“Professor Wang, have you ever had anything happen to you that changed your life completely? Some event where afterward the world became a totally different place for you?”
“No.”
“Then your life has been fortunate. The world is full of unpredictable factors, yet you have never faced a crisis.”
Wang turned over the words in his mind, still not understanding. “I think that’s true of most lives.” […]
“Yes, the entire history of humankind has been fortunate. From the Stone Age till now, no real crisis has occurred. We’ve been very lucky. But if it’s all luck, then it has to end one day. Let me tell you: It’s ended. Prepare for the worst.” (65)
Soon after moving to DC in my early 20s, I experienced a serious health condition. Recovery was slow and one of the side effects was brain fog, which manifested in many debilitating ways, chief among them as an almost complete inability to read. I could not keep the content of one sentence in my head long enough to connect it to the meaning of the following sentence. It felt like someone had neatly subtracted 50 points from my IQ. I felt like I had been lobotomized. It was devastating, and although I was told it was a temporary phenomenon, deep in my gut I believed that I was now permanently stupid and would never read or think deeply about literature or philosophy again.
I kept trying and failing to get into books. After a few pages, I’d realize I had absolutely no clue what I had just looked at. The connectome was not connecting. Eventually, I’d give up and turn on an episode of Stargate SG-1, which I’ve seen in its entirety so many times I don’t need my brain to follow it.
A couple of months into this distressing state of affairs, I wandered into Kramerbooks in DuPont Circle and picked up The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu from the front table. It had been published in English in 2014 and I was vaguely aware of it: cerebral Chinese sci-fi, Obama was a fan. I typically do not purchase full-priced new books on a whim—there is such a rich back catalog of time-tested classic sci-fi that I’m rarely curious about new releases. On its face, it’s an odd choice for someone who was struggling so profoundly to decipher the meaning of written words. It would’ve made more sense to go for some trashy beach read to ease me back into books. But, like I said, I wasn’t thinking straight, so I brought it home with me.
I opened The Three Body Problem and the words didn’t swim around in front of my eyes. I read the first chapter—about a bloody university struggle session during the Cultural Revolution—and then the next, and the next. It was a delightfully weird story, full of strange interludes set inside virtual reality video games and flashbacks about the Red Guard, but ultimately it was a dark mystery, complete with a rugged, chain smoking cop. I was ecstatic when I finished the book a couple of weeks later. It was proof that I was capable of reading a book, of being absorbed in a story. It was another couple of months before the fog fully lifted and I began to move through the world with ease, but finishing The Three Body Problem marked a turning point, when I knew I would be okay.
Recently, I became aware of the two competing TV versions of the Three Body Problem— the first, a Chinese-made 30-episode production now streaming on Amazon Prime under the title Three-Body, the second an international job on Netflix (known as 3 Body Problem) filmed mostly in English and directed by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, aka the two jackasses who ran Game of Thrones into the ground. We watched the first episode of each show and it was immediately clear that the Chinese production was superior in terms of fidelity to the book and non-annoying character development. It had been several years since I’d read the books, so I decided to revisit the whole trilogy, known collectively as the Remembrance of Earth’s Past.
My second reading of The Three Body Problem was under vastly different circumstances than my first, but I found it no less enjoyable. The first several episodes of the TV show mirror the book so precisely that I felt like I was hearing an echo as I watched the show and re-read the book concurrently—with one major omission. That brutal opening chapter set during the Cultural Revolution, which was so shocking to me (how did this get past the censors?), was defanged and buried for the show. I subsequently learned that in the original Chinese version of the book, this scene is hidden midway through the plot, but English-language translator Ken Liu suggested moving it to the beginning, with Cixin Liu’s enthusiastic agreement. It frames the story well, providing the context needed to understand a key character’s motivations.
The Three Body Problem is at turns bizarre and surprisingly conventional in its pacing, which hearkens back to detective stories, only this time the mystery is a string of suicides amongst scientists, and the enemy is unseen. Three-Body, the Chinese TV show, even has buddy-cop-flick vibes as a cop and a tormented scientist develop a grudging respect for one another. The pleasure of the novel is in the falling-into-place of carefully constructed pieces.
