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*What follows is a rambling, runaway review by a writer excited to have finally found a novel to his taste. Reader discretion is advised.

**The risk of spoilers is low until the “SPOILER ALERT!” below. I do mention a few things, but most appear early in Book One or won’t make sense to anyone who hasn’t read it, so don’t worry. If anything, I hope this post makes more people curious enough to read the book.

***Radiohead - Everything In Its Right Place: The original song used in one of the trailers for The Three-Body Problem. If you’re looking for something to listen to while reading the book or this review, put this on. It doubles the rush.

First encounter

I first learned about The Three-Body Problem from a trailer that played after I finished watching Nameless Gangster on Netflix. I watched it all the way through, but apart from its enormous scale, I couldn’t tell what the story was about. That only made me more curious. The source material was also a Chinese novel, something I’d never read before, and it seemed like a good book to try right after reading Japan’s Snow Country. Besides, it was the first Asian novel to win the Hugo Award, and Obama had mentioned it. I had no reason not to read it. I decided to start with the novel before watching the series.

It was late March, not long after the Netflix original series came out, but the novels already seemed quite popular. The original story has three books. At my local library, Book One had already exceeded the maximum number of reservations; at the digital library, 15 people were waiting for it. When I checked again the next day, that number had grown to 22 (it’s 45 now, lol).

That wasn’t a wait of a few weeks; there was no chance I’d borrow it this season. I gave up early and looked for another way. I considered buying it from Kyobo Book Centre, but the print edition was fairly expensive (15,300 won. Perhaps that isn’t much in a world where we spend about the same on a meal or a movie, but for some reason I’m especially reluctant to pay that much for a book). The e-book wasn’t much cheaper. Then I discovered I could borrow The Three-Body Problem through Kyobo’s e-book subscription service, sam! There was a Premium plan that let you borrow a set number of books each month and an Unlimited plan, which was cheaper. The puzzling pricing made sense once I learned that the two plans had different catalogs. Premium included The Three-Body Problem; Unlimited didn’t. Foolishly, I only realized this after the word “Unlimited” tempted me into subscribing to that plan first, and I found I couldn’t borrow the book.

The Premium plan, which allows two books a month, costs 9,000 won monthly. If I kept reading regularly, it seemed cheap compared with the time and effort of reserving books at a physical library, going to pick them up on time, and returning them. The first month was also on offer for 1,000 won, so I subscribed without nearly as much deliberation as I give other online subscriptions. These days I’m keenly aware that money can buy not just things, but time and energy too.

**Update** I kept getting an error when I tried to borrow Book Two, so I contacted customer service. Apparently The Three-Body Problem had been removed from the catalog in the meantime! Good grief. I’m canceling you right now.

An author soaring into the sky on the twin wings of science and imagination

*Someone’s description of Liu Cixin.

Obama said of The Three-Body Problem that its scope was so immense that his day-to-day problems at the White House seemed petty while he was reading it. Before I read the book, that puzzled me. It was only a book, words on a page—how could it leave such an impression? But it took only a few pages for me to understand. Soon after Wang Miao starts the “Three Body” game, I read about people dehydrating during a Chaotic Era and turning into thin sheets of skin. I was floored. It seemed plausible, yet it was an image I had never seen or even imagined! That was when I fell for the author’s ability to imagine strange, fresh things most people would never think of—and to build a setting where they belonged.

The behavior of the stars in the three-body world is another example. I already knew that the three-body problem has no general solution and that binary star systems are more common in the universe than single-star systems. Even so, I had never imagined a system with just one more star: a triple-star system. Much less what life would be like there under the stars’ complex three-body motion. (The system with the most stars actually observed—or inferred—apparently isn’t a triple system but a seven-star system!)

There were a few parts where the plot felt a little less natural or the science a little less convincing. Flying Blade was deployed in an operation when it was still too immature to mass-produce, for instance. And there was proton unfolding—I wonder whether that’s possible in the first place, but even assuming it is, it seems like a sophon could cause far more destruction than the book describes. Still, these were well within what I could accept as artistic license.

