The Three-Body Problem

So the Game Of Thrones guys, David Benioff and the other one whose name I can’t remember, have a pretty bad reputation after everyone massively over-reacted to the end of the series (fight me). Admittedly, they didn’t help themselves by proposing—and then swiftly un-proposing—a TV show where the American Confederacy continued into the modern day. But mostly, it’s the massive baby tantrum that people threw over Game Of Thrones that did it.

Their big comeback attempt is a Netflix adaptation of Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem, which is due to release in January. Being on the cutting edge of popular culture as I am, I had to check out the book ahead of the show’s launch to see what all the fuss is about. Here’s what I found.

The first part of a trilogy called Remembrance Of Earth’s Past, The Three Body Problem is a decades-spanning story about…well, here I run into problems because this is one of those books where unraveling the mystery of what’s actually going is in large part the whole point, which means that even the most summary description of the plot is technically a spoiler. In light of the fact that a big adaptation is around the corner, I won’t get too into it, but I will need to spoil some things in order to talk about the plot, so here’s your chance to click out of this post if you’re hyped about the Netflix version and want to go in totally fresh.

Basically, The Three Body Problem is about humanity’s first contact with intelligent aliens and how that turns out to be a far more sinister prospect than most of us would like to imagine, drawing on some of the more speculative criticisms of the whole SETI thing that have been going around for as long as we’ve been blasting messages into space.

In late 60s China, a politically-persecuted astrophysicist is drawn into a secretive military project that’s trying to beat the Americans and the Soviets to first contact. In the modern day, a nanomaterial researcher learns of a rash of mysterious suicides among scientists and is contacted by an international organization keen to get to the bottom of the mystery. After he begins to experience a terrifying breakdown of physical reality, his quest for answers brings him to Three-Body, a virtual reality game whose participants try to build a stable civilization in a chaotic world whose solar system doesn’t seem to obey the laws of celestial mechanics.

The Three Body Problem is trying to be a lot of things: historical fiction, old-school speculative hard-SF yarn, military/conspiracy thriller and alien invasion story. Like a lot of novels that try to do a lot of things, it doesn’t do any of them particularly well.

The best part of the story by far are the chapters taking place in the late 60s and 70s. Dealing heavily with China’s Cultural Revolution, these sections have a sense of place and atmosphere that is otherwise entirely lacking. Any time the book cuts to the modern day, the environment dissolves into a featureless void where setting description is almost non-existent and characters pop in and out of existence as the story requires them to.

The other problem with the contemporary chapters of the book (i.e. most of the chapters of the book) is that our protagonist, Wang, is a complete non-entity. I seriously don’t think I could describe a single aspect of the guy’s personality even after reading the entire book from cover to cover. He has a wife and child who vanish abruptly after a few chapters. Long stretches go by where he doesn’t think about important, on-going plot threads even though it seems like they should still be weighing heavily on his mind.

An illustrative example: one of the best parts of the book is an early plot thread where Wang discovers that a mysterious countdown is showing up superimposed onto photos he takes—and then, later, onto his own vision. Over the course of several chapters he considers, and then has to reject, multiple explanations for the countdown’s existence, and this process coupled with the torment of wondering what will happen when it ends drives him to the brink of insanity until he can find a way to stop himself from seeing it.

This turns out to be a huge red herring, which is a problem in and of itself (the eventual explanation for the countdown is “aliens were doing it to fuck with him” and we never find out in this book what, if anything, happens when it ends), but the bigger issue is that Wang goes from being utterly tormented by the phenomenon, to not thinking about it for most of the rest of the book. He only brings it up again once, much later, when he’s confronting a character who he believes might be able to offer him an explanation for it, and when that turns out not to be the case the whole thing is never mentioned again. All of this leads to an uncomfortable feeling that either the author has forgotten about the plot thread, or that Wang has, neither of which would be a good thing.

This lack of interiority from Wang causes more problems in the scene where he and the other players of Three-Body are told the true nature of the game, information whose specifics could be described as world-changing. Nobody present—not even our viewpoint character—reacts to this revelation with anything approaching a realistic level of emotion, which made me profoundly confused as to what was meant to be going on here. Did they not believe the person who gave them the information? Was I misinterpreting what the person had told them? Were the characters misinterpreting the information they had been given, but I was interpreting it correctly? For several chapters, I honestly wasn’t sure.

So if the book isn’t interested in its characters, what does it devote its page-count to?

Well, you know that long-standing stereotype about how sci-fi authors are all beep-boop robot guys who write books devoid of human emotion? That’s obviously never been completely true, but having read my fair share of classic SF, I can tell you that it’s not entirely untrue either. The Three-Body Problem fits right into that stereotype. This is a book that’s primarily focused on speculative sci-fi ideas, often delivered at a breathless pace and with the absolute bare minimum of prose required to count as a novel instead of a blog post. For example, here’s our boi Wang using an advanced VR gaming setup to enter Three Body for the first time:

“Wang entered the address for the game into the browser. It had been easy to memorize: www.3body.net. The site indicated that the game only supported access via V-suit. Wang remembered that the employee lounge at the Nanotechnology Research Center had a V-suit. He left the now-empty main lab and went to the security office to get the key. In the lounge, he passed the pool tables and the exercise machines and found the V-suit next to a computer. He struggled into the haptic feedback suit, put on the panoramic viewing helmet, and turned on the computer.
”

Let me be clear though: those speculative SF ideas that the book is primarily concerned with are some of the wildest shit I’ve ever encountered in fiction. Like, we’re talking about aliens unfolding a subatomic particle into four dimensions and then wrapping it around their entire planet so that its surface can be etched with the computer circuitry for an advanced AI program. These are huge, cool concepts that are often breathtaking even when presented in barebones prose. But they don’t make for a compelling novel on their own. Without characters that feel alive and a plot that the reader can invest themselves in, these scenes might as well be disconnected short stories or forum-post musings on the outer limits of science.

This would all be understandable if I thought Cixin Liu was just a bad writer, but the thing is, he’s definitely not. There are moments when the book slows the fuck down, focuses on its characters and tries to properly build a sense of mood or place, and the writing in these scenes is evocative, sometimes even beautiful. This is what makes The Three-Body Problem so frustrating.

Despite all the problems I had with it, I did finish the book wanting to know what happens next, so I ploughed straight ahead into The Dark Forest. Unfortunately, with the underlying mystery largely resolved in the first book, I found the resulting military/espionage plot terminally dull and quickly dropped it.