"The Three-Body Problem" (a Chinese sci-fi series that's actually about science)

Book cover for "The Three-Body Problem." 

[this review does not contain spoilers, in my opinion]

Here's a sci-fi book series I recommend: The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death's End [affiliate links]. (The series of 3 books together is called "Remembrance of Earth's Past.") It's written by Chinese author Liu Cixin, and it's been translated to English. (And the English version also seems to be a bestseller.)

(Those links are Amazon links, but if you're in mainland China you can easily buy English or Chinese versions on Taobao for cheaper than the Amazon prices. The Chinese titles are "三体", "黑暗森林", and "死神永生".)

It's being made into a Netflix series too- here's the trailer.

Anyway, this post is my review of this book series.

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Science fiction that's truly based in science

These books are different from any other science fiction books/movies I've seen, because the plot truly does depend on science. Contrast this with something like Star Trek, for example- in Star Trek, they have phasers instead of guns, but phasers are just the space version of guns, and besides that they're basically the same as guns. And in Star Trek, the Enterprise is powered by crystals or something, I think? I forget the exact details, because in Star Trek it doesn't actually matter, the story just needs some sciency-sounding jargon there, but it doesn't need to make sense. The sci-fi elements are sort of an aesthetic layer put on top of a story that could happen anywhere.

The books in this series are different. The plot is very much based on the details of scientific concepts- some of them real, and some of them fictional. People who have studied physics/astronomy/relativity/etc will recognize a lot of the concepts in these books. Even the title of the first book, "The Three-Body Problem"- if you know a lot about physics, you likely know what the three-body problem is, and it's an important plot point in the book so I might even say it's a spoiler. (But not really that bad of a spoiler, because there's a lot more to it in the book- it explores a whole bunch of interesting things related to the three-body problem, and there's a whole plot.) Liu Cixin takes very real scientific concepts, and also extends them in fictitious ways.

The second book in the series is called "The Dark Forest"- and actually, "dark forest theory" is a real scientific theory that Liu Cixin significantly contributed to (though Wikipedia tells me that he didn't create it himself). I won't explain what it is here because it's kind of a spoiler- I'll just say it's related to the Fermi paradox. Actually, since reading these books, I have coincidentally come across a couple different articles on the internet that discuss dark forest theory, and they all reference Liu and his novel "The Dark Forest."

Another aspect of these books that felt truly grounded in science in a way I haven't seen in other sci-fi was the sheer hugeness of the times and distances. For example, at one point, some characters discover that something that happened in space could potentially threaten the earth. In a typical sci-fi movie, it would be like "we just discovered this potential threat, and IT'S GOING TO HAPPEN TOMORROW" - for plot reasons the time when you find out the bad thing is going to happen is extremely close to the time the bad thing happens. But no, in this series of books it's not like that. Something is discovered that could potentially threaten the earth, and it's going to happen in a few hundred years. The earth has a few hundred years to get ready. And then the book explores how society would deal with this information. The entire series of 3 books spans hundreds of years.

As for the distances- yeah, there are spaceships traveling very far, and there truly is a sense of how vast and empty and lonely space is. For example, at one point a spaceship is launched for a mission that will take 50 years, because of the incredible distance it needs to travel.

There are a lot of instances in this book where someone sends out a signal or a probe or something in space, and it takes years for it to reach its destination and take effect. The extreme degree of separation between the sender and the recipient. If you send something into space, by the time it arrives somewhere and does something, does it even matter to you any more? There are a lot of important characters in the story who never meet each other.

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References to Chinese and western history

Parts of the first book in the series are set in China during the Cultural Revolution, and the struggles and political pressures that the characters go through are important to the plot of the book. Also, there's this, which just about made me fall out of my chair laughing:

[Some background information: In this time period in China, people believed that the Chinese government represented "revolution" and that was a good thing, and western countries were "imperialist" and that was a bad thing.]

Message to Extraterrestrial Civilizations

First Draft [Complete Text]

Attention, you who have received this message! This message was sent out by a country that represents revolutionary justice on Earth! Before this, you may have already received other messages sent from the same direction. Those messages were sent by an imperialist superpower on this planet. That superpower is struggling against another superpower for world domination so that it can drag human history backwards. We hope you will not listen to their lies. Stand with justice, stand with the revolution!

[Instructions from the Central Leadership] This is utter crap! It's enough to put up big-character posters everywhere on the ground, but we should not send them into space.

["The Three-Body Problem", page 171]

(And then there's a translator's note that explains that the "big-character posters" are a thing in China. They're propaganda posters about the things that the government wants you to believe, basically.)

When I read that, I was like "wow can't believe this was published in China" and my husband was like "yeah I bet they won't put that part in the tv series." (It's being made into a Netflix series in English, and also it's been made into a Chinese tv series before.)

