Book Review - The Three-Body Problem trilogy

The story

As China’s Cultural Revolution tears the country apart, a secret military project reaches out into space, and something answers. Decades later, a wave of impossible events and an eerie virtual-reality game pull a scientist toward a terrifying discovery: a civilisation from a chaotic three-sun system is already on its way to Earth. Cixin Liu’s trilogy follows the centuries of human history that single contact sets in motion.

What follows covers all three books, so there are spoilers for the sequels ahead.

An unexpected read

Along my reading journey, I have read very few sci-fi books, the ones I loved the most being the Metro series by Dmitry Glukhovsky and Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers. I came to Metro after finding out the games existed, though I still have not played them. I knew about Roadside Picnic because it was one of the books my high-school philosophy teacher recommended. Anyway, both present a desolate world where humanity has to fight to survive, with very few resources and constant hazards, which leads to a fragmented and hostile society that usually leaves you on your own against whatever comes.

On the other hand, I discovered the trilogy’s universe thanks to a recommendation from a friend from China. I saw that it was on sale on Apple Books, and at that moment I did not have any other physical books to be read, so I decided to give it a go.

The scene I did not understand at first

The trilogy does not open in space. It opens in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, with a physics professor named Ye Zhetai standing in front of a crowd at a struggle session, told to renounce relativity, quantum mechanics and the Big Bang. He refuses. He keeps refusing, and the crowd beats him to death while his own wife joins the denunciation and his daughter, Ye Wenjie, watches it happen.

I had bought this book as science fiction. I remember reading that opening and feeling that I had picked up the wrong novel, or that someone had put the wrong chapter first. It felt arbitrary, a piece of history dropped in front of me with no connection at all to the chaotic suns and the impossible physics I had been promised. I kept waiting for the story to start.

It took me a long time to realise that the story had already started, and that this was the whole of it. Everything that happens over the next three books comes out of what that afternoon does to Ye Wenjie. When she is later sent to Red Coast Base, and a signal from another world finally arrives there, she does not answer it as a scientist, and she does not answer it as a citizen of her country. She had already decided years earlier what humanity is, standing in that crowd, and everything that follows, the invasion, the Wallfacers, the centuries of fear, comes from one woman concluding that her species cannot be trusted to correct itself. That opening is not background to the story. It is what causes it.

Philosophical thoughts and dilemmas

At the beginning, I could not imagine how a string of physicists killing themselves could lead to what was going to happen in the following chapters. The concept from which the Trisolaran World comes is the mathematical problem of the Three Bodies, a system with no general solution, chaotic enough that nobody can predict where the bodies will be very far ahead. If this happened in a Solar System, instead of regular seasons, the planet swings without warning between Stable Eras and Chaotic Eras, and a civilisation can be scorched or frozen out of existence before it finishes rebuilding. Any civilisation that survives conditions like that has, by definition, learned to handle them, which is why the Trisolarans are so far ahead of us.

The plot changes entirely. Instead of discovering a whole new world, we find our own under one of the biggest threats in its history: an extraterrestrial civilisation is travelling to this planet with the purpose of invading it and settling down in a more stable world.

In this moment of chaos, the world decides to sort of unite, and they desperately create the Wallfacer program, where four individuals were handed enormous resources and the right to act without ever explaining themselves. These four people have to design a strategy that cannot be revealed in any way, since these Trisolarans are actually listening to everything that is happening on Earth via the Sophons, which are supercomputers the size of a proton. Three of them are broken by the Wallbreakers the enemy assigns to read them, until the fourth develops a theory that describes a dark and raw reality of the universe.

After this, the human civilisation goes through a series of events over several centuries where everything was possible, from the total extermination of the civilisation, to the idea of a human exploration of the universe beyond the Solar System.

Two characters, Luo Ji and Cheng Xin, went through a great many dilemmas because of the weight of what they were carrying, and I still do not know what I would have done in their place.

The first had more at his disposal than almost anyone alive, yet he spent several years living in peace in an isolated house in the middle of nowhere, as if he did not care at all about the human extinction. And this raises the question: What would you do? Would you focus on the technology, or on a plan that could fool the Trisolarans, or, given the fact that the chances of survival were at the lowest, would you go wild and spend all the money to live as you wished?

The second one, after being given the role of Swordholder, faced the situation in which she could either reveal the position of the enemies even if it involved revealing the location of the Earth too to provoke the extinction of both worlds, or refuse to do so and risk it all, allowing the Trisolarans to subdue human civilisation, with the hope that in the future they could manage to survive all these events. Thus, the question is: If you were going to die under the attack of someone (or something), would you prefer that you both were exterminated, or would you accept your fate and simply die?

Da Shi

The character I enjoyed the most was not one of the people carrying the species on his back. Shi Qiang, Da Shi, is a Beijing policeman with no doctorate and no patience, rude to almost everybody, a cigarette usually going, and entirely unimpressed by clever people explaining why something is impossible. Everyone around him is thinking in centuries. He is thinking about who did it and where they are now, and more often than not that is the question that actually moves things forward.

An image of the society

Throughout the trilogy, human civilisation faces events that lead to the best and the worst of it. From a civilised world where peace was omnipresent and everyone enjoyed the best of conditions, to a civilisation that was forced to relocate to a single continent and fight against each other for their own survival, the humans went through many events where they could not see a bright future, but still, they decided to be confident about it, and never lost hope, even in the last of their days.

Final thoughts

What stayed with me after closing the last page was not the scale of the events, but the contrast between the immensity of the universe and the smallness of human decisions against it. Where Metro and Roadside Picnic drop you into a world that has already collapsed, The Three-Body Problem makes you watch the collapse approach for centuries, and forces you to ask what you would carry with you, and what you would let go.

I went into these books expecting another desolate setting to lose myself in, and walked out of it with a trilogy that questioned how I think about responsibility, time, and the weight of being alive at the wrong moment in history.