The Three Body Problem

The hype is real; I recommend this for anyone.

The Three Body Problem spends much less time on philosophizing than the latter two books.  I found the “sophons” – extradimensional computers compressed into tiny three-dimensional space – to be somewhat silly, if only because of their rather arbitrary limitations.  The Cultural Revolution subplot/history worked well, as an informational for this relatively clueless laowei certainly but mostly because of the resulting payoff: after years of brutal victimization told over scores of pages, the character Ye Wenjie deliberately sells out humanity to the hostile, alien Trisolarans.

But my favorite aspect of The Three Body Problem was something else entirely: the use of immersive media for subversion and indoctrination.  You see, the Trisolarans want to settle Earth because their own home planet “orbits” a trinary star system.  Said “orbit” consists of chaotic movement among the three chaotically-interacting stars, resulting in unpredictable periods of burning or freezing desolation on their planet’s surface in between equally unpredictable “stable eras” of habitability and progress.  (By the way, this probably reflects a dramatized Chinese view of their own history as a cycle of the rise and fall of ruling dynasties.)  Human collaborators create a fully-immersive virtual reality “game” where the player (which includes several of the novel’s characters) learns about how terrible this situation is before eventually reaching the conclusion that the only fix is to leave (to Earth).  The game replaces alien culture and physiology with human wherever possible in order to increase the player’s identification with the Trisolarans (of whom the reader never receives an objective description, physically or socially).  The collaborators then select new members from among those who successfully “win” the game by determining the nature of the titular “Three Body Problem” and that they can only solve it through interstellar settlement.