The Three-Body Problem

The Three-Body Problem, written by Cixin Liu, is a hard science fiction novel that shines when it’s subverting its genre and developing its main themes. It can fascinate the reader with its creative world but also disappoint with its underdeveloped characters and anticlimactic ending.

The protagonist is the Chinese scientist Wang Miao, whose research in nanotechnology is put in check when a mysterious group of individuals threatens him in what appears to be a supernatural way: Miao begins to see a countdown floating in his field of vision, regardless of where he looks at. The quest for answers eventually leads the scientist to a virtual-reality videogame called “Three Body,” where he needs to solve a seemingly impossible problem to be able to figure out what’s going on in his own world.

The scenes that take place inside the videogame are very imaginative in their visual construction, resulting in imagery that borders the surreal. In the Three Bodies’ universe, individuals are being constantly dehydrated and rehydrated to survive the natural adversities caused by the sun: sometimes burning everyone because it’s too close, sometimes making everyone freeze to death because it’s absent for years, the star challenges the greatest academics to find a pattern in its movement. The goal of the game is to create a calendar that can predict when that world will enter a stable era (when the sun behaves as expected) and when it will enter a chaotic one (when the sun goes rogue and stops acting according to any discernable logic).

Because the book is “hard” science fiction, these sequences in virtual-reality become a clash between surrealism and science: in the midst of all the extensive and thorough technical ponderings on the movements of stars and the conception of technologies are situations that don’t just border on the absurd, but revel in it. At one point, Isaac Newton and Leibniz emerge dueling with swords in front of a Gothic pyramid to decide who invented calculus, while in another, millions of soldiers in formation communicate by colored flags to solve mathematical equations as if they were the parts of a computer. This contrast is further expanded at the end of the book, in which increasingly fantastic situations (a three-dimensional opened proton is removed from a planet’s orbit after it attempted to destroy it) are explained in increasingly difficult terms.

But the narrative never stops working since it moves the plot precisely through these technical explanations – which otherwise would be unbearable due to their frequency and size. Since the story’s greatest mysteries are connected to how some technologies operate, the more they are explained, the more the mysteries are unraveled.

But this mixture of science and madness works so well in The Three-Body Problem only because it reflects the drama that the scientists of the story are facing. When Miau starts to see the countdown, for example, he struggles to come up with a plausible reason for the event, thinking he must be going mad. Some physicists around the world are giving up and committing suicide after doubting the validity of their field of study. There is, therefore, a battle between science and madness, and the former is constantly losing.

Nevertheless, there are still some political and social discussions in the narrative, constructing an additional conflict between science and politics. The book begins with the death of a professor of physics during the Chinese Cultural Revolution: revolutionaries are portrayed as a group of enthusiastic but violent and foolish young people – mainly due to their tendency to overuse terms such as “reactionary” (the one considered more intelligent among them, for instance, argues that the theory of relativity is reactionary and a symbol of capitalism) – while the military that represses them is deemed unnecessarily brutal, even vandalizing the body of a girl who was just fifteen years old. The Cultural Revolution is often criticized in the narrative, even being categorized as “evil” during a certain scene. In other words, Liu’s attacks on it are quite blunt.

Moreover, in the story progress is often jeopardized due to completely crazy ideological problems. At one point, for example, a scientist is prevented from conducting an experiment that involves pointing an antenna at the sun because the action allows for dangerous symbolic interpretations, as the political leader in China is named after the star.

The character that connects most of these elements and carries all the dramatic force of the story is not the protagonist, but a scientist named Ye Wenjie. The injustices and tragedies of the Chinese Revolution make Wenjie resent the existence of humanity. She is a nihilist woman, unable to see a positive future for humanity, which she considers to be evolving only in its stupidity and self-destructiveness. The narrative reveals her immense sensitivity – a small sample of kindness is enough to make her question momentarily her ideals –, which makes the character even more tragic, indicating that her terrible actions could have been avoided had she lived in a less cruel environment.

The narrative, however, falters when it comes to the typical Dan Brown tropes it employs: it contains a worldwide conspiracy, discussions about the existence of aliens, and it even problematizes the possible discoveries of particle accelerators – although the narrative’s stance on this technology gradually turns out to be entirely positive, considering it integral to the technological advancement of mankind.

Liu, however, copies the worst in Dan Brown, especially with a protagonist that couldn’t be more flat and bland. Wang Miao has no personality, being so passive in the face of the events that he comes out more as a narrative device than a proper individual: his love of taking pictures, for example, is promptly discarded after its narrative function is fulfilled. It’s no wonder that Wenjie ends up being the character that stands out the most. After all,  she is the only person in the book with a narrative arc and an active personality, being able to create events instead of just reacting to them. It’s a shame, therefore, that for most of the time we follow Wang’s perspective and not hers.

Finally, the plot surrounding the worldwide conspiracy ends in an anticlimactic way: the book is the first in a trilogy, and its climax functions more as a turning point – the end of the first act – than anything else, leaving almost every thread open.

The Three-Body Problem is a novel that works great when subverting its genre, mixing complex explanations of technology with events of fantastic nature. It fails, however, when it decides to focus on an uninteresting protagonist and conclude on a disappointing note.

June 20, 2019

Review originally published in Portuguese on August 08, 2016.