Among the comments on the Netflix original series trailer, someone worried that the novel’s scientific foundations weren’t entirely solid, which would make adapting it for the screen difficult. I’ll have to read more well-known science fiction novels before I can compare how firmly their worlds are constructed.

Thoughts on the novel as a medium

— How it differs from film

Reading this book made me like the novel as an art form even more. Novels resemble films in that their main purpose is to tell a story. But I noticed advantages they have over films. The first is that I can take them in at my own pace. I enjoy films and have watched plenty, but I’ve always thought I wasn’t very good at fully grasping the characters, their relationships, and the flow of the story on a first viewing. Lately I’ve even preferred watching films on my laptop, where I can replay a scene several times (apart from certain films built around grand visual and sound effects).

With a novel, though, I read at my own pace by default. I can read slowly, reread a passage, or take notes as I go. It may take longer to finish, but when I do, I don’t feel as though I’ve missed anything.

The second advantage is the scope for expression that comes from the flexibility of writing as a medium. Admittedly, this may be more of an advantage for the author than the reader; as someone who also likes to write, that’s probably why it caught my attention.

Knowing there was a series based on this novel, I kept imagining what its scenes would look like on screen. It wasn’t easy. The story’s scale is enormous. Turning it into a storyboard, let alone a finished production, would take not just more than one person but more than hundreds. Liu Cixin, however, created the same story alone. In a novel, an author can rely on readers’ imaginations to fill in what he leaves unstated, concentrating on the parts he wants to convey. Understanding a novel is ultimately a collaboration: the reader’s imagination, as vast as the author’s, works alongside it. That is what allows an author’s world in a novel to expand without limit.

Early in Book One, I chuckled to myself at this line: “Wang Miao and Shi Qiang found a suitable spot by the water and sat down.” “Suitable”! A vague word like that won’t do on screen. Everything has to be made concrete. To film this scene, you’d first have to find a quiet riverbank with a rock they could sit on, go there in mild weather at the right time of year, and shoot the actors you’d cast in advance at just the right hour. Writing can dispense with all that work in a single word.

If film is like engineering, requiring all sorts of equipment and measuring instruments, writing is like mathematics, which needs only chalk and a blackboard. The quality of a novel depends entirely on an author’s ability to imagine and express it. That makes writing a novel easy, but writing a good one hard.

— How it resembles film

On the other hand, novels share some of film’s advantages. One reason I enjoy films is that they let me experience, if only indirectly, unfamiliar fields and places. Christopher Nolan is my favorite director not only because his fictional stories feel remarkably plausible, but also because of the fresh settings in which they unfold: Gargantua, the black hole in Interstellar; the beach at Dunkirk in Dunkirk; the freeport and opera house in Tenet; the Paris streets and snowy mountains in Inception. Watching his films feels like traveling.

I felt the same pleasure of encountering and learning something new while reading The Three-Body Problem. Since this was my first Chinese novel, every Chinese place name was new to me, and the historical setting of the Cultural Revolution felt fresh too. To say nothing of the three-body world. That pleasure peaked during Operation Guzheng, simply because terms like draft, freeboard, and Panamax were all new to me. They aren’t particularly difficult concepts, but I’d never even heard of them. Where would I have encountered them if not in this book?

Getting ahead of myself

Having finally found another work of such quality that I could also enjoy, I caught myself worrying: “What if ordinary novels just won’t satisfy me anymore?” I’d already had a similar experience with paintings.

At first, it was purely for external reasons—I tagged along with someone or got a cheap ticket—that I went to a few art exhibitions. Gradually, I realized I rather liked looking at paintings. Since making that discovery in my early twenties, I’ve visited the local art museum whenever time allows while traveling. In the process, I learned which subjects and styles I particularly liked within the broad world of painting, and the standard a painting had to meet for me to feel satisfied kept rising.

Then last year I went to the National Museum of Korea for Masterpieces from the National Gallery, London: The Great Masters’ Gaze on Humanity. I’d only visited the National Gallery in London when I was far too young to appreciate paintings, and I’d always regretted that. Oil portraits, in particular, are my favorite kind of painting, so I had high hopes for the exhibition. Tickets for the day had already sold out when I first went, but I returned the next day and managed to get in.

