The Three-Body Problem (Chinese: 三体; lit. 'Three-Body') is a novel by Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin, the first in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy—though the series as a whole is often referred to as The Three-Body Problem, or simply as Three-Body.[1] The series portrays a fictional past, present and future wherein Earth encounters an alien civilization from a nearby system of three sun-like stars orbiting one another, in an example of the three-body problem in orbital mechanics.
Liu Cixin was born in Beijing in June 1963. Before beginning his career as an author, he was an engineer.[9] In 1989, he wrote Supernova Era and China 2185, but neither book was published at that time. His first published short story, Whalesong, was published in Science Fiction World in June 1999. The same year, his novel With Her Eyes won the Galaxy Award.[10][11] In 2000, he wrote The Wandering Earth, which also received the Galaxy Award[11] and was adapted into a film in 2019.[12] When the short story Mountain appeared in January 2006, many readers wrote that they hoped Liu would write a novel. Therefore, he decided to concentrate on novel-length texts rather than short stories.[citation needed] Outside of Remembrance of Earth's Past, Liu's notable novels include Supernova Era and Ball Lightning. When not otherwise busy, Liu wrote 3000–5000 words a day; each of his books reportedly took about one year to complete.[13]
English translation
In 2012, Chinese-American science-fiction author Ken Liu and translator Joel Martinsen were commissioned by the China Educational Publications Import and Export Corporation (CEPIEC) to produce an English translation of The Three-Body Problem, with Liu translating the first and last volumes, and Martinsen translating the second.[14] In 2013, it was announced that the series would be published by Tor in the United States[15] and by Head of Zeus in the United Kingdom.[16]
Liu and Martinsen's translation of the novels contains footnotes explaining references to Chinese history that may be unfamiliar to international audiences. There are also some changes in the order of the chapters for the first volume. In the translated version, chapters which take place during the Cultural Revolution appear at the beginning of the novel rather than in middle, as they were serialized in 2006 and appeared in the 2008 novel. According to the author, these chapters were originally intended as the opening, but were moved by his publishers to avoid attracting the attention of government censors.[14]
Plot
Within the novel, the narrative is presented nonlinearly, jumping between various points in time. A chronological timeline of events is presented below.
During the Cultural Revolution, Ye Wenjie, an astrophysics graduate from Tsinghua University, witnesses her father get beaten to death during a struggle session by Red Guards from Tsinghua High School. Ye is officially branded a traitor and is forced to join a labor brigade in Inner Mongolia, and is later sentenced to prison. In prison, Ye 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, warning her not to respond or else the inhabitants of Trisolaris will be able to deduce the Solar System's location 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 also 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 Judgement 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. Furthermore, 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 Wenjie'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 himself. 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 stochastic 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 Judgement 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 extremely advanced picotechnology 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, 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 Qiang finds Wang Miao 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, 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".
Characters
In the following, Chinese names are written with the family name first and given name second.
Physicist and wife of Ye Zhetai. She is also one of his accusers at the struggle session that ended his life.
Ye Wenjie (叶文洁)
Astrophysicist and daughter of Ye Zhetai. She is the first person to establish contact with the Trisolarans while working at Red Coast Base. She marries Yang Weining and gives birth to a daughter, Yang Dong. She later becomes the spiritual leader of the ETO and directly influences several key events in the series.
Ye Wenxue (叶文雪)
Ye Wenjie's younger sister, a Tsinghua High School student and a zealous Red Guard. She is killed during factional violence at some point after the collapse of their family.
Red Coast Base
Lei Zhicheng (雷志成)
Political commissar at Red Coast Base. He recruited Ye Wenjie and oversaw her work. She later kills him to keep the secret of the interstellar transmissions.
Yang Weining (杨卫宁)
Chief engineer at Red Coast Base, once a student of Ye Zhetai, later Ye Wenjie's husband and murdered by her as well.
Present-day
Wang Miao (汪淼)
Nanomaterials researcher and academician from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is tasked with investigating the ETO as well as the recent spate of suicides among well-known scientists. Wang Miao becomes immersed in the virtual reality game "Three Body", through which he learns about Trisolaris.
Yang Dong (杨冬)
String theorist and daughter of Ye Wenjie and Yang Weining. She commits suicide shortly before the present day events.
Police detective and counter-terrorism specialist, nicknamed "Da Shi" (大史; 'Big Shi'). He has a crude demeanor but is highly dependable and often demonstrates keen insight.
Chinese-Japanese physicist and member of the Frontiers of Science.
Wei Cheng (魏成)
Math prodigy, recluse, and Shen Yufei's husband. He develops a possible solution to the three-body problem.
Pan Han (潘寒)
Biologist, friend/acquaintance of Shen Yufei and Wei Cheng, and member of the Frontiers of Science.
