Remembrance of Earth's Past - The Three Body Problem Trilogy by Cixin Liu
Warning: contains spoilers of all three novels above.
Every book in this trilogy was one I could not put down.
And those, in my opinion, are truly the best kinds of books. I like being engrossed in a world, spend hours on a lazy Saturday morning or a long plane ride burning through a good book that keeps reeling me in. And with a universe like the one in Remembrance of Earth's Past, it was impossible to stay away. Liu had weaved all my favorite parts of a novel into a thick soft blanket I did not know I needed until I felt its embrace in the cold winter: science fiction, cosmology, philosophy, conspiracy theory, a focus on Eastern culture, with the right amount of humor and love sprinkled in. His writing style is really beautiful and unique, and I think it's quite skillful when you can hear the author's own voice and character shining through such a fantastical story. It makes me excited to read more of his work.
I would like to focus on these topics that really struck a chord in me while reading this series: The style of writing, the theme of intelligence, the role that gender plays in this trilogy, and the philosophy of the story, the questions it pose. Warning - these thoughts are all word vomit!
Liu's style of writing
China as an emerging power in the world makes the story so much more compelling. I forget that this series was finished over 10 years ago, and yet you can see the current world state affairs reflected in the first novel of the trilogy.
Throughout the series, Liu successfully creates a world where the most alien ideas touch the deepest part of my soul. His writing makes me feel a whirlwind of emotions in the best possible way... As though I am being lulled into the sweetest dreams- I think about the Eastern paintings in Dark Forest and Luo Ji's entire time in his paradise. I get those mindfuck moments like in the video game of Three-Body Problem he creates a manmade computer, or when 18 billion years passes by in the blink of an eye. He is not afraid to push the boundaries in all aspects of his story telling, reflective of the way humanity is pushed to the edge of greatness and despair. The Three-Body Problem trilogy covers so much of the entire universe, a literally inconceivable range of time, yet manages to make a story of such grand scale feel so personable and relatable.
I love that his writing is centered around shining a light on the beauty of science. Because of Liu's academic background, his dedication to the hard science trope in sci-fi comes very naturally to him and knows how to make even the most ridiculous scientific imaginings sound so cool and epic. The bad reviews I've seen say it's too much information dumping, and I cannot deny there is a fair amount of it. However, I experience the sheer joy and excitement over those sections, which is likely just me nerding out.
The coolest example of this is the world building in the titular first book, the Three-Body Problem. Imagine living on a planet faced with the harsh unpredictability of an unsolvable math problem. What a wonderful combination of so many fields of science, from classical mechanics to cosmology!
Lastly, I really love that it just overall sounded like something entirely different than what I had read in a while. To put its simply, I believe that his non-western perspective is so refreshing. You can really see a reflection of the Chinese culture and style through his words and feel like you are in the mind of someone from China. At first I thought that was just some abstract observation only in my head, but upon reading the Ken Liu's postscript, the difference is certainly intentional.
The Chinese literary tradition shaped and was shaped by its readers, giving rise to different emphases and preferences in fiction compared to what American readers expect.
The best translations into English do not, in fact, read as if they were originally written in English. The English words are arranged in such a way that the reader sees a glimpse of another culture's patterns of thinking, hears an echo of another language's rhythms and cadences, and feels a tremor of another people's gestures and movements.
With this in mind, I invite your next book choice to be a story about a lifestyle you know little about! It will be refreshing. I would recommend: She Would Be King by Wayétu Moore, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, and Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Intelligence above all as a recurring theme
The focus of all 3 novels is on very, very intelligent protagonists. Everyone at least has a PhD, and it’s only those people that have the power to push humanity forward and save the world, because they’re the only ones that can do all this crazy research on astrophysics and cosmology/space. The focus and extreme preference towards the extremely academic is the most Chinese thing ever. (That’s coming from someone half-Chinese.)
Its importance is even reflected in the social hierarchy. It’s based on intelligence & success instead of race, or economic status.. obviously they all affect each other, but the most prominent discrimination is puts smart people at an advantage. This is another key difference of eastern vs western outlooks.
All the most powerful people in the world that wield this literally godlike power are the smartest, the best and brightest. Which makes sense; why trust anyone else with those kinds of decisions? We need to have our best people with the best brains at the helm of humanity, continuously striving to push the boundaries and what we know of as human, so we can push to be the greatest versions of ourselves we can be.
