that you don’t have to re-analyze the whole book to figure out), this might fall a bit flat, especially on a re-read.
