The Three-Body Problem

Written by Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem is a hard science fiction novel that shines when it’s subverting the genre and developing its main themes. It can both fascinate us with its creative world and disappoint us with its underdeveloped characters and anticlimactic ending.

The protagonist is the Chinese scientist Wang Miao, whose research in nanotechnology is put in check when a mysterious group of individuals threatens him in what appears to be a supernatural way: Miao begins to see a countdown floating in his field of vision, regardless of where he looks at. The quest for answers eventually leads the scientist to a virtual-reality videogame called “Three Body,” where he needs to solve a seemingly impossible problem to uncover what’s really going on in his own world.

The scenes that take place inside the videogame are very imaginative in their visual construction, resulting in imagery that borders on the surreal. In the Three Bodies’ universe, individuals are being constantly dehydrated and rehydrated to survive the natural adversities caused by their special sun: sometimes burning everyone down because it’s too close, sometimes making everyone freeze to death because it’s too far away, the star challenges the greatest academics to find a pattern in its movement. So, the game’s goal is to create a calendar that can predict when that world will enter a stable era (when the sun behaves as expected) and when it will enter a chaotic one (when the sun, much like Nintendo, suddenly and without warning decides to go rogue and stop acting according to any discernable logic).

Because the book is “hard” science fiction, these sequences in virtual reality become a clash between surrealism and science: in the midst of all the extensive and thorough technical ponderings on the movements of stars and the inner-workings of technologies are situations that don’t just border on the absurd, but revel in it. At one point, Isaac Newton and Leibniz emerge dueling with swords in front of a Gothic pyramid to decide who invented calculus, while in another, millions of soldiers in formation communicate by colored flags to solve mathematical equations as if they were the parts of a computer. This contrast is further expanded at the end of the book, in which increasingly fantastic situations (a three-dimensional opened proton is removed from a planet’s orbit after attempting to destroy it) are explained in increasingly difficult terms.

This mixture of science and madness works so well in The Three-Body Problem only because it reflects the drama the characters themselves are facing. When Miau starts to see the countdown, for example, he struggles to come up with a plausible reason for the event, thinking he must be going mad. Some physicists around the world are giving up and committing suicide after doubting the validity of their field of study. There is, therefore, a battle between science and madness, and the former is constantly losing. In other words, the narrative’s secret is how it ties the plot to the thorough technical explanations it’s constantly offering: since the novel’s greatest mysteries are connected to how some technologies operate, the more they are explained, the more the mysteries start to unravel.

But the book also contains some important political and social discussions, building an additional conflict between science and politics. The story begins with the death of a professor during the Chinese Cultural Revolution: revolutionaries are portrayed as a group of enthusiastic but violent and foolish young people – mainly due to their tendency to overuse terms such as “reactionary” (the one considered more intelligent among them, for instance, argues that the theory of relativity is reactionary and a symbol of capitalism) – while the military, who’s violently repressing them is deemed unnecessarily brutal, even vandalizing the body of a girl who was just fifteen years old. The Cultural Revolution is often criticized in the narrative, even being plainly categorized as “evil” during a certain scene.

Moreover, scientific progress is often jeopardized in the story due to completely crazy ideological obstacles. At one point, for example, a scientist is prevented from conducting an experiment that involves pointing an antenna at the sun because the action allows for dangerous symbolic interpretations, as the political leader in China is named after the star (its unhinged version in the game, then, gains political implications).

The character that connects most of these elements is not the protagonist, actually, but a scientist named Ye Wenjie. The injustices and tragedies of the Chinese Revolution make Wenjie resent the existence of humanity. She’s a nihilist woman who’s unable to see a positive future for humanity, which she considers to be evolving only in its stupidity and self-destructiveness (and be honest, can you blame her?). But the story eventually shows her immense compassion – a small act of kindness is enough to make her momentarily question her ideals, for example –, which makes the character even more tragic, indicating that her terrible actions could have been avoided had she lived in a less cruel environment.

The narrative, however, falters when it comes to the typical Dan Brown tropes it employs: it contains a worldwide conspiracy, discussions about the existence of aliens, and it even problematizes the possible discoveries of particle accelerators – although the novel’s stance on this technology gradually turns out to be entirely positive, considering it integral to the technological advancement of mankind.

Liu, however, copies the worst of Dan Brown too, especially with a protagonist who couldn’t be more uninteresting and bland. Wang Miao has no personality, being so passive in the face of events that he comes out more as a narrative device than a proper individual: his love of taking pictures, for example, is promptly discarded after its narrative function is fulfilled. It’s no wonder that Wenjie ends up being the character that stands out the most in the story. After all, she’s the only one with a narrative arc and an active personality, being able to create events instead of just reacting to them. It’s a shame, then, that for most of the time we follow Wang’s perspective and not hers.

Finally, the plot surrounding the worldwide conspiracy ends on an anticlimactic note: the book is the first in a trilogy, and its climax functions more as a turning point – the end of the first act – than anything else, leaving almost every thread open.

The Three-Body Problem works great when it subverts its genre, mixing complex explanations of technology with events that are totally bonkers in nature. But it fails, however, when it focuses on a vapid protagonist and concludes in a disappointing manner.

May 07, 2025

Review originally published in Portuguese on August 08, 2016.