Once I’d seen it, though, I was left disappointed. There were dozens of paintings, including works by famous artists such as Rembrandt, but none moved me much. I doubt there was anything wrong with the exhibition. My standards had simply risen. It felt like confirmation of a vague fear: ordinary paintings no longer moved me, and even among the works of famous artists, only a select few worth traveling far to see would satisfy me. I know how arrogant that sounds. But that’s how I felt.

Reading The Three-Body Problem brought back a similar worry. After a little thought, though, I realized novels are in a much better position than paintings. A painting seen on a screen or in print can’t convey the impact of the original at all; you have to go see it. A copy of a novel, by contrast, can move you just as much as the original. There is a new barrier to cross if the original is in another language: translation. But for novels, if not necessarily poetry, that barrier seems much lower than the barrier between a painting and its reproduction. Access to the original is therefore a minor concern. The real bottleneck will be my willingness to find good books and keep reading them. So rather than getting ahead of myself with that worry, I’ve decided to worry first about dying without ever starting most of the great novels out there because I was too lazy.

Now, on to Book Two!

SPOILER ALERT!

What follows may spoil the book for anyone who hasn’t read it yet.

This doesn’t fit the flow of the review above, but I wanted to leave it here somehow. As someone who loves space, I already knew about many real things that appear in the novel, including SETI, the Arecibo Observatory and the Arecibo message, and the Kardashev scale. That made the book especially fun to read. I particularly remember SETI and the Arecibo message being featured in Science Boy, a science magazine my family subscribed to when I was little.

It made such an impression on me that I even signed up to help the SETI project. I still have the email from back then:

Looking at it now, I see that the organization behind Korea@Home and its VLBI_SETI project was the Supercomputing Center at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI). It’s right on my school’s campus—the place I walk past all the time and where I once had a chance to access one of its computers through a support program! What a small world.

Notes taken while reading

Present-day China

• Wang Miao
• Shi Qiang: police captain
• Xu Bingbing: policewoman and computer expert working in intelligence
• Chang Weisi: military general
• Stanton: U.S. Navy officer and special operations expert
• Yang Dong: physicist who proposed an experimental model of superstring theory
• Ding Yi: theoretical physicist who became famous for discovering macro-atoms while researching ball lightning; Yang Dong’s boyfriend
• Shen Yufei: host of the Frontiers of Science
• Wei Cheng: Shen Yufei’s husband
• Pan Han: biologist who predicted genetic abnormalities and ecological disasters. Advocates building a “New Agricultural Society” based on “Chinese Pastoral” and “Gentle Technology”
• Ye Wenjie: Yang Dong’s mother. Former astrophysicist
• Sha Ruishan: Ye Wenjie’s student. Works at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ National Astronomical Observatories radio astronomy station near Beijing
• Lin Yun: made major contributions to ball lightning research and the discovery of macro-atoms. Introduced by Ding Yi

Relationships

• Ye Zhetai—married to—Shao Lin—mother of—Ye Wenjie—mother of—Yang Dong—in a relationship with—Ding Yi
• Ye Wenjie—sister of—Ye Wenxue
• Ye Zhetai—graduate adviser to—Yang Weining
• Ye Wenjie—married to—Yang Weining
• Shen Yufei—married to—Wei Cheng

Three Body: in-game

• Wang Miao: Hai Ren → Copernicus (Civilization No. 183 onward)

