Book review: The Three-Body Problem

The Three-Body Problem (2006), by Cixin Liu, was required reading for me.

If it hadn't been for this fact, I may well have stopped reading it after the first chapter or two.  I wasn't impressed by the beginning, but since Teacher Mama required it, along with a suitably detailed book review analysis, I had to keep reading.

Mama had read it in the original Chinese, while I read Ken Liu's English translation, which was published in 2014.

For those who don't know, The Three-Body Problem is a science fiction novel set mostly in China and written from a Chinese perspective.  That's pretty special; most science fiction is US (or occasionally British) based.  And that matters, because science fiction is not merely about neutral, objective, geeky sciency stuff.  At heart, science fiction is, almost always, an investigation into, and an opinionated commentary on, societies and morality.  Even the more hard-science style of science fiction shows us the author's (admittedly sometimes un-thought-through) views on life and What Is Most Important.  In this sense, The Three-Body Problem gives us an interesting and thought-provoking Chinese eye view of people and society.

And it is a depressing and pessimistic view.  But more on that later.

Starting at the beginning, why was I not impressed with the first couple of chapters?

Partly it was because I felt that it was poorly written.  The first chapter, especially, was over-filled with amateurish, badly thought-through similes.  It was extremely off-putting, like a picture frame hung crookedly.  Or like a piece of food stuck in one’s teeth.

When I said this to Mama, she was very surprised, as she thought that the Chinese version was eloquently written.  Doubts were subsequently raised as to my authority and competence as an English language critic.

So, to get another opinion, we employed Mulan to read the first chapter.  Unprompted, she said much the same as me.  In fact, she laughed at the inappropriate similes, thinking them very silly.

Admittedly, this is not conclusive evidence.  Mulan's English sense, after all, has been significantly influenced by me.  But until we can convince anyone else to take a look at the book, we'll stick with this judgment.  Our best guess, then, is that it is a bad translation.  Perhaps Ken Liu tried to translate too much word for word, and what works in Chinese doesn't work in English.  Further into the book this became less of a problem, as the silly similes faded away.  The writing became more direct in style, and smoother to read.

The other part of why I was not impressed with the first couple of chapters turns out to be more difficult to explain.  In a couple of words, I could say "casual violence," but it is more complicated than that.  As I read further into the book I realised that what bothered me was linked to the key underlying social commentary given by the author.  The author was expressing a worldview, and encouraging the reader to believe in it, while I was fundamentally opposed to it.

I'll try to explain.  A bit of plot exposition may help.

The Three-Body Problem starts in 1967, during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and continues into the present.  In Chapter 1 we open with some particularly nasty scenes of violence.  That's understandable.  It is a historical fact that the Chinese Cultural Revolution was a horrifically violent and nasty time.

But there are different ways of telling a story of this violence.  One way might be to create an empathetic feel with the victims, showing the struggles and hurts from their perspective, as real human beings who deserve, but failed to receive, care and respect.  Part of this more sensitive approach might be also to try to understand how society and individuals could have become so broken that the perpetrators lost the ability to feel for others as they enacted those atrocities.

Liu doesn't do any of this.  His writing reminded me, instead, of Iain M. Banks' book, Consider Phlebas, which I reviewed earlier this year.  Liu, like Banks, seems to focus on writing imaginative violence as graphically as possible.  And while I can't know what was going on inside these writers' heads, with both of them their writing gave me the feel of them enjoying putting together those flowing descriptions of violence.  The violence was not written as a tragedy; it was written as a fun exercise in language creation.

It was that offensive heartlessness in the opening chapters of The Three-Body Problem that made me feel it wasn't worth reading.  I am not interested in reading violence porn.  Moreover, novels are subtle influencers of readers' moral attitudes, and I am opposed to novels that work to deaden the hearts of their readers.

But as I continued reading, I think I began to understand the book better, while still fundamentally disagreeing with the values and attitudes it expressed.

A bit more plot exposition.

From Chapter 1, we follow a university graduate student in 1967, Ye Wenjie, who has just seen her father, a university professor, killed by a revolutionary mob.  Ye is soon sent to the countryside, where she is forced to work cutting down trees.  Based on her background as a student in astrophysics, Ye is next forcefully transferred to a radar base, where she works her way up into a position of trust and authority.

This radar base turns out to be more than meets the eye, and while working there Ye develops a way of sending a super-strong message across the galaxy.  Thinking the experiment a failure, nothing further happens for another several years, until Ye, still working at the base, receives a message in reply from an alien civilisation.

Conveniently, Ye uses the base's deciphering software to instantly translate the alien message.  The message is a warning, advising Earth not to reply further.  If Earth replies then a warlike alien race, the Trisolarans, will be able to locate Earth and invade.

