Disclaimer 1: Didn't see the show yet 🙂 But, there's sure to be loads of spoilers.
Disclaimer 2: The books are long and kind of meandering and I read them all pretty rapidly, so my memory of details may be off.
Disclaimer 3: My reviews are long, sorry.
THE THREE BODY PROBLEM
This is a sci-fi trilogy by a Chinese author that got made into a Netflix series. The basic premise (the VERY short version) is: a base is created to broadcast a message into the universe, in the hopes of reaching alien life, and a particular scientist has a breakthrough that amplifies the signal enough to finally reach another civilization. And their response is essentially "you're lucky your message reached a pacifist. If the others find out about this, they will invade. DO NOT RESPOND."
Unfortunately, the scientist who received the reply, thinks humanity needs a wake-up call. So she immediately responds.
We learn that some years ago, this scientist (Ye Wenjie) witnessed her father being tormented and accidentally killed by some high school protesters during the Cultural Revolution. They not only go unpunished, Ye is branded a traitor merely for her association with him. She gets sent to a labor camp in the wilds, and after another "social credit -10,000" error, Ye finds herself on thin ice. She's given an ultimatum – come work for the government at the mysterious Red Coast base, or else.
They want her because of her expertise in astrophysics. But they warn her that if she accepts, she may never be allowed to leave. Her faith in humanity is essentially gone, and she has nothing else to live for, so she doesn't hesitate to accept. When she receives the alien's reply years later, she not only welcomes the invaders, she's willing to kill to keep their existence a secret.
Without rehashing the rest of the plot, the book plays out as a sort of war between different factions of the ETO, an organization founded by Ye and bankrolled by a wealthy American environmentalist who has his own reasons for hating humanity. They openly (and sometimes secretly) work to support the invaders.
The premise of alien invasion is common, but what makes this series interesting is the time scale – even with advanced interstellar travel, it will take over 400 years for the invaders to arrive. So the question becomes… given all this time to prepare, can we advance technology to the point where we have a fighting chance against an overwhelmingly more advanced civilization?
Immediately, humanity is kneecapped not only by the ETO, but also a sophisticated 'attack' of sorts by the Trisolaran homeworld… 11th dimensional subatomic particles called sophons, that can effectively be 'beamed' to earth instantly, even though we're safe (for a few hundred years) from any direct physical threats.
The sophons are incredibly advanced, essentially sentient nanomachines… probes which have no restrictions in where they can go, and what information they can acquire. Only our thoughts remain hidden to them. Their subatomic nature also gives them some strange ability to fuck up the results of particle physics experiments, and create maddening hallucinations in the scientists working on the kind of super advanced physics research we'll need to win. The trisolarans understand that their best bet for victory lies in sabotaging scientific progress.
There's a lot of moving parts to the first book. There's a strange VR game that shows a simplified simulation of life on Trisolaris, which suffers from the titular 3-body problem. Essentially, the alien homeworld is chaotically orbiting 3 suns, and the situation is too complex to predict the path of these orbits. So randomly, they'll have periods of climate stability, then periods of intense heat where the sun scorches all life from the surface, or extended ice ages. The trisolarans have adapted to (partly) survive this, and even reach a state of incredibly advanced technology. But ultimately, they will need a new home, and Earth has basically rolled out the red carpet.
There's also a subplot where this gritty, almost noir-esque cop has been tasked with figuring out why a bunch of scientists have suddenly gone insane and killed themselves, including Ye's daughter. If you had a classic good-cop/bad-cop scene in a detective novel, Shi Qiang would be the bad cop. And he's enlisted a scientist to infiltrate the ETO.
By presenting these moving parts in an interesting (not entirely chronological) order, the author really hooks you, and the first book is, for me, easily the best. Ye is not exactly a likeable protagonist, but the premise and the other characters keep you invested. There's not much in the way of way-out-there sci-fi, it's mostly fairly relatable, the author dwells a lot on Ye's fundamental disconnect from humanity and the eventual thawing of her hatred. He spends a lot of time on the relationship between the cop and his undercover mole, and their efforts to infiltrate the ETO.
It moves along at a decent pace, but is hard to get into initially. I'm sure the TV show will solve that by cutting out a lot. There's not much of a resolution in this book, it's really only the start of the story, so basically if you read this, you're committing to the whole series. Whereas something like The Expanse feels like each book is a bit more self-contained and is satisfying by itself.
THE DARK FOREST
The second novel follows a new protagonist Luo Ji. He's a little more likeable than Ye, and they have very little to do with each other, though their one interaction is critical.
