A Brief Book Review of “The Three-Body Problem” by Liu Cixin
“It’s however you feel, g’head, you swing / Your arms too short to box with god / I don’t kill soloists only kill squads” - Nas (2001)
There’s a scene toward the end of The Matrix (1999) that came to mind after finishing this book. Our protagonist Neo, having gained his full powers and become The One, defeats the evil program Agent Smith by jumping into him and essentially tearing him to pieces from the inside out. The final setting of this battle for the future of humanity was staged in the most mundane of places, a dark hallway in a drab private apartment building. Afterwards, a triumphant Neo flexes his muscles, and the entire universe flexes with him. Such was also how I felt after finishing this thrilling, colossal battle of a book, The Three-Body Problem (2006). I actually flexed. (Apologies to anyone watching.) It is a testament to the narrative powers of author Liu Cixin; he takes you on such an epic journey that in the small conversations and struggles he describes he leaves you too feeling like you just witnessed and won numerous battles for humanity in the most unlikely of places. The story is told with a non-linear, interplanetary, and inter-dimensional narrative that works surprisingly well in holding the reader in suspense while teasing out the beautifully told strands of action to come.
The book begins in the late 1960s during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. A physicist and professor at Tsinghua University, Ye Zhetai, is being forced to atone publicly for teaching his students theoretical physics instead of applied physics. The young communist Red Guards who have confronted him believe he has violated principles of the revolution because his area of study depends perhaps too directly on the exchange of ideas with thinkers from capitalist Western societies. One of his daughters witnesses his degradation and murder, and it profoundly shapes her for decades to come.
We follow that young woman, Ye Wenjie, as she ages and finds herself one day a physicist too; she is trying to solve some highly technical and relatively mundane questions about interstellar communication. Her clever answer to these questions, which employs the Sun to massively amplify radio communications from Earth to other solar systems, dramatically shapes the future of human civilization as we know it.
Lest we cheer Ye Wenjie, a modern Newton, we are faced with some startling questions: Given it takes years on Earth to send and receive communications with the nearest solar systems, what would happen if the first person to communicate with another intelligent civilization was vindictive toward her fellow man, even if that feeling of revenge were in many ways valid? When is vengeance appropriate and solace preferable? How many drafts would you think appropriate to write before sending our first interstellar email or text? What if you screwed up and sent the wrong message? (Damn it, Siri.) What could go wrong or right in the intervening years between call and response? What sort of civil wars or tensions might break out among humans as we try to find one voice to represent ourselves to an alien civilization?
While pondering these wonderfully meaty questions, we also meet Wang Miao, a nanomaterials researcher, and Shi Qiang, a corrupt cop, who form an unlikely duo as protagonists who unfurl the mysteries and battles at the core of this story. They are aided by representatives of the major economies of Earth as well as the United Nations and NATO. The action here and stakes up for grabs are why former President Barack Obama in a 2017 interview with The New York Times just before he left office described The Three-Body Problem as “immense” and “fun” and that it made his "day-to-day problems with Congress seem fairly petty”.
Liu has a talent to take minor interpersonal struggles and show how the fate of the universe can hang in the balance. I once enjoyed an excellent book structured around special relativity called The Forever War (1974) by Joe Haldeman, a writer and professor at MIT. This book takes similar ground. While at the heart of The Forever War is an interstellar love story revolving around the sacrifices of warfare, at the heart of The Three-Body Problem is the topic of intergenerational trauma, on individual and societal levels, and the deep, real, and philosophical consequences of it. In the process, you learn a lot about Chinese intellectual, political, and social history as well as astrophysics and the history of science. This was a remarkable, sweeping story, and I look forward to reading the other two parts of this trilogy.