There are references to Chinese historical figures (like King Zhou Wen), western scientists (like Newton), famous art (like the Mona Lisa), and so on. I really like this, it's like, very aware of how these pieces of history and culture matter to society, and how they continue to shape the way people think. I like how there was a good mix of Chinese references and other culture's references. (Also, probably most of the characters are Chinese, but there's also a diverse mix of non-Chinese characters who are important too. I love Kent.)

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It was about how society works, rather than fast-paced action scenes and heroism

The way that Liu tells this story feels very unique to me, because he doesn't really focus on the emotions of individual characters. I would say that for most stories I've read/watched, it's about characters facing a challenging situation, and they make decisions out of courage and love, to save themselves and save others, and the writers really want the audience to feel the emotions of the characters, how difficult it is for them, how much they love their friends and family and would do anything to save them, etc- yeah, these books are not like that AT ALL. 

For most things that happen in these books, it's written like the reader is not meant to connect emotionally with the characters, but it's just showing you a thing that would inevitably happen when society is facing this kind of crisis. For example, there are several big disasters in these books, where thousands or millions of people die, and they're mainly described in broad terms, kind of a similar feeling to reading a news article. There are very very few such disasters in the books where the main characters that we care about are caught in the middle and have to decide how to face the danger.

There are a few characters whose feelings are described in enough detail that the reader would actually care about them- like Wang Miao and Luo Ji- but for most characters, and most things that happen, the way the story is told is not about caring about what the characters are going through. Instead, it's about exploring what would happen to human society when faced with a science-fiction-y crisis.

When I was reading these books, reading about various crises that different groups of characters went through, and how some of them died, I was just thinking about how if I was in a situation like that, even if I couldn't save myself, I would do anything to save my child. But we don't really see many characters thinking along those lines in these books. The human capacity for love is mentioned a few times, but it's much less important than game theory (we'll get to that). There are a few mentions of characters caring about their family members, but not many.

It makes me think about the vast opportunities for fanfic writers. The story spans hundreds of years, and a lot of things happened to a lot of people, and many of those big newsworthy events are only mentioned briefly. There's so much potential to write about ordinary people living through these events- how their lives were affected, how they felt about it. (And I'm checking Archive Of Our Own, and indeed, yes, there is a lot of fanfic there. Most of it is in Chinese. Interesting, because Archive Of Our Own is blocked in China. Also, I just did some googling and found out there's a fanfic that has actually been turned into a published novel and translated from Chinese to English by the same translator who worked on this series. Wow.)

Also, another thing that's very unique about this story is it didn't really use lucky timing as a way to increase the level of conflict in the story. Okay, I don't know if "lucky timing" is the right term (I kinda just made that up), but what I mean is this- I've seen lots of movies where the heroes are trying to figure something out, and then they finally figure it out, but by coincidence there's a group of bad guys who also figured it out at basically the same time. So the story's no longer about "can the heroes figure this out?" but it becomes "the heroes and bad guys both showed up at the place where the treasure [or whatever] is at the same time, and now they're having a shootout, and it's EXCITING because we don't know who will win." 

Yeah, these books are not like that at all. Instead, they're like, these characters are trying to figure something out, and then they have a scientific breakthrough that suddenly makes the problem extremely simple, so then when they actually go and implement their plan, the "bad guys" don't really stand a chance. So it's not "exciting" in an action-movie sense. And then later, the bad guys have their own scientific breakthrough, and so the heroes have no chance of defending themselves.

It seems that in most action movies, the heroes and the villains are pretty evenly-matched. Otherwise, there's no suspense about which side will win. (The real world is really not like that at all...) Well, in this series of books, it's not like that.

I will say, there was at least 1 event that happened in these books where the timing of it was extremely lucky and had major implications for the plot. But for the majority of the important events in these books, it wasn't about someone making a heroic split-second decision at just the right time. Instead, it was about societal trends, and scientific research making gradual progress for decades.

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Morality and game theory

There are things in these books that are very dark. There are situations where people are pushed into very extreme crises, which might not even be survivable, and basically what happens is determined by game theory. It's very survival-of-the-fittest, take-advantage-of-other-people-before-they-take-advantage-of-you, prisoner's dilemma, that sort of thing. There are mentions of cannibalism. Yeah, it's dark.

And, the terrifying thing is that these bad things don't happen because some villain decides to be evil or whatever. Instead, it's portrayed like these are the behaviors that will inevitably arise, according to game theory, when people are put into these situations. ("Game theory" basically means mathematically analyzing the benefits/costs/risks of different choices that one could make, and trying to determine the best strategy for how to interact with other people. Do you cooperate with other people, because you're in a situation where you benefit the most by being a trustworthy member of society? Or do you screw people over, because if you don't, you might not even survive?)

