Imagine you take a cue ball and hit the 8-ball into a pocket of that same pool table from three inches away — not that hard. Now imagine that same cue ball and that same 8-ball on the same pool table, still three inches away from the pocket. Think you can do it again? Not in Liu Cixin’s “The Three-Body Problem.”
It tackles questions about the fragility and harshness of life on Earth and then contrasts that with an alien world where the sun does not rise daily. It compares our struggle as a species with the struggles of a species where all of the odds are stacked against them. It tells the story of two races that are both trying to survive in their separate environments and become masters of their own world.
The story’s dedication to hard science makes the story not only believable but plausible. It spins a narrative of human failure and illustrates how small actions can have impactful effects on the whole human species as it follows the most terrifying character in literature: Ye Wenjie.
Ye Wenjie watches as her family is torn apart by the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Her mother suffers a mental breakdown; her father is killed by revolutionaries. She is sent to a work camp deep in the Greater Khingan Mountain Range and is recruited into a top-secret military project known as Red Coast. Disguised as a satellite defense system, its true purpose is to establish contact with extra-planetary civilizations. And after many years of work — Ye succeeds.
The first message from an extraterrestrial organism reads: Do Not Answer! Do Not Answer!! Do Not Answer!!! But Ye, after witnessing the horrors of humanity, decides to get ultimate revenge on the whole human race.
“The fate of the entire human race was now tied to these slender fingers. Without hesitation, Ye pressed the button.”
“The Three Body Problem” illustrates how Ye’s actions on that fateful autumn night in 1971 affected every human in the world and managed to capture the beauty of both human and alien societies as they brace for their final confrontation. It is the story of a struggle overarching thousands of years of technological and social evolution of two sapient organisms. It is a story of the human spirit and ingenuity — even in the face of unwinnable circumstances. It is the story of a beautiful and terrible life.