Civilizations

• Civilization No. 137: King Wen of Zhou (Ji Chang; tries to predict events using the 64 hexagrams), King Wen’s followers, King Zhou, Fuxi. Destroyed by extreme cold. Advanced to the Warring States stage.
• Civilization No. 141: Confucius (tries to predict events through li, or ritual propriety), Mozi (tries using a copper sphere with a shell). Destroyed by fire. Advanced to the Eastern Han stage.
• Civilization No. 183: Pope Gregory, Galileo, Aristotle. Destroyed when three suns rose. Advanced to the medieval stage. Copernicus succeeds in identifying the universe’s basic structure, moving the game into its second stage.
• Civilization No. 184: Tries to calculate using a computer. Qin Shi Huang, Newton, Leibniz, von Neumann, Kepler, Herschel. Destroyed by the gravitational pull of “three suns in a straight line.” Advanced through the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions.
• Civilization No. 191: During “flying stars do not move,” tidal forces on the planet exceed the Roche limit and split it in two; 90 million years pass before the next civilization appears.
• Civilization No. 192: A huge moon. Einstein, UN General Assembly. Proves the three-body problem cannot be solved and discovers the stars’ “breathing.” New goal: fly into space and find a new home. Destroyed 451 years later in the flames of two suns rising in the sky. Advanced to the atomic and information ages.
• Civilization No. ?: A Trisolaran fleet capable of reaching one-tenth the speed of light

Terms

• Dehydratory: a large warehouse for storing dehydrated people

Three Body members’ meeting (7 attendees)

• Pan Han: meeting organizer
• Wang Miao
• A white-haired, youthful-looking old man known for giving Eastern philosophy modern scientific meaning
• A female novelist in strange clothes whose work is avant-garde
• Reporter for a major media outlet (young)
• Science faculty doctoral student (young)
• Vice president of the country’s largest software company (middle-aged)*
• Senior executive at the national power company (middle-aged)*

*Opposed intervention and were expelled by Pan Han because their views didn’t fit the meeting’s direction

Earth-Trisolaris Organization meeting

• Ye Wenjie: commander-in-chief
• Adventists: Evans, Pan Han (eliminated over the Adventist issue). Omission of received messages; mass transmission of information not reviewed by the organization
• Redemptionists
• Survivors

China in 1967

• Ye Wenjie
• Ye Wenxue: Ye Wenjie’s younger sister
• Cheng Lihua: female cadre; military representative on the intermediate court’s military control commission
• Lei Zhicheng: political commissar at Red Coast Base
• Yang Weining: Ye Zhetai’s graduate student; chief engineer at Red Coast Base
• Bai Mulin: reporter for the Production and Construction Corps newspaper Daxing’anling Daily
• Ma Gang: young member of the Corps who spoke with Bai Mulin

Timeline from 1967 onward

• Autumn 1971: Earth’s first transmission of stellar-scale energy by a Type II civilization.
• 1978: Reply received from the Trisolaran world. Ye Wenjie kills Lei Zhicheng and Yang Weining.
• (2 years later) The Cultural Revolution ends; Ye Wenjie and her father are rehabilitated. She leaves Red Coast Base and returns to her alma mater.
• (0.5 years later) Ye Wenjie takes charge of designing a large radio astronomy station and meets Evans while selecting a site.
• (3 years later) Ye Wenjie tells Evans about Red Coast and the Trisolaran world.
• (3 years later)

Qijiatun in 1979: a small village deep in the Greater Khingan Mountains

An elderly hunter and his wife. They have two sons and two daughters. Both daughters have married and moved away; one son serves in the military elsewhere, while the other lives with them. Their daughter-in-law, Dafeng, is from Northeast China.

The Trisolaran world

People

• Marshal
• Listener at Listening Post No. 1379
• Head of listening operations
• Emergency meeting of the Trisolaran world’s consuls
  • Science consul
  • Military consul
  • Agriculture consul
  • Industry consul
  • Culture and education consul

Earth’s technological level is advancing at a frightening rate. The following plans are set in motion to eradicate its civilization:

• Staining: exploit the side effects of science and technology to make the public fear and loathe science.
• Miracles: show humans supernatural powers.

These can hinder progress but not stop it. Another plan aims to suffocate it completely and keep Earth at its present level:

The Sophon Project

Turning a proton into a superintelligent computer.

• Infiltrate high-energy accelerators on Earth and take the place of target particles in collisions, producing incorrect or confusing results.
• In a high-energy state, imprint letters, numbers, or shapes on human retinas as though exposing photographic film.

Resources

• https://www.qsl.net/bg3tt/zl/mesdm.htm
• https://www.threebody.com