The Three Body Problem and John C. Wright’s Count to a Trillion are both about humanity confronting imminent invasion by highly advanced aliens. However, Liu is an Atheist Chinese and Wright is a Christian American, so things don’t go quite the same way in the two stories.
I will point out one significant technical difference. The Trisolarans in 3BP will arrive from Alpha Centauri in 400 years, while the much more massive Hyades Armada spends a leisurely 10,000 years en route to Earth. Eschaton’s characters acknowledge that maintaining a single continuing civilization on this time scale is preposterous, something that 3BP’s characters don’t (think they) need to worry about.
Wright’s characters are much more proactive in attempting to control their destinies than Liu’s. Fatalism, not to say nihilism, dominates the worldview of the characters in Liu’s series. Ye Wenjie and the ETO betray humanity because she wants to see the world burn; Del Azarchel and the Hermeticists do it because they want power. Both Azarchel and Montrose refuse to give up their attempts to assert their will against the powers of the heavens.
And they succeed. This is a difference in style, but it’s not just that. Liu’s authorial refusal to reunite Yun Tianming and Cheng Xin in Death’s End is a statement that humans can expect nothing from the universe. Wright’s characters, especially the protagonist Montrose, get lucky again and again, and Wright is only a bit coy about why this may be. Montrose doesn’t arrive at the end of time to find that his wife hasn’t made it. This is authorial intent as an analogue of Divine Providence. Of course, an author is a Creator in miniature — he possesses an intellect and a purpose, and can only simulate a purposeless universe in his works. Liu can’t do more than play pretend at being the Void — whatever ill treatment his characters suffer results from conscious will, whatever point is being made. God Himself has authored tragedies, although not of course in order to demonstrate that He doesn’t exist, which would be quite the contradiction.
Wright’s view of space as the Final Frontier is completely different from Liu’s Dark Forest. In the Eschaton books there are powers among the stars, but they’re not all bad, and they don’t preclude a patient and determined hero with Providence on his side from conquest. In the pagan Dark Forest, of course, the most an upstart race can hope for is to keep their heads down long enough to live a decent life for a while before the unseen powers beyond inevitably stamp them out or they retreat into a high-walled garden.
The cyclic universe depicted in Death’s End reflects the cyclic nature of the Trisolaran civilization, in turn inspired by the history of dynastic rule in China. Both series acknowledge that “progress” is not monotonic, but there is no reset button at the end of the universe in Count to Infinity, as in Death’s End. That makes some sense, as there is no “better place” outside the universe in Liu’s atheist cosmology; an ultimately meaningless sentiment and the prospect of a few remaining megajoules of usable energy starting a new universe are all he can offer, and even that is a turning-away from the logical endpoint of existence simply petering out.
You had one job, and it didn’t involve your goldfish. (link)
Both authors seem to agree on the limits of superior intellect and technology — that they can’t change the fundamental problems of existence. Despite its less intellectualizing tone, Eschaton portrays the cooperate/defect decisions facing higher-order entities much better than Liu does. No, Earth doesn’t threaten the Hyades Principality, that’s silly, there’s better use to be made of Earthlings than “kill them all”, and civilizations that trash their corner of existence get outcompeted by those that don’t.
Both stories are about coming to terms with man not being alone in the universe, or particularly high in the galactic pecking order. The differences between the story are not merely the result of style but of the author’s philosophy and worldview. Is one view better? I’ll let…you decide…
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