Ye chooses to reply, sending the message "Come here!  I will help you conquer this world.  Our civilisation is no longer capable of solving its own problems.  We need your force to intervene."  (Chapter 23)

This quite clearly opens up key social and moral questions.  Ye is a product of a broken social environment.  She interprets this brokenness as the universal human condition, and thinks outside, non-human, intervention is the only solution.  (This is not a new idea; Christianity, with its idea of Original Sin, and Jesus as the Way, has the same thought.)

It seems to me that a scaled-down version of this thought is common in today's Chinese thinking.  I think a common Chinese thought is that life is necessarily tough, and we must be tough to survive.  This is presented as a cynical realism, and those who doubt it are seen as idealistic, naive, and not in touch with reality.  I've commented on this before, and as I've said before, I think this common Chinese thought is largely self-fulfilling -- since most Chinese people believe it, they act to make it true for themselves.  In reality, they don't have to be like that, but sadly they don't realise they don't have to be like that.

I felt that in this book Liu was writing from this perspective, and his heroic characters embodied this cynicism, and often with a certain arrogance.  Liu's heroic characters were typically scientists, engineers or police/military personnel.  They were knowledgeable and authoritative in their fields, and Liu (himself an ex power-plant engineer) was competent at explaining the technical scientific stuff.  But the problem was that the characters (and perhaps Liu, himself) thought that they could transfer this knowledge in the hard sciences across to the social sciences, and it didn't work.  The characters (and Liu's) pronouncements on social matters came across as naive and ignorant, but as they gave this with the same sense of authority as when they explained scientific matters they also came across as unpleasantly arrogant.

Alongside Ye Wenjie, from Chapter 4 we also follow another scientist, Wang Miao, in the present.  Wang represents the reader -- the typical educated, modern, upper-middle-class Chinese man with a science/engineering background.  Wang has a wife (who is a doctor) and a son (six years old), and while he uses them to help him in his research, he never thinks to genuinely interact with them as people.  Wang is dragged into a mystery, which seemingly challenges his normal understanding of science and scientific laws.

One part of this mystery is that physicists have been committing suicide.  Their suicide notes all claim that the evidence shows that "physics does not exist" and they had no choice.  Wow, strong stuff!

Wang learns that experiments around the world using high-energy particle accelerators have been coming back with inconsistent results.  When particles are collided, seemingly identical conditions yield different results.

Unfortunately, this is where The Three-Body Problem became like a silly horror story.  I hate horror stories.  They are unbearably frustrating because they turn everything into a big panic, whether or not panic is warranted.  Everyone runs around like headless chickens for no good reason.

Liu made his physicists run around like silly headless chooks.  The results of these experiments as described don't lead us to conclude that physics does not exist.  And they certainly ought not push anyone to suicide.

Liu's physicist characters, if they were reasonable, could have come to at least two other more plausible interpretations: (a) Universal physical laws still hold at a deeper level, but there is some other variable that is causing the inconsistent results (spoiler alert: this is what it was -- aliens!), or (b) physical laws still hold to some extent, but there are limitations and randomness, too.  A possible next step research project might have been to perform more nuanced experiments to see if they can detect any patterns in the particle-collision results.

Continuing on in the story, Wang is introduced to a virtual reality online computer game, called Three Body, which takes him into a mysterious world in which there are seemingly random periods of extremes of heat or cold.  Wang and the other game participants have to try to figure out how to predict these Chaotic Eras, so that game civilisation doesn't die out every time a chaotic period happens.

Given the title of the book and this computer game, it should come as no surprise that it turns out that this game world circles three suns, and is consequently sometimes closer and sometimes further away from the suns.

Unsurprisingly, too, it turns out that the invading aliens, the Trisolarans, come from such a planet.  They have given up on trying to accurately calculate the movement of their planet, and with their superior technology launch an invading force towards Earth.

The small number of humans who are aware of this situation form various political factions, with some wanting the aliens to come and conquer Earth (either to destroy or improve Earth) while others want to fight the aliens.  The  leaders of these factions seem pretty broken and crazy.  They don't do reasonable discussions; they just do pseudo-rationalistic justifications of extremism.

Lots of Earthly conflict and violence ensues between these various factions while waiting for the alien arrival, and we and Wang steadily learn the details of the situation.

The Three-Body Problem is the first in a trilogy of books, followed by The Dark Forest and Death's End.  Given the graphic violence, and the universally unpleasant, irrational, arrogant characters, I don't feel inclined to read the other two books.  For me, the book's main redeeming feature is that it is an interesting study into Chinese thinking about society.  But other than that I see it as mostly empty, sensationalist violence porn.