With word that Denis Villeneuve is working on a new Dune movie, I thought I’d revisit Frank Herbert’s 1965 book. I’ve read all six of the sequels as well, and read enough about the Brian Herbert/Kevin J. Anderson-authored postmortem books not to read them. For this post however, I’ll try to stick to the original.
The first-edition cover, with a “dark desert” motif
Like many other SF authors, most of Cixin Liu’s characters are props for the reader to explore the setting and ideas. This isn’t helped by the characters’ Chinese names; I agree with spandrell that Chinese names just don’t trigger the proper associations for Westerners. However, Liu can produce more developed characters when necessary — for instance; he does make Ye Wenjie’s story powerful. He also manages, intriguingly, to bring to life the commissar Zhang Beihai. In many ways Zhang is a familiar type – the competent leader whom others look to in difficult situations, but…he’s a Communist political officer. Liu portrays Zhang’s devotion to “ideological work” and that work’s necessity and efficacy in a straightforward, positive manner. I find the explanation that Liu did this to atone for the sin of his brutally frank portrayal of the Cultural Revolution in The Three Body Problem tempting but inadequate. Ultimately Zhang’s job is only a mild cultural variant of the role of the priest or diversity officer.
Another notable character is Luo Ji. Luo Ji is one of five “wallfacers”, individuals granted total unquestioned authority by the United Nations, standing in for “humanity’s collective will” in typical Clarkean fashion, to do whatever it takes to forestall the Trisolaran invasion. The UN intends this tactic to counter the sophons, whose pervasive surveillance presumably doesn’t include mind-reading, at least in any useful sense. The UN selects five Wallfacers, all famous and powerful (and non-Chinese) individuals — except for Luo Ji, a burned-out grad student.
Luo Ji has no friends and, while not exactly unlucky with women, not much in the way of social or career prospects, and Liu clearly wants the reader to think he’s basically a loser. Then, as the Fifth Wallfacer, he’s handed unlimited authority and responsibility, at random. Luo Ji of course ends up being the hero, the Man Who Saves Humanity (by coming up with an effective deterrent scheme). The whole arc comes dangerously close to rehashing a particularly obnoxious trope — one pervasive in although by no means exclusive to East Asian pulp literature and comics — of the total loser who accidentally gets Power without effort and then Wins Everything, again without much effort. In raw form, this archetype is a blank reader surrogate, and Liu shows his chops by giving Luo Ji enough of a personality to be his own man, in narrative terms. He also makes the difficulties Luo faces after eating his figurative million-year mushroom rough enough to account for some real character growth, and to avoid being a straight power fantasy.
Luo Ji in Death’s End – from gramunion
Cheng Xin, whom we meet in Death’s End, is a feminine counterpart to Luo Ji who fails to maintain the human deterrent out of sheer lack of will. Both her failure and the election that determined her position as Luo’s replacement are pretty easy to read as criticisms of Western society and ideals. Chinese SF fans I’ve spoken to claim that Cheng is almost universally considered a villain in Chinese fandom. Rather than changing her ways, the story bends to fit Cheng Xin’s sensibilities, granting her first the chance to escape catastrophe through deus ex machina and at the very end by giving her a chance for sacrificial cooperation.
The latter two books of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy had more to do with each other than with the Three Body Problem, other than sharing a setting. If you liked Three Body Problem, these books will if anything be better.
The “dark forest problem” (introduced in the titular volume) states that any extraterrestrial intelligence possessing the means to do so will destroy any detected civilization with overwhelming force in order to minimize threats to itself. The analogy is to a dark forest where any light or movement is set upon by predators. This makes concealing the location, indeed the existence, of one’s own civilization a critical matter of survival (and also makes SETI-type active searches for life suicidally foolish). I don’t think this necessarily describes the universe we live in, but the series takes it for granted. The resulting war of all-against-all is revealed in Death’s End to be literally destroying the universe.
(That this war is conducted by progressively lowering the dimensionality of volumes of space via a process analogous to “false vacuum collapse” was a great touch, although I found Liu’s description of hyperdimensional spaces to be questionable – I don’t see how a human body could possibly function in such an environment.)
Death’s End pursues the Dark Forest scenario to its logical conclusion. Spacefarers obsess over hiding their presence and positions, and both offensive and defensive warfare measures materially alter the universe in negative ways. Everyone lives under constant threat of total annihilation without warning. As characters grow to understand the implications of the Dark Forest, they become increasingly fatalistic — sure, they might be able to make decent lives for themselves, but there is no prospect of a grand future in the universe. Ultimately we face annihilation, and the inevitable can only be delayed. The series emphasizes this by making sure not to have everything work out for the characters. Luo Ji does find a wife and makes a nice family life for himself for a while, but eventually she leaves with their child. Likewise, the characters Cheng Xin and Yun Tianming overcome incredible odds to find each other — only to be sundered at almost the last possible moment without even seeing each other. They each must content themselves with an alternative mate.
At the end though, Liu shies away from full nihilism. The Trisolarans, who had previously behaved in an extraordinarily callous if not completely hostile manner towards humans, provide a character with a self-sufficient pocket universe to live in to avoid an otherwise hopeless situation. When the “real” universe finally ends, Cheng Xin — who previously had provoked a devastating Trisolaran attack by being too mushy-headed to maintain Luo Ji’s deterrent system — volunteers to cooperate in a rather contrived prisoner’s dilemma by contributing the pocket universe’s negative entropy back into restarting the universe at the cost of her own life.
I appreciate that Liu kept some ambiguity in the “message” of Death’s End. Whether Cheng Xin’s ruthfulness was justifiable is left an open question (although I personally think she not only did more harm than good but that she could easily done the right thing in both circumstances: triggered the deterrent system and cooperated in the final dilemma). The trilogy overall deserves its widespread acclaim and popularity, and I’d recommend it for both new and veteran readers.
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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.
I recently finished Death’s End, the third book of the “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” trilogy that starts with The Three Body Problem. The trilogy, written by Chinese author Cixin Liu, enjoyed substantial mainstream popularity (my copy of Death’s End had a blurb by none other than Barack Obama on the cover). Is the hype justified? Yes, it’s good, and most of the grumbling is sheer contrarianism. Don’t worry, anyone “respectable” writing science fiction will continue calling their books something else.
Liu’s style strongly resembles – if it was not directly influenced by – that of Arthur C. Clarke. The glorification of technocracy and technologists, lackluster character development, a strong United Nations, atheism, and a complete unconcern for politics or economics beyond the superficial. Even the striking passages on the Cultural Revolution (which affected Liu’s family when he was a young boy) in The Three Body Problem remind me of Clarke’s surprisingly vivid writing on Sri Lankan history in The Fountains of Paradise. That being said, Liu is no imitator. Several characters in the trilogy resort, righteously and effectively, to violence. Also, one of the central concepts of the trilogy – the “Dark Forest Problem” – is distinctly un-Clarkean. I must mention a standout feature: Yun Tianming’s fables and the circumstances around them. These resemble more the subtle grandness of Gene Wolfe than anything Clarke ever wrote. Liu even adds the flourish of having a minor character remark later on the high quality of Yun’s fables.
Regarding the translation: I recall several instances in The Three Body Problem where the translator seemed to have simply picked the wrong synonym resulting in some awkward phrasing, although I can no longer be specific. Neither of the last two books had this problem.
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