The Dark Forest documents our early attempts to deal with the Trisolaran threat, still 400 years away but being taken very seriously by various world governments. A handful of promising scientists and political figures ('Wallfacers') are tasked with developing and implementing plans to deal with the invasion, and to keep the plans secret from everyone. These plans have to be supremely subtle, the ultimate sneak attack, and the task is daunting. Luo Ji, is one of these 'Wallfacers', and he's baffled… he's smart, arguably a genius, but sort of a slacker who hasn't really done anything with his gifts. Why was he chosen?
All we know is… he's the only person the Trisolarans have ever tried to directly kill, with help from the ETO. Initially he has no plan, and simply rejects his nomination. The rest of the world maddeningly assumes this rejection is part of the plan, a subterfuge. So he leans into it, and decides to just use the nearly-unlimited resorces given to Wallfacers, to build himself an easy, blissful life with a beautiful home and family. But he comes to accept his duty once he realizes the simple facts that Trisolaris desperately wanted to keep from him… a realization that was only possible because Ye felt some urge to either atone, or give humanity the slightest fighting chance. He conducts a test, and then goes into hibernation to await the result.
Hibernation is critical to these books… it means the characters can sleep and wake up decades or even centuries later, without aging, so we can see them confront the invaders on doomsday. It makes it possible for readers to have consistent protagonists (and some villains) they can follow across huge jumps in time. But the introduction of this technology is also where the series somewhat goes off the rails, for me.
The first timejump is pretty engaging… Luo Ji is a few hundred years in the future, and humanity has decided we've got the threat under control. We've made huge advances in technology despite the interference from the sophons, and our fleet is bigger and faster than the Trisolaran fleet. Luo Ji's services are no longer needed, and the entire Wallfacer project is now viewed as sort of primitive, panicked overreaction.
The concept of the Wallfacer program is pretty cool, the idea that a handful of people (backed by a mountain of funding and scientific support) have to figure out how to defeat an enemy with superior firepower and perfect intel, using low-tech resources. It's like… what if a country with a huge fleet of old warships with sails and cannons, REALLY had to defeat modern aircraft carriers, and were given plenty of time and money… could they figure out a way?
There's a stark, almost brutal scene in the book where we find out the answer. And Luo Ji gets to see the result of his experiment.
DEATH'S END
This is where the series faltered, for me. It was a bit of a slog, and… without spoiling too much, it avoids any expected 'happily ever after' ending, which CAN be memorable and compelling if it's done right, but in this case it's mostly just depressing. I won't say "so therefore, you should avoid this series". The ending stays with you, and that's worth something, and the previous two books are strong. So, if you try those, you pretty much have to follow through with this one, just to see where things go.
Mankind has found a way to hold off annihilation, but it hinges on the willingness of one man (or woman) to essentially "push the button" that results in muturally assured destruction. This is the Swordholder.
Following the trend from the previous books, we went from someone who loathed humanity in book 1, to someone who was (initially) indifferent and had many personal flaws, and now we finally have a heroine who is likeable and has a strong sense of duty and decency. But, she's also the most dull. Cheng Xin is tasked with trying to figure out a way to send a probe to Trisolaris, and has a promising idea, but even so, it requires enormous resources to send something… let's call it 'kitten sized'… to the alien homeworld. So we send – a flash-frozen brain.
We're now fully in goofy, unrelatable, very hard sci-fi territory. The plan is to encase a disconnected living brain into a container, and accelerate it to near-light speed to somehow get picked up by the enemy, and relying on that enemy to use tech we're only guessing about, to somehow revive it and allow our disembodied spy/ambassador to live.
Meanwhile, humans look for ways to live underground, or off-planet, on starships. We've got most of the technology. But we know we're still far behind Trisolaran tech, and Earth seems like it could be a lost cause.
A weakness in our defenses, combined with an advance in Trisolaran tech (remember, they also had 400 years to prepare) means we're pretty much doomed, and at this point the tone of the books goes from… the enemy being inscrutable higher beings with magic, to petty oppressors who put humanity into a sort of District 9 situation.
Cheng does her best to salvage what she can, along with her oddly named sidekick Ai AA. She's the one who talks a former classmate, a depressed loner who had a secret crush on her forever, into volunteering for the flying brain project. And we follow her as she timejumps to doomsday, and beyond, eventually to Doomsday 2.
SPOILERY STUFF
I'm finding it impossible to really discuss the third book without spoiling too much. And this is a little ranty.
Basically, our nutty plan works, and the sad-sack envoy gets to experience Trisolaran civilization. And he's allowed to communicate with our heroine, in a very limited way. So he contrives a way to pass coded information to her in a way that might slip by the Trisolarans, and this involves some very lengthy 'fairy tales'. These have hidden meanings that, if correctly decoded, will give mankind a chance to survive.
