Getting your head around Cixin Liu’s incalculable Three Body Problem
Spoilers upcoming! Read the book, as you dam well should!
Sometimes you just need to cave in to peer pressure, and sometimes peer pressure is a positive thing. To be fair, there is no active pressure from my colleagues to get me to pick up a copy of Liu’s Three Body Problem off the shelf. Plus, my TBR is like 40 books thick. But when your mates are reading the same books and watching the same shows, then it’s just gotta be done. Plus, I’ve had my eyes on Cixin Liu’s masterpiece for a long time, and it wouldn’t be a book that I’d hesitate to pick up in a book exchange or off secondhand shelves if it ever comes my way. But my copy is new and sometimes, you just need to buy new and expensive books I suppose.
Science fiction has never really gone away, and there’s always pockets of loyal readers who would always read Asimov, Dick, Le Guin, Herbert, and so on and so forth. We could argue that sci-fi is really back to the forefront of contemporary culture. Just look at Dune cleaning up in the box office, and all the reels inspire by the movie. The Three Body Problem is on Netflix, which is why I’m picking up this book along with many others because the book had been out of stock for weeks, until a couple of days before the show started.
Science fiction for me though, has never been something that I actively seek. I space out my sci-fi reads as I do my young adult reads. This is because by nature, sci-fi rarely ever succeeds as literary fiction. You either get too much science, or too much fiction, and the two are rarely ever in balance. I couldn’t think of many sci-fi books that blew me away with its prose. But fuck me dead, The Three Body Problem comes close. It is the best sci-fi books that I read in years, and I’ve read some.
The unpredictability of the three bodies
We start way back in the cultural revolution, where a young Ye Wenjie saw her father practically murdered by revolutionaries in front of a crowd. Her father did not give an inch in his defence of science and physics — it should transcend political and national boundaries. But this is the time when any ideas can be turned on its head, and with the backing of a bloodthirsty crowd, theories and those representing them fall victim.
Wenjie then served in Inner Mongolia to decimate the forests there, getting ready for an invasion from the North. After a misadventure with a young journalist and a banned book, Carson’s Silent Spring, the authorities gave Wenjie a choice to spend her life as a scientist in a research centre, or to go back to the dirt. No prizes here for guessing whether she took the red or blue pill.
Fast forward to present day, the nanotech scientist Wang Miao was fiddling around with cutting hard matter with the smallest of nanoparticles. He started getting hallucinations of a countdown wherever he goes. It doesn’t help that a member of the special police, who’s a bit of a cunt, is following him everywhere and that the world’s top scientists are dropping off like flies under mysterious circumstances.
When Wang dug deeper, the smartest brains in the world were playing an RPG of the three body problem, trying to save a civilisation by bringing predictability so that society can thrive, though it is a close to impossible task as the planet is stuck in the orbit of three suns, which could appear all of the sudden and burn the shit out of everything in its way. But what does have the game have to do with anything? And what is all this noise about an impeding alien invasion? The dots all connect though, and they connect beautifully.
You and me and you and your friend STEVE (doo-doo-doo-doo my friend STEVE)
Here is a terrific video by TedEd explaining what’s the three body problem. Initially, I thought it’s the problem of having three bodies, like you know, human bodies. Maintaining one is already hard enough, let alone three. But a third body really does present problems of unpredictability which is incalculable. We are lucky in that our gravitational pull relative to the sun, we don’t experience any interference from a third party, like let’s say a gargantuan black hole. Perhaps this analogy is also apt in explaining the problem with the three bodies (DAMMIT STEVE).
The Three Body Problem is heavy in its scientific extrapolations, but you are seldom ever lost. In fact, these extrapolations are creative and elegant. Look at the case of the soldier-run massive human computer of Qin 1.0, an amalgamation of thirty million soldiers forming logic gates, thus the collective forming a motherboard. And yet, it is still flawed as Galileo did not take into account the space-time curvature. There is elegance in sending out messages using the sun to amplify the radio signal, and whether that makes sense to me or not, whether it is true or not, I can buy it. Or even the sophons, and their creation in Trisolaris, packing in multi-dimensions into a single proton. Yeah, I got lost in that, but I bought the idea too as though it was bulk Pecorino cheese on sale in Village Grocer.