It’s not a perfect book. My second reading uncovered a couple of overly convenient plot points deployed in the service of tying in loose threads, and the disorienting video game sequences drag on for just a few too many beats. But the language is more beautiful and the characters more emotionally sophisticated and compelling than I had remembered. This is surely, in part, the hand of translator Ken Liu at work, because the English rendering of the second book by Joel Martinsen is wooden in comparison. (In spite of its relatively poor prose styling and some deficiencies in character development, The Dark Forest is full of its own wonders that I’ll address in a later post, and is not to be missed. In fact, as well as The Three Body Problem stands on its own, I believe that Cixin Liu wrote it so that he could write The Dark Forest and Death’s End. But now I’m getting ahead of myself.)
In a recent New York Times review of the TV show Three-Body, critic Mike Hale decrees that the trilogy is “generally understood to reflect historical Chinese anxieties about Western domination.” In a 2019 New Yorker profile of Liu, Jiayang Fang notes how readers from Chinese tech bros to Obama to Mark Zuckerberg ascribe similar meaning to the book. (N.B.: lots of spoilers in both articles!) I argue that this attitude fundamentally misunderstands both the novel and science fiction as a genre. While the story is expansive in scope and geopolitics does play a role, it is arrogant and incorrect to center the West, or even to interpret the story as an allegory to be decoded at all. Elements of science fiction can serve as ciphers for terrestrial power struggles, but I believe that only weak sci-fi seeks to serve as a roman a clef. The power of good sci-fi is not its ability to mirror or critique our present or past. It is its willingness to use history as a springboard to move beyond the psychological confines of our existing frameworks for understanding the world and to uncover truths about human nature that transcend petty provincial politics.
Liu is not a weak sci-fi writer. He is deeply rooted in the tradition of Golden Age science fiction, paying homage to such greats as Asimov and Clarke with Easter-egg names and occasional direct references. Attempting to map current or historical attitudes onto the players in The Three Body Problem is to underestimate the scope and ambition of the project. I understand why the New York Times is tempted to do so, why Obama probably felt he could project his narrow American understanding of China’s psychology onto the book. It’s always a risk when you have non-sci-fi fans reading a strong sci-fi book. If your exposure to sci-fi is defined by Avatar, with its painfully obvious anti-colonial message, then you might look for the allegory in every speculative story. It’s a lazy way to read.
I’m not trying to shame you non-sci-fi nerds. Really, I’m not. (Okay, maybe just a little bit—blame the residual trauma of growing up as a chubby little girl who was obsessed with Stargate SG-1 in a world of Harry Potter and Gossip Girl.) I’m just here to tell you that there’s so much more to science fiction than thinly veiled metaphors for imperialism and Space Nazis—as fun as those stories can be. Strong sci-fi is valuable and mind-expanding precisely because it does not map neatly onto our own world.
Ken Liu said it best in his foreword to Invisible Planets, an anthology of Chinese short science fiction that he translated into English:
“Given the realities of China’s politics and its uneasy relationship with the West, it is natural for Western readers encountering Chinese science fiction to see it through the lens of Western dreams and hopes and fairy tales about Chinese politics. [...] I would urge the reader to resist such temptation. Imagining that the political concerns of Chinese writers are the same as what the Western reader would like them to be is at best arrogant and at worst dangerous. Chinese writers are saying something about the globe, about all of humanity, not just China, and trying to understand their works through this perspective is, I think, the far more rewarding approach.”
Let go of your expectations and preconceptions about China when you open this book. My grandmother was Chinese (hence my middle name), but I have no special knowledge or insight into the character of the country beyond that of any other moderately well-informed American who occasionally listens to a podcast about China or watches a kung fu movie. I was forced to set aside my Western biases the first time I read The Three Body Problem because my brain was (temporarily) broken and simply couldn’t make those connections. This time, I had to will myself into that state and open my mind to a very alien—and yet universal—set of ideas. I can attest: it’s worth the effort.
And please, for the love of god, don’t encourage those Game of Thrones assholes by watching the Netflix series.