three-body-problem

How The Three Body Problem Captures the Imagination

/ Logan Sidwell / Leave a comment

This is one of my archived reviews, it covers the content of Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem. A review of its sequel can be found here

The Three-body Problem is on its way to its second season being released on Netflix. The book has glowing reviews “A War of the Worlds for the twenty-first century”, “Wildly imaginative”, “A breakthrough book”. So what did this book do that made it feel so fresh? What does any sci-fi book need to do in order to rise to the level of War of the Worlds?

I believe there are 3 key elements in which the novel excels. 3 scientific explorations floating through a narrative space, influencing and guiding one another. At the center is the story, pulled in every direction, with no way to predict its future. Let’s talk about the Three-Body Problem.

Pioneering Science

All speculative fiction explores pioneering science. But one thing Cixin Liu does that sets him apart is pick niche and rarely explored subjects to expand on. Space travel’s been done to death, we don’t need another explanation of Warp Drives and interplanetary jumps. Instead, the book explores Quantum Space and Dimensionality. These are some hefty topics, the kind that can scare people away if you get too in-depth on them. There’s no simple “And then a rocket engine ignites to carry us through space” in Quantum studies. A lot of folks will run screaming the second you try to explain why quantum entities are both a wave and a particle.

But Cixin Liu is smart. He knows that quantum mechanics kinda don’t make sense, so rather than diving deeper into the quagmire of quarks and spins and Higgs Bosons, he says, “In my book, there’s a reason things don’t make sense.” Messages in a person’s eye, science with inconsistent answers, physicists abandoning the field. Each of these questions is a mystery. And it resonates with anyone who’s ever tried to understand particle physics. Our brains want to understand the world as tiny marbles bouncing around at incomprehensibly small scales, so the book leans into the incongruity between our minds and microscopic reality.

In The Three Body Problem, physics is broken.

It makes sense in a twisted way. We don’t understand the results, so maybe the results are being tampered with. Of course! Quantum mechanics is unreliable because the trisolarans are interfering in all our experiments. Quantum mechanics is insane, but it isn’t in Cixin Liu’s world. Sabotage, that’s something any reader can wrap their head around.

And then there’s dimensionality. This is the realm of mathematics PhDs with fifteen colored markers and very large whiteboards. It’s a field so disconnected from our lived experience that any progress feels a century away. Perfect for an Alien Race with impossible and incomprehensible technologies.

Dimensionality is only given about a chapter and a half in this book. That’s probably a good idea. Think for a moment what ‘many dimensions’ mean to a regular reader. Either you’re doing a spiderman multiverse, or you’re dealing with non-euclidean physics. It’s impossible to visualize, it’s impossible to reason through. The human mind hasn’t trained itself to deal with it.

So Cixin Liu plays with the concept in its most broad terms. If a particle has 9 dimensions, and we can’t see 6, it’s probably bigger than we think it is. If we cut a dimension away, it starts to unfold. A single photon becomes large enough to cover a planet, the biggest unboxing in history. And once the circuitry of an AI is burned into its surface, sew the dimensions back together and it’s back to being tiny.

A simple, speculative exploration of the future of a field you don’t see that much in sci-fi. One standout moment for me is when the Trisolarans accidentally cut a photon down to a single dimension and pollute their planet forever with line segments.

The joy of sci-fi is seeing our weak scientific understanding turn into almost magical outcomes. From afar, quantum mechanics and dimensional manipulations are the perfect choice. No one but geniuses really have a clue what’s happening. And more importantly, we aren’t just told about all this. The book crosses out of sci-fi and into mystery, thirty impossible phenomena turn out to be directly related. All tied together in one brilliant invention.

Time as a Resource

It’s easy to forget how much we sacrifice to further science. In order to find the Higgs Boson, we had to build a 17-mile ring of superconducting magnets that costs a billion dollars a year to run. It took all of NASA to put three people on the moon. And these are the success stories. Discoveries don’t translate to inventions for another hundred years. Einstein figured out Relativity in the early 1900’s, it was another fifty years before we had anything that needed to include it in its calculations.

This is an absolutely essential element of The Three Body Problem. The books span centuries. We need to feel the cost of science. How do you do that? You remind the reader how far we’ve come.

For my money, the best part of the Three Body Problem takes place in a strange VR world. Players find themselves on the trisolaran world, attempting to decipher the impossible movement of the celestials bodies over their head. Historical scientists appear in the game and propose various elaborate models to predict the next planetary freezeover, or its next boil. And through the eyes of people like Archimedes and Copernicus, we see how hard it is to get things right. 

