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Review: The Three-Body Problem

When I was younger I devoured books at an unrelenting pace. I'm sure this is a relatively common story, but over the last 15 years with more and more to consume on the internet, and phones becoming more pervasive in our lives, my "reading" has become more about tech-blogs and personal investment tips on my phone than full 'feature-length' novels. I occasionally partake in the weaponized brainrot of TikTok before bed, so every now and then I like to prove to myself that I can still read an entire book, and that all my poor brain cells haven't wilted.

While I'm normally under constant bombardment from friends and family to "Watch X, it's really good" and "Trust me bro, watch Y", since the release of "3 Body Problem" on Netflix, the frequency at which I've been suggested it has been quite high. I heard that it was a fairly recent Hugo award winner. The last time I proved to myself I could still read, I slammed through "Enders Game" (Hugo winner in 1986) and "Speaker for the Dead" (Hugo winner in 1987) while I had the flu and loved them, so picking Hugo winners seems like a fairly good move. My partner and I had a quiet weekend away planned on a farm, so I brought the book and finished it over the weekend.

I thought it was an excellent book. I'm not going to write any more praise because thousands of more fluent writers than I have written this book more praise than I can imagine. It's already won a Hugo. It's a good book. Instead, I'm just going to spout some nonsense that I thought when I was reading the book. Let me preface it by saying I just finished the book and haven't read anything more about it. I haven't talked to anyone else about it. I haven't read the Wikipedia page, or sifted through the trove of memes that I'm sure exist on Reddit somewhere. My thoughts lie entirely unpolouted by foreign ideas, facts, and actual content of the book that I might have just forgotten, so I'm almost writing this in the hope that it contains some abolutely wild takes that get answered in the subsequent books.

What do Trisolarans look like?

Something I enjoyed from the Three Body Problem is that you never find out what Trisolarans look like. I'm pretty sure the only things we know are that:

Presumably because their eyes are the same as ours, we're dealing with carbon based life forms. So the Trisolarans probably aren't bundles of floating rocks, or glowing gaseous hiveminds. Because they can de/rehydrate, my brain has been picturing them as plant-like. I'm imagining a slender, possibly 10m tall, Groot-like character. When fully hydrated, its skin is plump like a hydrated succulent, and when dehydrated it looks like a cracked plank of wood, or possibly just a dead succulent.[1]

I'm sure we'll meet them in the next book though, so I'm curious to see how they 'actually' look. Also I wonder if the ETO knows what they look like from their transmissions? We never get to find that out, though, and I suppose it could also just be lies. It would be pretty funny if they arrived on earth and were like 2cm tall or something.

I love that the book is Chinese

As the first translated winner of the Hugo award, I really enjoyed reading something that was originally Chinese. It made me realise things like:

I should probably learn more about the Chinese Cultural Revolution

The book started with it's roots in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. When I started reading about Ye Wenjie's youth, I thought "This is an interesting but unrealistic dystopia", and later remembered that the Cultural Revolution was actually real and I was just incredibly naive. I enjoy a good history podcast, and am ashamed that I know significantly more about the Russian Revolutions than the Chinese Revolution, despite being Australian and China being our largest trading partner. I'm going to queue up some history podcasts about the Chinese Revolution when I finish reading this series.

Chinese names are hard

We've all heard the classic line that "All [insert race here] people look the same". It turns out that this observation is so unoriginal that research into the "Cross-race Effect" was first published in 1914. I wonder if unfamiliar names trigger something similar to this. Below is a sentence from the book:

"Dr Ding, would you please show Yang Dong's note to Professor Wang?"

I actually had a chuckle at that one. Reading this book felt like reading The Inheritance Cycle where the author essentially made up his own language and gave everyone really weird names. It made it harder to link names to characters, and I often longed for the cognitive ease of a character called "Greg" or "Bob", but I did thoroughly enjoy learning a bit about Chinese names even if I did have to search how to pronounce almost all of them.

Communism and Pessimism

I generally have a pretty positive view of the world. It seems that the world has generally improved over the last several hundred years[2], and so I see no reason to be pessimistic about life and am thankful for the life I live and am excited for the future. Possibly because it's a different viewpoint to my own, or because I think constantly being negative achieves nothing in life except making you sadder, I don't really enjoy reading chronically negative books.

Ye Wenjie seems like a chronically negative person. I guess this makes sense since her father was killed in front of her, she barely escaped her own death, and living in the throes of the Chinese Cultural Revolution certainly does seem like a time where one could experience nothing but quality of life decreases throughout their own life. So assuming she was ignorant enough to not consider the entirety of human history up to her own life, I can kind of understand how she'd come to the conclusion that the human race was doomed? But then to take action to personally condemn all humanity to almost certain death via aliens, is INFURIATING to me.

But I do understand it. The book would be boring if she left the aliens on read.

Interestingly enough, the last chronically negative book I read was literally the communist manifesto. All doom and gloom and "Oh no, if we don't revolt rn, everyone who doesn't own assets will be a slave forever". No positivity. No regard for human compassion or that capitalists have the capacity to be nice? That humans can share? At least that's my grossly abridged summary. I'm starting to think communism itself is based around negativity and a bleak outlook on the future, and I'd almost welcome any sort of literature that tried to frame communism in a relentlessly positive light such that I might enjoy it.

Science Fiction or Science Fact?

The author does an excellent job of explaining all science, whether fiction or fact, in the same way. I have a physics degree, so I like to think that I know pretty well what concepts are fact and fiction. The fictional physics is explained in such a believable way though! It really makes the story more engaging and I love that.

"Oh the sun is made of layer and you can bounce radio wave around in them and it gets amplified".

"The sophons can draw on the energy of the vacuum to travel around at ~the speed of light without violating the laws of thermodynamics".

I suppose all the made up concepts are plausible enough until you really start to think about it, and I like that. I really hope it doesn't confuse people as to what is and isn't true though.

Wang Miao's Poor Wife

I swear my recollection of Wang Miao is:

Classic Wang Miao

Also

I'm totally stealing: "I'm a simple person, if you look down my throat you can see out my ass."

[1] Or as we call them in my house, just regular succulents.

[2] Yes there have obviously been pockets in time and space where quality of life has decreased locally, but given that the average life expectancy in medieval England was just over 30, 30% of infants died before the age of 1, poverty in the world has never been lower, etc. I think it's safe to say that by almost every measurable metric, the world is better now than at any point in its past.