And there are characters in these books who are morally gray, who make decisions that many people would view as unethical, because they believe it truly will benefit humanity as a whole. For example, at one point, there is debate over what area of scientific research to invest money in, and one character believes that one of the research areas has a lot of potential to save humanity, and the other is basically a dead end. He ends up murdering some of the supporters of the rival research area. After that, because there are fewer supporters, the enthusiasm for that research area kind of dies out, and society decides to invest resources in his preferred research topic. Like... wow, that's messed-up that he murdered people- but what if it did really make the difference? What if he was right that that research area was a dead end, and the other one saves humanity?

There are also characters who could be described as naive, who have a strong sense of morality and always want to do the right thing, but their lofty ideals don't really fit the situation they're in. And Liu seems to be saying that it's not good to have that kind of perspective on morality. 

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Sexism

Unfortunately, there's a lot of sexism in these books. The way the female characters are written is not great. And something that stood out to me was the number of times a female character stood in front of some glowing thing (the setting sun, the window of a spaceship, etc) and a man admired the way her slim figure was silhouetted against it- like, that happened a weirdly high number of times, as if Liu Cixin doesn't know other ways to describe women.

In the part of the story set in the future, the book says that men in that futuristic culture are "less masculine" and that's a bad thing. Umm, what? Umm, masculinity is defined differently in every culture- it doesn't make sense to say that men in a certain culture or a certain time period are "less masculine" than a different culture or time period. Whatever the men are like, that's what masculinity is.

There's one part where a character meets people from the futuristic culture for the first time, and she incorrectly assumes the people she meets are all women, because in that culture, men look "more feminine" and that's apparently a bad thing. Like, come on. Just because an outsider isn't familiar with your society's gender norms, that doesn't mean masculinity is in decline. What on earth.

The book says the main problem with men becoming "less masculine" is that the men of that futuristic culture aren't able to courageously make those morally-questionable decisions which are necessary to ensure the survival of humanity. Uhh... ? And apparently it's taken for granted that women can't do that.

A Chinese friend told me that the translators who translated these books from Chinese to English made a lot of edits to get rid of sexist descriptions of women. Good job to the translators. (Here's an article from a Chinese news site along those lines.)

But the most glaring example of sexism, in my opinion, was this: There's a male character in these books who daydreams about an imaginary woman that he made up in his head. He's totally in love with her, or something. Then, he ends up meeting an actual real woman in the real world who fits the description of his imaginary dream woman, and he treats her like she actually is his perfect dream woman. He seems to believe her entire reason for existence is to fulfill his romantic fantasies. Like he doesn't realize that she has her own life, and she's NOT the nonexistent woman he fell in love with in his imagination.

Every thought he has about her is viewed through this lens of how amazing it is to be with her, to finally meet the woman he dreamed about for so long. He immediately takes up the role of the affectionate boyfriend who takes her on lavish romantic dates, etc. Even when she has a problem and needs help, he seems to think it's so cute, how she shivers in the cold and needs him to come and romantically bring her a coat and some hot tea and hug her.

It really reminds me of guys I knew in college, giving each other advice to take a girl on a date to a horror movie, so that when she's scared she'll snuggle against him. Very immature-teenager-who's-never-been-in-a-relationship-before. But in this book, this male character- who is an adult- seems to think he can build a whole relationship on that kind of shallow fantasy. Or rather, that he doesn't even need to build a relationship, because he already knows her- he's dreamed about her for so long!

I kept reading about their relationship, wondering "when is he going to realize she is a person?" And it never happened! They're in a long-term relationship, and the book mostly describes the beginning of the relationship, so maybe you could speculate that eventually he did figure out that she's a person but the book just didn't go into detail about that phase of their relationship... but... Like, wow, does Liu Cixin not realize that this male character totally sees this woman as a one-dimensional object, and that's a problem? 

I just can't get over it. Didn't she ever complain about anything? Didn't she ever get mad at him? Did she ever get sick and throw up and he needed to clean it up? All things that happen in a real relationship with a real person, but aren't very romantic.

Anyway, I just did some googling and found there are a lot of articles out there about the problems with how Liu writes female characters. Yeah. For me, it didn't affect my overall enjoyment of the books, but it made me go "well, this is a bit ridiculous" a few times.

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Summary

In summary, I recommend these books to people who like science and want to read a long fictional series. I love how the story incorporated a lot of science concepts which are real things that I learned in high-level science classes in college, and how the plot of the story is completely dependent on the science. The books also have a lot to say about how society works- how humans as a group would respond to these big space crises. And it brings up interesting ideas about morality, game theory, and how society will change in the future.