You don’t get the right answer on the first go-around, or even on the fifth. The journey involves cataclysmic ailures, we see citizens of the ‘theoretical’ planet frozen, or dragged off the surface by a powerful gravitational pull. And every ‘guess’ costs a hundred years.

Even when the problem is life or death, no single scientific leap solves everything. At one point the book makes use of a one-hundred thousand person computer just to predict the solar system’s next position. And even with an accurate model of the three-sun solar system, the solution is still out of their grasp.

All of this creates a context. Science is not easy, cheap, or fast. It costs the resources of an entire civilization, it takes centuries, and a complete understanding of a problem does not equate to a solution.

So when the book jumps to the Trisolaran planet and shows the reader how technologically advanced they are, it grounds the reader and helps them understand just how insurmountable the opposition is. There is no ‘catch up fast’ button. Victory is almost impossible.

Philosophy and Statesmanship

Science and civics are inextricably tied. To pretend someone can invent ‘the printing press’ without changing the world is naive. But leaders are rarely scientists. A dark cloud permeates this book’s society. Folks are tired of being humans on Earth. Themes of ‘betrayal of species’, ‘giving up on humanity’, and ‘embracing the advent’ all lay on its pages. When humanity doesn’t have an enemy, do we become our own worst enemy?

In HG Wells’ War of the Worlds, there is no domestic threat. It’s just an Alien Attack. And all of humanity are helpless against them. Not here. The biggest threat in The Three Body Problem are the people on Earth. The folks who’ve decided to help an alien species invade. 

One moment stands out to me here. A moment when a random trisolaran communicator receives Earth’s message and decides to warn them. A hero and a villain who betrays their own species out of a respect for all living things. There’s not much room in this book to explore trisolaran society as anything other than a species desperately trying to survive in impossible conditions, but this lone actor gives so much humanity to the alien threat. The angry and desperate drive the war. The angry and the desperate on Earth tear humanity apart.

Things change after the Trisolarans are revealed. It’s funny to say, but once there’s an enemy, humanity rights its own sinking ship. The society of the second book is strangely healthier than the first.

In a funny way, the ‘mystery’ of a broken society is solved in this book. All we needed was an enemy.

Conclusion

The book is about an alien invasion, but at its heart, it’s a mystery. Three mysteries. Two scientific, one social. For those who love the scientific process, there is no greater joy than witnessing a team of experts turn a hundred unknowns into fifty, then two-hundred, then finally explain it all with a single answer. That I think is the great accomplishment of Three-Body Problem. Turning scientific inquiry into a thriller sci-fi.

I’m of the opinion the entire point of the VR section of the book, other than building a picture of the trisolaran world, is to make a promise to reader. A promise that says, ‘through deeper understanding, we will unravel the mystery of the cosmos’.

And at the end of this prelude to a sci-fi epic, the book delivers.

Mystery is the Engine of The Dark Forest

/ Logan Sidwell / 2 Comments

The following is a discussion of Liu Cixin’s novel The Dark Forest. Spoilers abound.

The end of The Three Body Problem novel poses a fundamental issue. If humanity can’t progress technologically, how do they defeat an alien race with a five-hundred year scientific lead that can see everything humans do? At the beginning of The Dark Forest, we get part of an answer. The Trisolarans have a weakness, they can’t lie, and thus have never engaged in the twisted logic of Humanity’s games of deception.

So the whole of The Dark Forest, although often told from different character’s points of view, is effectively told from the point of view of the Trisolarans. We see everything humanity does, but the intent is kept hidden. This is what makes The Dark Forest compelling, it’s not a traditionally fantastical or sociological sci-fi, it’s a mystery novel powered by reader speculation. Tension, twists, turns, all of it exists to mislead and trick the reader before the grand reveal. And not just one reveal, but five or six.

Walls, Facers, and Breakers

The Wallfacers are humanity’s answer to the Trisolaran weakness. Four individuals given wide-ranging authority and instructed to do whatever they’d like, with the intent of defeating the Trisolaran menace. During the novel we see each Wallfacer’s actions. We see how they speak to their troops, what they research, their personal relationships, but nothing inside their head.

