Chinese author Liu Cixin’s monumental science fiction book three body problem, This work was made into a Netflix series with a punchier title. 3 Physical problems, From climate change activists to skeptics, Chinese Communists to anti-communists, nationalists to open borders fanatics, there’s something that troubles just about everyone. This is a big story with big ideas, and like most good works of fiction, even the author doesn’t have complete control over how the events are interpreted.
Mr. Liu should be commended for having the intellectual integrity to incorporate both ideas that he personally prefers. and He incorporated opposing or skeptical concepts into his epic stories. three body problem and its Netflix adaptation are just the beginning of the trilogy. dark forest And it ended like this The end of death.
The next review will definitely include: major spoiler As for the first book and the Netflix series, if you want to remain spoiler-free, read no further.
The title of Liu’s first book refers to the complex mathematical problem of predicting the movements of planets in a solar system with three suns. The book explains the three-body problem in quite a bit of detail, but the Netflix show has someone explain it to you and sympathetically summarize it. Can not Predict a planet moving between the three suns, at least not for long.
The three-body problem is actually a very big problem. live Because on a planet orbiting between three suns, it would be utter hell. Your world will alternate between frozen solid and baked to a crisp. After decades of golden age of perfect climate and abundant growth, we might watch in horror as a massive earthquake tears the earth apart. Everything you’ve built gets wiped out regularly.
If you lived in such a world, you would evolve into something extremely tough, evil, and focused on survival at all costs. Maybe we’ll find a way to preserve knowledge during these random planetary apocalypses, or hibernate until the world becomes habitable again. Perhaps your species will endure like that for a million years, making great advances in technology…and one day a very bitter Chinese woman will see her beautiful, stable planet from four light years away. It sends out radio signals describing things and complains like this: Her goddamn species has a terrible job of taking care of it.
Would you like to consider moving? It will take 400 years to reach a new home, but your species has long ago learned to hibernate, to be patient and ruthless, and your culture has transcended human morality to learn how to best survive. I am evaluating this as a goal. You may come to view the relatively primitive inhabitants of your new home as inferior and unreliable.
Can Earth’s inhabitants really complain about the horrors that will unfold when you arrive? You know perfectly well what usually happens when you make a decision.
three body problem All sides of the current debate have plot beats that they can claim to be legitimate. The most obvious example is climate change. Some readers and viewers see this story as a philosophical vindication for climate change activists. Because the human protagonists are forward-thinking people who insist on making sacrifices to prepare for an invasion that won’t take 400 years.
Some characters argue that they don’t need to worry about seemingly inevitable disasters that won’t happen for generations, long after someone they know or care about has died. Some people. They oppose spending trillions of dollars to prepare for alien attacks in the distant future, money that could be spent improving life on Earth now. These characters could be seen as allegories for the “climate denier.”
On the other hand, the cult-like human servants of the impending alien conquerors look a lot like today’s climate change activists. The woman they relentlessly attack is basically Greta Thunberg with a license to kill. Although they claim the mantle of science and proudly proclaim that they are above human religion, their movement has all the trappings of religious extremism. They have literally accepted super-advanced aliens as their “masters” and have rejected all arguments and evidence contrary to their beliefs.
The alien human servants share the extreme arrogance and contempt for humanity exhibited by climate change extremists. The aliens consider humans to be “bugs” and plan to wipe out most of humanity upon their arrival. It’s a plan that many real-world climate change and overpopulation extremists wholeheartedly support.
The cultists are happy to condemn the rest of humanity to misery and death, but believe that they and their descendants will be accorded special privileges. They are completely convinced of their superiority. They will say the science is settled and the enemy is the denialist.
Later in the Netflix version of the story, a character suggests that humans should simply have children. That would effectively wipe out humanity before the aliens had a chance to kill us all. This is not all that different from the thinking that has created a demographic death spiral in countries around the world, including China.
An important early detail is that the woman who drives humanity to extinction is a huge fan of Rachel Carson’s movies. Silent Spring – This is one of the earliest and worst examples of junk science, an apocalyptic environment that sentenced millions to death by malaria based on fabricated and exaggerated evidence and hysterical appeals to emotion. It is a protectionist pamphlet.
The aliens themselves are running away from an environmental catastrophe, but it’s no one’s fault. Their world is terrifying and doomed. Because that’s how you were born. The aliens imply that charlatans throughout history have seized power by claiming to be able to predict the weather and blaming natural disasters on sinful acts.
Alien invasion can also be seen as a grim allegory of mass immigration. The people of Earth have no say in whether to welcome or reject immigrants from the planet. Aliens come from terrible places and bring all their negative cultural baggage with them. Their culture is authoritarian and unified in nature, with an emphasis on conquest. Their motto is “If one survives, we all survive.” They freely commit murder, have no concept of individual rights, and do not value individual life.
This alien is eerily similar to real-world authoritarian governments like the People’s Republic of China. They shrewdly exploit the weaknesses of free societies and manipulate human sympathy. They are waging an information war on an insane scale, using technology that allows them to communicate with Earth centuries before they physically arrive. They use propaganda-laced virtual reality games to recruit human agents. It’s similar to TikTok, except you can smell it.
Many readers and current viewers are three body problem I have been fascinated by the harsh depictions of China’s Cultural Revolution. How did Mr. Liu manage to get content so critical of communism past an army of a million Chinese censors? (Answer: He moved Scenes from the Cultural Revolution were in the middle of the book, so censors were unlikely to pay attention to them, but he says they are at the beginning of the story, as presented in the English translation and in the Netflix show. (I believe).
The evils of the Cultural Revolution are just one of many provocative ideas in Liu’s vast body of work, which ultimately culminates in the existential question of whether the Cultural Revolution will really happen. problem, In the system of the universe, who “owns” the Earth? Is humanity worth fighting for? Can you defeat the enemy you wish for? live More than us? Is it possible to coexist with completely alien civilizations, or should we fear each other? Is the problem of two small intelligent species a mountain of beans in this crazy universe?
Great stories can appeal to everyone, but that also means they can frustrate everyone. A great war story must convey the enemy’s perspective, but when you think about the enemy of humanity as a whole, it should be an unpleasant one. At the end of the first act, three body problem It asks its readers and viewers to consider the possibility that whatever they think about humanity, they may be wrong.
