”The Three-Body Problem” (2007)

Author: LIU CIXIN

The first volume of the trilogy “Remembrance of Earth’s Past

“The Astronomer” Jan Vermeer van Delft, around 1668

Who is the Earthling?

The features of his pensive face are drawn with thin, delicate strokes, giving him a gentle, thoughtful, dreamy look. Curious by nature, he ventures into the unknown.

Does his face deceive us, does he have hidden thoughts or a complex nature, a paradox in a paradoxical universe?

The trilogy “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” by Chinese author Liu Cixin, published between 2007 and 2010, is a fascinating science fiction story about the history of the universe and humanity. As the writer himself stated in the postscript to the 2015 English edition, this trilogy is intended to be a myth of creation from the Big Bang to an imaginary future.

The fascination of the void and mathematics, the poetry of physics, the theory of relativity, the subquantum mechanics, but also time and space are gradually revealed to us, ultimately transforming the world of scientists into a miraculous world, full of mystery but at the same time terrifying.

Throughout the three novels that make up the trilogy — The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End — we will travel from the past to the present to a very distant future and witness, in the author’s vision, the transformations of human society.

In his first novel, The Three-Body Problem, published in 2007, author Liu Cixin reveals to us a world of reason and emotion. It all begins in China in 1967, in the midst of the Cultural Revolution. Astrophysicist Ye Wenjie and her father are victims of the Red Guards’ ideological purge of intellectuals. After her father’s death, executed in public, Ye Wenjie is recruited to work on a secret astrophysics program on the Red Coast. Disappointed by human society, which cannot find its way to morality on its own, Ye decides to secretly contact an extraterrestrial civilization. After several years, a mysterious countdown, perceived only mentally, threatens the lives of scientists around the world. Among them is Wang Miao, a researcher in the field of nanomaterials. Trying to find out the purpose of this mysterious countdown, Wang is contacted by a secret society, “Frontiers of Science,” which provides him with a virtual computer game. The goal of this game is to get the player to figure out a solution to the problem of the three bodies (suns) that are threatening a supposed alien civilization. On this occasion, Wang learns that the supposed extraterrestrial civilization on Trisolaris really exists and that it was contacted by Ye many years ago. Faced with extinction, the Trisolarian inhabitants leave their planet and head for Earth with the aim of occupying it.

Writer Liu Cixin uses the context of virtual computer games to briefly present the important moments in human history in its attempt to decipher the mechanism of the universe. Research into the cosmos and its influence on the destiny of humanity has been and continues to be difficult, full of theories that have proven to be incomplete. People’s efforts to use their human intellect and ability to analyze the complexity of astrophysical phenomena have gradually led to a certain stage of understanding and technological development.

The computer game features personalities who have marked the human world of science over the centuries and who are trying to find a solution for the three suns that periodically destroy the Trisolarian civilization.

Thus, scientific thinking, beginning in ancient China, moved from mysticism (the concept of yin and yang, Confucius’ concept of li, I Ching) to experiments and observations, to philosophy (Mo Zi), and then to Europe (in ancient Greece, Aristotle, in the Middle Ages, Galileo Galilei, Leonardo da Vinci, Giordano Bruno), which attempted, based on large amounts of observational and experimental data, to make logical deductions in order to construct a model of the universe. Copernicus, Newton, Von Neumann, and Einstein made decisive progress, but the three-body problem cannot be explained solely on the basis of physics; it also requires mathematical calculation. The relative algorithm would be the solution, but unfortunately it has not yet been calculated, and as such the three-body problem cannot be solved.

The dialogues between the characters in the game, who demonstrate their theories, evoke the atmosphere of Plato’s Dialogues as a form of exposition — and Isaac Asimov also resorted to this literary expression — in which the truth is revealed to the disciple step by step through the explanations given by the master. In this way, the reader is gradually introduced to theories in the field of astrophysics, from mysticism to the theory of relativity.

Not only science but also art in all its forms is present throughout this novel. References to works of art, both in literature and painting, abound, and thus Liu Cixin creates a harmony between reason and emotion, a harmony that should dominate human existence.

The wonderful description of mathematician Wei Chang’s dream, who discovers the void through meditation, is accompanied by Bach’s music, giving rise to a vision of a giant who builds a large, complex building using only his mind.

The indisputable intention of the Chinese writer Liu Cixin is to reveal to the reader, in the pages of his story, the beauty of the human mind. Scientists and artists are equally creators of values. Thus, the computer game is compared to the famous painting by Chinese painter Zhang Zeduan, Along the River During the Qingming Festival, which represents a fable of human society, an utopian world that hides a reality deeper than the fine lines of the drawing suggest.

This unknown world of the scientist’s mind, a world that until now was known only as lacking in beauty and rigid, suddenly becomes a fantastic world thanks to Liu Cixin’s artistic mastery.

With the first volume of his trilogy, Chinese writer Liu Cixin wants to change our view about the human mind. Beauty is often associated with goodness, and man’s fascination with the world beyond the stars will prove to be a trap into which the naivety of the human race will fall. The last words of the first listener on Trisolaris will sound an alarm about humanity’s fascination with the universe.

To be continued