Frederick Tyler is the first Wallfacer. His entire plan is basically to pretend to be friends with the Trisolarans, get close to them, then blow them up. The evidence is all in the pages black and white. Research on self-destructing swarms, water on Saturn, connections with human supporters of the Tri-solarans. It’s a 1-dimensional plan, and it teaches the reader how things work. Just as the reader think they might have a clue about Frederick Tyler’s plan, a man shows up out of nowhere and says “Frederick Tyler, I am your Wallbreaker”.

This is the equivalent of Sherlock Holmes gathering everyone in the library and revealing his theory. After Frederick Tyler, each time a wallbreaker appeared, I would close the book and craft in my own head the vision in my head of what the Wallfacer’s scheme involved. And that’s how this book is supposed to be experienced, you should be guessing, because with each wrong guess, you learn the rules a little better, and you get a little closer on the next one.

The second Wallfacer is Ray Diaz. His scheme rocks, and I think the book owed that man more respect than he got. He rises above simple tactics and ‘destroy the enemy’ thinking and instead goes down the path of mutually assured destruction. This reveal doesn’t just close the door on a part of The Wallfacer Project, it helps prime the reader for bigger mysteries down the road.

Our last regular Wallfacer is Bill Hines. This guy goes full old-school sci-fi mind-control. And his plot represents an entirely different camp, the camp that asks the question, “What if humanity can’t win?” The fun part about this guy’s work is that even when he’s discovered, there’s no way of knowing who he got to.

We’ll get to the protagonist soon. First, let’s talk a little more about the plot.

Great and Terrible Battles

In any mystery novel, the resolution of the book always revolves around one of its key mysteries. Despite being about the 400-year buildup to interplanetary war, most of the book takes place in the first one-hundred years. It’s a signal to readers that victory won’t come from scientific progress, it’ll come from unraveling a mystery.

In the back half of the book, a couple centuries down the road, our main character catches up with the future. He’s told the human starships are unbeatable, that victory is inevitable, and most importantly, that the mysteries of the cosmos don’t matter.

This runs in direct opposition to everything we’ve seen in the book so far. Instead of excitement for a great battle, the book leaves a pit in your stomach. A sense of terrible fear you already know the outcome. Either the book was about to break a fundamental rule of mystery writing, or humanity was about to take the biggest L in history.

And they do.

And without an army, without a means to defend itself, the only chance to victory is to solve the mystery.

The Mystery of The Universe

Luo Ji is an astrophysicist, the target of many assassination attempts, and a wallfacer without a plan. We are told again and again that this is the man the Trisolarans are afraid of. They use DNA targeted diseases, assassin viruses, and hacked cars to try to kill the guy. All this because he knows what no on else does. The thing is, as readers we’re allowed into Luo Ji’s mind, and inside it, we discover that this Wallfacer, this leader of humanity’s defense, has no plan at all.

It’s exciting. It’s compelling. Our protagonist only has one clue as to what makes him so formidable. He suspects that somewhere in his research, somewhere in his understanding of the universe, lies a terrible secret, and the answer to Trisolaran defeat. It’s the central mystery of the book, the murderer with the knife, the revelation that beats an unbeatable opponent.

We are only given one real clue. Luo Ji casts a spell on a nearby solar system, and a hundred years later, that solar system is completely annihilated.

The Dark Forest is almost twenty years old, and the downside of age and fame is spoilers. Before I read the book, I had heard “The Dark Forest Theory” explained to me on three separate occasions, so the great mystery of the novel was apparent to me by the one-third mark. I wouldn’t dare peel back the mask here, instead I’ll just say this. The novel follows the rules of mysteries, and by identifying the murderer, so to speak, we see a path to possible victory.

Additional Comments

There’s a lot more to this book than the mysteries, there’s whole stories of intrigue, conspiracy, and multi-century planning. But this is also a book set in war-time, there’s not much room for these characters to grow and change, it’s more about who they already are, and what actions they take. Our protagonist’s starts as something of a nihilist, finally finds happiness, then has it ripped away as a manipulation to force him to perform his role as Wallfacer.

My favorite section of the book is titled The Battle of Darkness. It has almost nothing to do with the overarching mystery, and more to do with the painful sacrifices and cruel realities of space travel during wartime. The best conversation is one that’s had without a single word, soldiers coming to terms with an unavoidable truth.

Most Sci-fi is built around wonder and adventure. Exploring the cosmos, extraordinary technologies, alien species. This book isn’t that. This is hard-science book that asks the reader to come along, to observe the evidence of the story as an impartial observer, and to unwind the mystery a page before the book reveals it.