The Three-Body Problem

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I heard nice things about The Three-Body Problem recently. Specifically, I participated in a blog comment thread discussing the novel Decoded by the Chinese writer Mai Jia, which I'd read a couple years back. Somebody else in the thread mentioned this book as a better example of recent Chinese literature, and it did win the 2015 Hugo award for Best Novel. And (best of all) I still have borrowing privileges at Dimond Library of the University Near Here, it was available there, so…

It's a mind-blowing tale of interstellar chicanery, but first there's a horrifying tale of how China essentially went insane during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s. This was also a plot point in Decoded—apparently it's allowed for current Chinese writers to honestly examine that period. (Don't get your hopes up; the censorship in China is still pretty bad. Tianmen Square? Fahgettaboudit.)

The Cultural Revolution smashes apart the family of Ye Wenjie. Her physicist father is killed when he refuses to renounce relativity, quantum mechanics, and the big bang theory. One of his denouncers is his wife, Ye Wenjie's mother. Ye Wenjie is an astrophysicist by training, but, politically suspect, she's banished to Mongolia to harvest timber. She gets into even more trouble there, involving a copy of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.

Eventually, however, she's rescued, recruited into working on the mysterious "Radar Peak" military installation. Which turns out to be a Chinese effort to communicate with extraterrestrial civilizations.

Jumping ahead to the (roughly) present day, Wang Miao is a researcher working on nanotech. He gets unexpectedly recruited by a police investigation into a wave of suicides among physicists. He is led into playing the immersive virtual-reality game "Three Body", the origin of which is mysterious. The game itself is set in a nightmarish world continually thrown into chaos by its unpredictable orbital path around its three suns. In related news, it seems that the very underpinnings of physics are being ripped asunder. (I hate it when that happens.)

The book is not without humor. One of the other "Three Body" players is described: "The strangely dressed woman was a famous writer, one of those rare novelists who wrote in an avant-garde style but still had many readers. Your could start one of her books on any page."

I laughed out loud at that one.

Bad news: The Three-Body Problem is part one of a trilogy, and it ends in kind of a cliffhanger.


Last Modified 2024-01-26 10:28 AM EDT