Three Body Problem Review
Science fiction is blossoming in China in book, cartoon, video game, movie and TV series forms, and available in English translation. Inspired by the commercial success of the Chinese movie The Wandering Earth, The Three Body Problem was introduced on Chinese television in January 2023. The thity-part series by writer Liu Cixin was followed by an Americanized version on Netflix in April 2024.
Both American and Chinese versions deal with the first book of the three-book trilogy called Remembrance of Earth’s Past. The storyline begins in the Cultural Revolution when a young woman becomes an astrophysicist. She is in a secret project to send messages to the stars.
She receives a warning from a pacifist Do Not Answer from a three-star system four hundred light years away. Communicating through giant radio telescopes gives way to mysterious reality video game headsets that are not made from any material on Earth. We learn that the three-sun system is environmentally degraded and the Trisolarians have launched a fleet to settle on Earth but it will take four hundred years to arrive. We learn that through quantum physics and quantum entanglement the Trisolarians are able to monitor physics on the Earth to prevent the Earth from developing weapons that would oppose them.
Like the American science fiction writers Isaac Asimov in Foundation and Orson Scott Card Ender in his Game series, Liu Cixin explores the rise and fall of civilizations and species. Both the Chinese and American series comment on historical cycles, science vs. anti-science and the historical fact that civilizations with technical superiority dominate those without. Both countries plan to serialize books two and three.
Cultural productions like these are seen as an important part of Chinese society and are highly political in nature. During the Cultural Revolution science fiction was banned in China and discouraged in the 1980s as being “spiritual pollution”. Two months ago the Hong Kong paper China Morning Post published an editorial from a People's Liberation Army theory group. The article criticized the Netflix version of Three Body Problem for changing the setting from China to Europe. In the Chinese version this struggle against Earth's scientists takes place within China. The PLA critique is that the Netflix version puts forward the theme that white people are portrayed as the saviors of the human race. In an aspect that might appeal to many DSAers, the Trisolarians test five people using historical problems via virtual headsets.
American history is replete with the examples of colonial conquerors like Columbus, Pizzaro and Cortez. We know what happened to the Iroquois and Cherokee nations. While science itself is not neutral and reinforces class interests, the central struggle in this book is how the Trisolarians use anti-science ideology. They promote anti-scientific ideas to destroy the Earth's ability to defend itself. The contemporary parallel here is to destroy science in favor of theology or removing science-based government regulation.