Sha Ruishan (沙瑞山)
Astronomer, one of Ye Wenjie's students.
Mike Evans (麦克·伊文斯)
Radical environmentalist who supports "pan-species communism", also son of an oil magnate. After meeting Ye Wenjie, he becomes the main source of funding for the ETO.
In Liu's early childhood, when he was three years old his family moved from the Beijing Coal Design Institute to Yangquan in Shanxi, due to his father changing jobs. He also spent a part of his childhood in the countryside around ancestral hometown of Luoshan, Henan. On 25 April 1970, Dong Fang Hong 1—China's first satellite—was launched. Liu remembered the launch as a pivotal event in his life, recalling a deep sense of longing on witnessing it.
Several years later, Liu found a box of books under his bed in Yangquan, which included an anthology of Tolstoy, Moby-Dick, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Silent Spring. Upon beginning to read Journey to the Center of the Earth, his father told him: "It's called science fiction, it's a creative writing based on science". This was his first encounter with the genre, and he later remarked: "My persistence stems from the words of my father." At that time, such books could only be safely read privately by individuals: "I felt like being alone on an island, it is a very lonely state".[17]
Reverence and fear of the universe is one of the main themes of Liu's writing. According to him, as humans we will stand in awe of the scale and depth of the universe. His novels also focus on curiosity about the unknown. Liu says he cannot help thinking about the future world and lifestyle of human beings, and he tries to invoke readers' curiosity with his books. He also believes that humans should be treated as an entirety.[18]
Reception
In December 2019, The New York Times cited The Three-Body Problem as having helped to popularize Chinese science fiction internationally, crediting the quality of Ken Liu's English translation, as well as endorsements of the book by George R. R. Martin, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and former U.S. president Barack Obama.[14] George R. R. Martin wrote a blog about the novel, personally expressing its worthiness of the Hugo Award.[19] Obama said the book had "immense" scope, and that it was "fun to read, partly because my day-to-day problems with Congress seem fairly petty".[20]
Kirkus Reviews wrote that "in concept and development, it resembles top-notch Arthur C. Clarke or Larry Niven but with a perspective—plots, mysteries, conspiracies, murders, revelations and all—embedded in a culture and politic dramatically unfamiliar to most readers in the West, conveniently illuminated with footnotes courtesy of translator Liu."[21] Joshua Rothman of The New Yorker also called Liu Cixin "China's Arthur C. Clarke", and similarly observed that in "American science fiction ... humanity's imagined future often looks a lot like America's past. For an American reader, one of the pleasures of reading Liu is that his stories draw on entirely different resources", citing his use of themes relating to Chinese history and politics.[22]
Matthew A. Morrison wrote that the novel could "evoke a response all but unique to the genre: an awe at nature and the universe [which] SF readers call a 'sense of wonder'."
American streaming service Netflix announced in 2020 that Game of Thrones writers David Benioff and D. B. Weiss would be adapting the series into a sci-fi TV drama, making it one of the few originally non-English books adapted by Netflix. On the 18th of June 2023, Netflix uploaded a teaser for the upcoming release.
Some Chinese scholars[who?] found that Western readers appreciated the zero-moral universe depicted in the trilogy, which is considered to promote rationalism. Liu tried to answer the existential dilemma of "where should mankind go from here" through various efforts.[23]
A serialized digital comic adaptation has been published by Tencent Comics since 2019.[44]
Audio
The chapters of Three Body Problem were featured in serial podcast Stories From Among the Stars produced by Tor Books and Macmillan in July 2021.[45]
All 3 books of the Three-Body Problem have been adapted to a 100-episode Mandarin radio drama on Ximalaya.[46][47]
Animation
The Three-Body Problem in Minecraft (Chinese: 我的三体) is a fan-made (later officially-sanctioned) animated adaptation of the series, directed by Shenyou (Zhenyi Li).[48] It was initially animated entirely as an amateur Minecraftmachinima, with a low budget and production quality for its first season in 2014. According to Xu Yao, the CEO of The Three-Body Universe, Shenyou chose this medium out of the minimal budget, as Minecraft allows its players to design environments with ease and does not require animation. The machinima format, after the first season's first few episodes, was later converted into Minecraft-styled computer animation due to the show's success.[49][50]
An American TV series based on the book has been ordered by Netflix, with David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo set to write and executive produce.[52] The Netflix adaptation began production on 1 November 2021, with a scheduled finish date in August 2022.[53] The release date is 21 March 2024.[54][55]
A three-part documentary series titled Rendezvous with the Future which explores the science behind Liu Cixin's science fiction was produced by BBC Studios and released by Bilibili in China in November 2022. The first episode covers many ideas featured in The Three-Body Problem such as messaging extraterrestrial civilisations and the possibility of a gravitational wave transmitter.[56] An international version of the series has not yet been released.
