Book Review: The Three Body Problem

Cixin Liu
2010
Awards: Hugo
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

The Three Body Problem is the first book in Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. Its events are set in motion by a Chinese astrophysicist who, because of the atrocities she witnessed during the Cultural Revolution, has become so disillusioned with humanity that she invites a race of ruthless alien overlords from Alpha Centauri to come take over Earth.

If you like quick, tidy resolutions in your fiction, you may want to be aware that you won’t get anything of the sort in this novel. You will need to read the trilogy’s next two installments to find out what happens to the protagonists (not to mention humanity as a whole) But the ride of this book is worth it: it has an excellent, engaging premise, and this first part of the journey is filled with sometimes puzzling, sometimes disturbing, often funny, and increasingly surreal imagery, events, and characters.

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The book opens with a one-two punch of gut-wrenching scenes from the 1960s civil wars that followed the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The first is the shooting of a fifteen-year-old rebel by Red Union regulars. And the second is the beating death of a professor of physics during an anti-intellectual show trial, during which his wife is one of the key witnesses for the prosecution.

The physics professor’s daughter, Ye Wenjie, witnesses the whole trial, including her mother’s betrayal and her father’s death. The traumatized Ye goes to her university mentor for help, only to have her mentor commit suicide shortly thereafter. And then Ye herself, who refuses to denounce the beliefs of her dead father, is judged an enemy to the revolution and is sent to a reeducation camp in Mongolia. There, she is caught with reactionary propaganda (a copy of Rachel Smith’s Silent Spring), framed for writing a letter reporting the camp’s deforestation of the area, and thrown in prison.

However, Ye is an astrophysicist, and the military needs her expertise. So she is given a reprieve of sorts: her life is spared, and she is sent to work on a top-secret radar installation called Red Coast Base. But by this point, Ye doesn’t care. And any shred of faith she might have had in humans is long gone.

Ye’s story pauses here, in the late 1960s. The narrative fast-forwards forty years or so to 2006, when Wang Miao, an unassuming professor of applied research working on nanotechnology, is pressured by the army to try to infiltrate a secret physics society called the Frontiers of Science—a society where several prominent members have recently committed suicide.

After reluctantly accepting the assignment, strange things start to happen to Wang. Most disturbingly, he starts to see a countdown appearing in strange places: like on a roll of negatives he shot from his camera, and in the corners of his eyes while reading. The tiny numbers show up everywhere, relentlessly counting down. It is driving him crazy. So he goes to the Frontiers of Science for help. His key contact there, physics professor Shen Yufei, tells him to stop his nanotech research, and the countdown mysteriously stops.

Then, on one of his visits to Shen’s house, Wang happens to catch her playing an immersive game called 3body. Curious, he plays it himself. The game puts him onto an alien planet with three suns. The suns are sometimes big, sometimes small, never moving in a consistent direction or at a consistent speed. Sometimes they disappear for weeks or years (which he can observe because time passes much more quickly in the game than in real life). The planet is also populated by other, usually quite quirky players who take on avatars of characters from history like Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton. The players are all trying to find some formula that will allow them to predict the movement of the suns, but they never do. And with every play, Wang is only able to see civilization advance just a little bit further before some combination of the suns’ movements burns the planet to the ground and the inhabitants have to dehydrate themselves, waiting out the heat until the next period of solar stability.

Wang realizes that the game is an illustration of the three-body problem, a classic physics puzzle. The problem is that when a planet has three suns, the suns’ competing gravitational behavior will make them behave so erratically that their movements cannot be predicted by any known formula—and will periodically result in unexpected destruction of the planet. The game’s creators hope that it will help people to come up with an algorithm that will predict the movements of the suns, and thereby find a way to avoid the carnage that results from unfortunate solar combinations.

And when Wang attends a user group meeting, he learns that this is not just a theoretical concern. The world of the 3body game is a real place: a planet near Alpha Centauri that really does have three suns, and where the native population of “trisolarians” lives in constant danger of being wiped out by an unlucky sun alignment.

Which brings us back to Ye Wenjie’s story. Because when she was at Red Coast base in the 1960s, she discovered that she was able to use our sun’s radiation as a natural amplifier. So one day, furious with humanity, she sneaked into the control room and bounced a message off the sun in the direction of Alpha Centauri, saying, basically, “we are useless; come take over.” The trisolarians received it, and began preparing to come and take over our planet as their own.

Ye couldn’t be more strongly in favor of this idea. And, in fact, has co-founded an organization with a radical millionaire environmentalist to welcome the trisolarians with open arms. They are closely affiliated with the Frontiers of Science, and the 3body game is one of their brainchilds.

I should say at this point that I do most of my reading on the subway, on the way to and from work. I was innocently reading on the train one morning, minding my own business, when the guy sitting next to me said, “Is that The Three Body Problem? That book is crazy. It just keeps getting crazier and crazier. I read it in one night straight through, and then I read the other two books in like two more days. I can’t get enough of his writing. It’s completely nuts.”

And my traveling companion was correct. After the message gets through to the trisolarians, the book does start to get odd, eventually ramping up to the point where it is indeed pretty nuts.

For one thing, we become privy to the trisolarians’ preparations for the invasion of Earth, including their launch of a science-disrupting bombe surprise—a set of instructions encoded on the inner surfaces of two protons—which will get to Earth many light years before they will, and which they have to test with often hilarious results on their home planet first.

For another, simultaneously, Wang teams up with an international task force to gather (or steal by force) intel from the Frontiers of Science, which culminates in an effort to saw a supertanker into pieces using a device that is essentially a gigantic egg slicer.

And the 3body game keeps getting progressively more and more bizarre, with the repeated, inevitable destruction of the planet by one or another sun causing increasingly demented historical avatars to come up with increasingly wacky ideas to solve the sun problem, and to deyhdrate themselves into little people-prunes over and over again.

It all builds up intense anticipation for the arrival of the trisolarians...which, unfortunately, we have to wait until a later volume in this trilogy to see.

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This book does require a little bit of familiarization with the history of the Cultural Revolution, for those not already aware of its complexities. I took Chinese history in college, and still needed quite a bit of help, what with the confusing civil wars after the revolution, and the references to reactionaries and the material dialectic. The translator’s footnotes help a lot here.

The physics can also sometimes be difficult, and so advanced as to be almost surreal. But there is enough explanation in that area, too, that with just a little effort it’s still very possible to follow the main stream of the story.

The characters—human and alien, real and virtual—are engaging and quirky. They can be earnest, dedicated, and smart, but also sometimes inappropriately, sweetly frank and obnoxious. (The  message sent out by the Chinese equivalent of the SETI program to announce themselves to whichever alien race is listening, for example, is adorably imperious.)

Most of all, I loved the clever, off-the-wall situations in the 3body game, which do allow scientists to conduct thought experiments they never could do when constrained by Earthly physics. One of the best is when in one of Wang’s forays into the game he encounters the emperor Qin Shi Huang, who uses his vast army to create an enormous, human-scale computer processor, including a CPU, memory, system bus, and hard drive, and processor messages sent by semaphore and horseback.

It was brilliant in a way similar to the binary language instruction scene in Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. And, indeed, this book had many elements in it that reminded me of Stephenson’s best work—combined with the funny and accessible multi-dimensional physics of Edwin Abbott, the surreal settings of Roger Zelazny, and the alien invasions of H.G. Wells.