We know from the previous book that the universe is essentially a hostile place where, if you make yourself visible and broadcast your location, your planet is doomed. There's civilizations out there who make the Trisolarans look like cavemen, and they look at everyone else as threats to be casually eliminated… sort of like a hunter who hears rustling in the trees, and sends a shot into the woods towards the sound, because it might just be a squirrel, but maybe it's a bear. So he takes no chances and doesn't care what the bullet hits.
So in this third book, the big baddie we've been gearing up to fight… is blown up by one of these hunter civilizations. And that's it, the threat fizzles out. Except, in the process of revealing the Trisolarans, Earth also reveals itself, and so… as casually as pushing a button, this super civilization snipes us too. Game over. There's no last-minute clever leap in technology that lets us avoid or deflect the attack. Earth and the rest of the solar system are simply wiped out. A handful of people on ships escape and colonize other planets, and we're stuck with Cheng and AA and brainboy. The rest of the book is just marinating in the sadness of trying to save a few pieces of the lost civilization and the tiny nugget of hope that maybe some small chunk of humanity is surviving on some alien planet somewhere.
Also, what the fuck, the aliens use weapons that are guaranteed to just destroy the entire universe, bit by bit, like setting fire to a building that you live in, but knowing that the fire's in a far away corner of the building and you've got a little fireproof cubicle you can hide in. If that summary doesn't make sense to anyone reading, it conveys how I feel about magic superweapon used to wipe out humanity.
It's just TOO stark, and not that interesting. Once all is lost, the fundamental conflict that drives the plot is gone, and so the only thing left is to see how this small handful of not-that-loveable characters handles it.
Ultimately, I did enjoy the series, but it was hard to love at times. Part of it is simply that the tone is different and, at times, feels hard to relate to. I dunno if it's because it's coming at things from a more Chinese POV, and I'm a westerner, or if it's just Cixin Liu's writing style, or just that sci fi can sometimes get so abstract that it's like… how do you relate to something as impossible as a planet getting sucked into a 2D black hole and people timeskipping millions of years to live in a fake universe that looks like a farmhouse and some woods crammed into a 1 mile box? The writing style is occasionally a bit too melodramatic, like characters are either implausibly stoic or burst into tears. There's a lot of subtext that I can detect but probably don't understand, which I think is criticism of Chinese politics… something the author had to bury pretty far into the series to sneak it past censors, apparently. But mainly it's that there's this sort of meandering plot that feels like it could be tighter, and a kind of tonal inconsistency. Like in one book, the aliens sound like ethereal, calm, advanced beings who are straining to simplify their speech down to something we can understand. They come from a world of total transparency and are seemingly emotionless and rational. But then they go into full mustache-twirling villain mode where one of them (or rather, a sort of android being controlled by one) laughs and says stuff like "did you really think you could defeat me" and then yells at a bunch of people for being savages and chops them in half with a sword. And the super-civilization that defeats them is almost worse, because it's like… almost like weird office workers with a cult-y belief system, who go through their day cheerfully humming tunes to themselves while they tap a few keys to wipe out a few billion lives over hear, another billion over there, whole hoping the boss doesn't yell at them for not working hard enough. It's a striking mental image, which I think is what the author wants, just not very plausible.
The first book is the most likeable because it has plots and concepts I find more relatable. Like there's a neat scene where a bunch of people get in a room and try to figure out, how do they kill everyone on a floating supertanker without potentially destroying all the critical info stored on its computer systems? Their solution involves waiting for it to pass through the skinny part of the Panama Canal, and using nanofilament wires…invisible and almost infinitely thin, sharp, and strong… to slice it like a block of cheese as it cruises past a chokepoint. This is the kind of tv and movie-friendly powerful scene that probably made someone think "we gotta put this on netflix". The second book has this absolutely BRUTAL scene where the Trisolaran teardrop probe wakes up… more tech that is fundamentally magic but has an effect we can all understand. There's also a very nicely plotted and executed scene where someone figures out how to assassinate people who are essentially holding up human progress, using tiny meteorites. It's a bit convoluted but follows the 'rule of cool' and is sure to appear in the TV show somewhere.
But the third book… maybe this is just my caveman guy brain, but it's just less fun slogging through the endless coded fairy tale segment of book 3, or the melancholy rambling of the forever-alone guy who eventually volunteers his brain for a suicide mission. None of it feels as real, somehow.
Yeesh, this is long. Nobody's reading at this point. Good thing I skipped the 4th book, an unofficial fan-made sequel that was published with Cixin Liu's blessing. The writing isn't as good, and I DNFed it in the 2nd chapter I think. The rest of the trilogy… I think it just needs better editing, and it'd be incredible. Not that I can complain about a lack of editing.
by CreeDorofl