The Three-Body Problem

The roots of modern science fiction in China — brilliantly synopsized in the pages of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction — are to be found deep in the early decades of the twentieth century, much like those of the genre in the USA. The mode continues to attract a large Chinese readership, as exemplified by the existence of the magazine Science Fiction World, the planet’s most widely read SF publication. But of course, with historically minimal foreign commercial and intellectual contacts, either one-way or two-way, and shifting ideological banners, Chinese writers and readers came to explore radically different story spaces and themes, moods, and attitudes than their Gernsbackian brethren.

Unfortunately, due to the exclusionary rigors of the foreign marketplace and the lack of a cadre of crack translators, English-language readers have been generally cut off from this parallel world. Even veteran American fans would be hard-pressed to cite famous or representative works of Chinese SF, as opposed to recognizing French, German, Japanese, or Russian authors.

But welcome cracks in the dam are appearing, most notably with the publication in English of The Three-Body Problem, the first in a trilogy by Cixin Liu, ably translated by the award-winning American SF writer Ken Liu. And given the fact that filmmakers currently have in development five projects based on various works by Cixin Liu, this could be a watershed moment for Chinese SF in general.

The novel opens in the midst of China’s Cultural Revolution, with a family tragedy in progress. A scientist deemed a counter-revolutionary is denounced at a show trial by his brainwashed wife, then murdered in front of a crowd that includes his young daughter, Ye Wenjie. It is Ye Wenjie, richly adumbrated, who will occupy much of the novel’s center. We follow her through her maturation and her gradual involvement in a secret Chinese research program at a place called Red Coast Base. The exact transcendental and dangerous nature of this program is parceled out to the reader in measured fashion, in a series of flashbacks interspersed throughout what we might dub the realtime narrative, set in the present. But Ye Wenjie will figure in that contemporary telling as well, as an elderly woman, still pivotal to events.

But the main plot concerns a nanotechnologist named Wang Miao during the present era. Alarmed by a rash of suicides among scientists, by some disturbing anti-science cultural trends, and by certain hallucinatory incidents personally experienced, Wang Miao begins to conduct some investigations into the source of these allied phenomena. Part of his research consists of logging into the full-sensory online VR environment known as “Three Body.” This place — “game” hardly describes the software — presents itself as an utterly strange alien world whose astrophysical setup involves arduously Darwinian Stable and Chaotic periods for its planets and their flora and fauna. Playing the role of visitor, Wang Miao gradually assimilates the bizarre realities of “Trisolaris.”

Aiding Wang Miao in the practical aspects of following clues and interviewing and confronting suspects is a cop named Shi Qiang, also called Da Shi. Amid all the high-flown intellectual conundrums and catastrophes, Da Shi provides the grounded, common-man perspective, and he threatens to steal every scene in which he appears. His droll, gruff language and refusal to be cowed by any existential threats offer a thread of hope and humor against the grimness of what eventually materializes: a situation in which the game proves to be a partial manifestation of a conspiracy of the most wide-reaching — indeed cosmic — significance imaginable.

The ultimate experience of reading Cixin Liu’s novel is both parallel to the experience of reading similar English-language books and utterly lateral to those familiar frissons. In his afterword, Liu speaks of growing up on American SF, so it is hardly surprising that there would be similarities. But his native upbringing, embedded in the alternate reality that is China, ensures that his writing will also offer many uniquely foreign attitudes and thrills.

Considering the familiar aspects, we find appealing echoes of Lovecraft, for a start. Wang Miao’s quest follows a path evocative of the investigations of The Call of Cthulhu. One might also fruitfully recall Colin Wilson’s The Mind Parasites. Mixed in with this is a Pynchonian vibe, with Wang Miao as a kind of Tyrone Slothrop figure. In this sense, Liu’s book stands in a cousinly relation to such contemporary outings as David Shafer’s Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. And I’d adduce certain parallels between the outré seasons of Trisolaris and the equally exigent celestial circumstances of life on Brian Aldiss’s Helliconia. All of this is updated, in a sense, by Cixin Liu’s fascination with the odder features of quantum physics, theories that spark similar excitement in the writer’s Western counterparts.

So much for touchstones in The Three-Body Problem that conjure up examples of Western SF. But to see where Liu’s book reads distinctly like the product of another culture — a pleasing and desirable effect that the deft translator Ken Liu, in his notes, speaks of seeking to preserve and convey — we need to look at relevant Western SF whose effects are not duplicated here. I’m thinking of classic alien invasion novels such as Footfall by Niven and Pournelle, or The Killing Star by Zebrowski and Pellegrino. These books are, to simplify their essences, rational and practical invasions, Wellsian in other words. Liu’s more existential and soul-twisting tale in part resembles the more multivalent and nebulous work of Haruki Murakami, with elements of the Strugatsky brothers in such works Definitely Maybe. The inner and outer journeys conducted by Wang Miao and Ye Wenjie are almost Jungian. Perhaps the nearest instance in Western SF is something like Philip K. Dick’s VALIS.

And then there is an almost indefinable gravitas present in this book — and in much of non-Western SF — which is hard to pinpoint. But I think it is indeed quantifiable, especially in the opening section dealing with the Cultural Revolution, and in the way the characters define their individual freedoms balanced against societal duties. Having lived through such annealing times, writers from these cultures possess a certain outlook that incorporates the transience of life and the lack of sociopolitical stability and which Americans and UK citizens don’t share. This distinctive disjunction was best captured in Philip Roth’s famous observation from his 1986 interview in The Paris Review:

When I was first in Czechoslovakia, it occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters. This isn’t to say I wished to change places. I didn’t envy their persecution and the way in which it heightens their social importance. I didn’t even envy them their seemingly more valuable and serious themes. The trivialization, in the West, of much that’s deadly serious in the East is itself a subject, one requiring considerable imaginative ingenuity to transform into compelling fiction.

Finally, I sense a bit of pre-modern Chinese literature fabulistic tactics here, Dream of the Red Chamber intricate cunningness, in the way the flashbacks intermingle with the realtime narrative, and in the story-within-a-story section devoted to the life of a fellow named Wei Cheng.

Ultimately, the welcoming commonality of this thought-provoking, heartfelt tale, its universality, outweighs the piquant flavorings that might seem exotic to Westerners. We emerge from the book happily affirming Cixin Liu’s assertion in his afterword: “Science fiction is a literature that belongs to all humankind.”