Author: Cixin Liu, 2008 (English translation, by Ken Liu)
A cerebral review for a cerebral book.
What do aliens, video games, religion, nanotech, colonization, weapons, the Chinese cultural revolution, dimensional folding, and the elusive mathematical three-body problem have in common?
They are all involved in the attempts to solve the fascinating problems in Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem.
Before I explain, here’s the story’s premise: prominent scientists begin to commit suicide one after the other. Nanotech scientist, Wang Miao finds himself threatened by a mysterious force driving him in that direction, but he collides with the right people to escape the other scientists’ fate. It turns out it isn’t just the scientists who are threatened: it’s all of humanity.
So back to solutions. What’s the solution to the personal threat Wang encounters? A video game. And what’s the solution to the game? For that, Wang must discover how the Chinese cultural revolution, forbidden “reactionary” science, and aliens collided to create his problem.
How does one untangle such a web?
Among the attempts for a solution are religion (get spiritual), nanotech weaponry (get violent), and detective work (get curious). So true to human patterns. Religion creates a framework of language, but doesn’t solve Wang’s problem, and violence recovers some sense of power in the face of feeling powerless, but doesn’t solve the problem, either.
It’s detective work—“thinking like a criminal”—that develops the understanding into sustainable cultivation of both language and power, though the process feels painfully slow, weak and inadequate.
But such an approach is exactly the reflection needed on the Chinese cultural revolution—and any other movement that stymies curiosity and justifies violence.
This book is a subtle theological tug-of-war between, on the one hand, the Chinese cultural revolution’s atheism, and, on the other, Christianity.
Liu uses Christianity’s language—sin, repentance, advent, reformation, immanent arrival, etc.—in a new context (which sci-fi often does so brilliantly), and which exposes both problems with the language and the reason it’s needed.
Liu demonstrates the ongoing human need for religious language to encompass mysteries not yet within our understanding, regardless of what science can do.
He also exposes how such language can be used grotesquely and oppressively. True to the human pattern, there are fundamentalist/ultra-conservative, moderate, and liberal factions at play here, and none are perfect. Liu also gently critiques how Christianity can sometimes focus on humans (and only for particular categories of humans, at that) rather than all creation, juxtaposing Buddhism’s attention to all living things.
Note how various leaders in the story—political and religious—act on their convictions to oppress others who are in their way. Ironically, the leaders’ convictions don’t even represent the convictions of those they lead. Leaders take note.
Most sobering is the goal that Liu names: a sinless world. And suddenly the human craving to get there in the ways Liu explores don’t seem worth the cost of dignity and life.
The recent Netflix version changes many details from the book: most importantly, the show is set in England rather than China. This might subtract from the cultural insight the book offers, which Ken Liu (no relation to Cixin) already translated for the English-speaking world in 2014. Liu, the author, had put the Chinese in the position of saving humanity, rather than the Western world.
That said, the story leaves several problems unexplained, as complex sci-fi sometimes does.
First, the three-body problem being explored is actually abandoned rather than solved, even though human technology might be able to model it and actually predict whether it is, in fact, eternally stable or chaotic. This suggests that the colonization of a civilization may actually help, with cooperation rather than subjugation. Humans take note.
Second, there’s actually a fourth body in the problem—the planet. How does it avoid being obliterated?
Third, there’s an awkward lock on earth time in years and hours that’s not explained. Anyone drawn to the story’s hard science fiction aspect might squirm.
Whatever the unanswered questions, Liu writes with an unusual sensitivity to cultural expectations placed upon a great variety of characters.
Such a story makes us wonder what it is that drives us to either eagerly embrace the outsider, or conservatively withhold hospitality, keeping in view the ultimate outsider: God. What motivates us to see an outsider as superior saviour, equal friend, dangerous threat, or inferior nuisance?
Favourite lines from Three-Body Problem:
- “What do I know! I’m just a bug!… Let’s go drinking and then go to sleep, like good bugs.”
- “Humans don’t need saving. They’re already living better than they deserve.”
- “The more books you read, the more confused you become.”
Three-Body Problem review written by: Jazmine Lawrence, Captain (Retired, RCAF), BSc Honours Physics, MA (Theology) student, future sci-fi author