Isn’t this after all, the purpose of science fiction? To study the universe using our own creative conjectures of what may be possible? In the post-scriptum, Liu stated that he found sci-fi to be more beautiful: “I’ve always felt that the greatest and most beautiful stories in the history of humanity were not sung by wandering bards or written by playwrights and novelists, but told by science.” Even though I can hardly agree, I can understand Liu’s ambition and passion to craft stories of infinite beauty and to make sense of the world we’re in. The Three Body Problem is one of the most beautifully written science fiction novels ever.
But there is plenty of humanity in this novel, as great novels are endowed. We understand the motivations of Ye Wenjie through the lens of her history against the authorities who saw her as a bug. But she relearns humanity too late, when she stayed in the Qijiatun village after complications with her pregnancy. She meets and lives with the villagers to enjoy the rare privilege of the daily life, such as hanging up the laundry and having idle chat about the sky. She became mentors to the young students in the village, inspiring them to take the mantle of science, which provides her an avenue to return to her post as a professor in the university where her father was murdered. It is heartbreaking to listen to Wenjie’s story and perhaps we cannot fault her to call in the Trisolarians to squash humanity.
The Three Body Problem also explores otherisation. The Ye family is a testament to the consequences of having differing ideas to the majority. It is the study of the relationship between the majority and the minority, the strong and the weak, and how the weak has hope. The strong is apprehensive in that they are more than willing to resort to extremes at the face of an uncertain enemy. For example, the red guards over Wenjie’s father’s defence of the theory of relativity, the Trisolarians intentions to wipe out humanity, or humanity itself to eliminate the uncertain Trisolarians coming their way. It is looking after your own interests in the vein of game theory, and to eliminate and destroy is often a logical conclusion.
The million dollar question: How did the Netflix Series go?
As far as the series go, I reckon it was alright. The trouble is that it didn’t really stop when the first book stopped, it just kept on fucking going. So of course, I’m up in arms about the spoilers coming up in the next book that I was going to buy this weekend anyway. Fuck you Netflix.
Timelines aside, the series feels like any other Netflix-produced show. The acting is passable, but not great. Nobody’s gonna win any fucking Emmys here; the video game world looks fine, like a Windows XP background if it had more colours available. But that’s the issue innit? I had a world more beautifully crafted, more intricate and far more grand in my head when I read the book. The Netflix version was a poor imitation of my imagination.
The extra characters in the series might be a major deviation, but they hold their own and serves a purpose in the whole scheme of the story. Wang Miao is divided into Auggie, Jack and Jin. The group has their own drama that we get to enjoy as the average Netflix viewer, where we’re not really sure who’s sleeping with who, who’s in love with who. But I think this added drama is fine if it doesn’t detract from the main story and for a large part, it intrudes little.
There are some scenes in the series which blows the book away. The most obvious that comes to mind is the Panama canal scene — a bare passing zephyr in the book with its two pages, as we learn that the crew is killed for the sake of the information the Judgment Day withholds. But this scene was fucking savage in the show. Throw in whole families getting sliced up in there with nano-fibres and you get a brutal but memorable centrepiece for your show.
Will I watch a season 2? Yes, of course, so I can bitch about it with my colleagues.
—
The Three Body Problem is a love song to science, and to a lesser extent, science fiction. We have come a long way since Jules Verne proposed men shooting themselves with a giant canon to the moon. Our ideas of astronomy and aeronautical engineering was still embryonic then and we had come a long way. This is the science fiction of the modern era, and as science evolves, so will science fiction. Cixin Liu is right in the forefront of this small step for man.