Gender
The perspective of the trilogy changes most significantly in Death’s End, where we are blessed with a female Swordholder. Reviews online have pointed to Cheng Xin as a character or her treatment in the novel as a major flaw of the whole series. Some people even viewed it as demeaning to women. She fucked everything up! She was the whole reason the Trisolarans took over when they did! It’s all her fault, we should have been more selfish as a species, etc. But I would urge you to look at it from a different point of view. Here’s mine at least:
I think that as women, we are hardwired to think more of the collective than the individual- putting others needs before my own (or is that just me?). I would argue we are pigeonholed into this mindset more than men, that are taught at a young age differently. Cheng Xin, the eastern Madonna of the world, has her stereotypically feminine aspects (such as the collective over individual mindset) heavily correlated with weakness in Death's End. Her decisions are “annoying” and “stupid” at first. She had a "lack of strength" to keep the deterrence, and that life is too precious to throw away like that...
This is just one example of Liu’s negative outlook on feminine qualities. Another is when he describes an era where "humanity has gone soft" because humans accentuated highly feminine physical features, so much so you couldn’t tell men and women apart. To the galactic humans aboard Gravity and Blue Space, they think this is a relapse in society by letting such a time flourish. However, it was probably the most peaceful time in humanity as well.
But when you think about it, all of the initial impressions you get from Cheng Xin’s actions are wrong. She was a strong person. Can you imagine carrying the weight of all those deaths after the chaos that ensued deterrence was broken and still having the will to survive? She was ridiculed horrendously in Australia, and "failed" again when she hindered the progress of lightspeed research (failed in her eyes at least, because you never know the kind of terrible war she might have prevented in that act).
She treated all life with respect, kindness and authenticity; that's what she did towards Tianming, and look where it got her (ahem, a whole universe). And at the end, she lasted longer than all ya'll motherfuckers.
So much of what happens to our female swordholder may initially make us feel pity or frustration towards her. However, the book hints at the end that maybe the logic to her actions and her overall outcome in life is what in fact saves the last bit of humanity we have in us left. Reddit user zotsandcrambles puts it best in this reddit thread:
We learn that the universe is destroying itself because civilizations keep launching attacks that will hasten the destruction of the universe... She [Cheng Xin] professes again and again that civilizations shouldn't cause harm in order to preserve themselves, for that only creates more harm. She's completely correct, though we are led to believe she is foolish by the characters and politics around her.
Shrug. I take solace from this at least. I am happy the Swordholder made the decisions she did, even if i hated her for it as I was reading the book. I think this is the intention of the book: we hate her in the moment for not acting like the men before her, but we realize that the men before her created the situation of shit she was left to deal with. She was bounced around the inhumanity of the people around her, and at every point she tries to preserve some semblance of grace against the horrors she encountered. If the people before her had acted this way, she would never of had to been a Swordholder to begin with.
Philosophy in the three body problem trilogy
What does it mean to be human? This, I believe, is the main, simple, yet profound question that the entire series posits.
The most striking example of this is the solar system humans vs. the galactic humans, or humans that were born on earth (have this "attachment" to earth) vs. humans that were born in spaceships after they had defected from earth. Just think of how different we became as soon as we separated our species from our home. It just shows how important the Earth is to our humanity, and that we should be doing everything we can to preserve it.
Liu does a superb job of putting us humans in the perspective of the entire universe. Although so much of our lives may seem important, we are but a speck, a the grain in the vast desert that is the universe. It’s almost as if… all of our actions could be meaningless…!
Another tool Liu utilizes is the crushing weight of time. Time erodes everything and we as a species are all burdened by its length - it’s both always too long or too short. Billions of years can go by in a page and feel like nothing (and everything at the same time??), yet it’s time that allows us to progress, as humans did in the trilogy. It’s one of the many times he ties extremely opposing concepts in a paradoxical yet beautiful way.
These are just some of the many questions that I had for myself reading The Three Body Problem:
If humanity were pushed to the extreme limit, which happens throughout the entirety of this trilogy, how will we respond?
How much of the course of history for all of humankind determined by the collective versus individuals?
How do we want to be remembered, and how will we be remembered? What is our legacy, what does it mean to have a legacy? Think of the mausoleum of humanity on Pluto was like. If a higher alien species found your little slice of life, what would they think of it? What kind of mark do you want to leave on this world?
In the vastness of the universe, do we matter?
I can only think to answer the last question. I argue that through Liu’s writing, he tells us: actually, yes. We do matter in the vastness of the universe. We may feel small at times, but in the story, it was always individuals that had the greatest impact in our trajectory as a species. From all the Swordholders to Ye Wenjie, individuals literally changed the course of humanity.
Overall takeaways
So I hope that all somewhat made sense. I tried to distill the most important takeaways of the series in these 3 points:
Despite our insignificance in respect to the rest of the universe, there is merit in striving and aiming for the pinnacle of existence, to be the best people we can and should be.
The crushing weight of time and space does not necessarily hinder an individual's impact on the course of humanity, but it will if you let it.
Some times we have to do terrible things in order to reach that pinnacle, but we must remember never to lose our humanity or our values along the way. What those values are, though, are for you to decide.