In this series of posts, I review six novels with alien communication as a main plot point:

• China Miéville, Embassytown
• Ann Leckie, Translation State
• Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea
• Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Children of Time (book 1)
• Cinxin Liu, The Three-Body Problem–reviewed in this post
• Ursula LeGuin, The Dispossessed

The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu, 2006 (English translation by Ken Liu published in 2014)

This novel by the Chinese writer Liu Cixin (using the family name first here and then the given name, as is the Chinese practice) was lauded in China, where the writer is known admiringly as “Da Liu” (Big Liu). The Three-Body Problem, the first book in the trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past, was translated by American speculative fiction writer Ken Liu. It went on to win the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

Liu Cixin’s life, how he came to write science fiction, what his experience as a writer in China has been like–all these are very interesting. I had trouble with the novel, though, and I should admit this up front. Possibly this is because I found the translation very flat. Translations are their own art form, and it is hard for a reader who is not a native speaker of the author’s language to know whether her reaction comes from the novel. The second problem I encountered was confusion over what was happening when and to whom, and why. I am a pretty experienced reader of convoluted fiction time lines, and I had a lot of trouble. This may be because the novel was originally serialized and then stitched together, or possibly because the writing lost my interest right away and so I had trouble paying attention.

To address that second problem first: speculative fiction readers go about their reading with more variety of motives than other types of readers (just my guess). One type of science fiction reader is all about the ideas. Another type is all about the plot. I’m all about the writing, because I’m a reader first and a science fiction reader second. I am puzzled by readers for whom the reading experience is all about the ideas. Why not read an essay about the ideas instead? Why not just look over a PowerPoint of the ideas? I know I’ve said this before in this blog, and I know many readers disagree with me.

About those ideas. As I painfully pieced them out, I found that the novel is about a survivor of the Maoist intellectual purges, an astrophysicist who is allowed to rehabilitate herself and practice her discipline in a very small, controlled way at a backwater research station. That part I really enjoyed, because I knew little about the historical background. By the way, the translator Ken Liu’s footnotes were invaluable to me as an ignorant American reader. The scientist, Ye Wenjie, makes an important discovery, which she carefully keeps to herself and only a few she trusts: her research station has received a message from an alien culture on the planet Trisolaris, orbiting in a complex pattern around the double-star Alpha Centauri a and b, and their third companion (the closest star to the sun) Proxima Centauri.

The Trisolarans have a big problem. Their planet’s erratic orbit exemplifies a dilemma in the mechanics of motion, the “three-body problem” of the novel’s title. The solution to this problem has stymied physicists for centuries, all the way back to Newton. The novel is pretty clear about this problem, which I the non-scientist reader appreciated, but I also found it useful to find out more. THIS is a good general discussion. For the Trisolarans, this means a wildly unpredictable climate. The inhabitants of Trisolaris go through stable periods, but then chaotic periods follow, during which whole civilizations rise and fall. When they make contact with Earth, they covet Earth’s stable orbit and hence stable climate, eventually resolving to colonize Earth and migrate their whole civilization to our planet. This is all really fascinating, especially when the Trisolarans realize the trip to Earth will take them 450 years, even with their advanced spaceflight technology–meanwhile Earth, behind Trisolaris technologically, will have time to catch up and oppose the would-be colonizers.

Ye is fed up with Earth’s self-destructive ways. She joins forces with a powerful oil magnate to keep the Trisolaran plans secret while the two of them and their fellow conspirators collaborate with Trisolaris in the takeover of Earth. To draw recruits to their cause, the conspirators have developed an elaborate virtual reality game that Earth game players are enticed to try out.

This immersive game allows human gamers to imagine themselves into the Trisolarian dilemma–an endlessly repeating succession of Stable and Chaotic eras that re-set civilization to zero each time the Trisolarians fail to save their civilization from the erratic influences of their planetary system’s three suns. The game simulates the wildly fluctuating stable and chaotic eras, while Ye and her colleagues scrutinize the game-players for sympathy with the fate of Trisolaris and then recruit any sympathizers to the conspiracy to aid Trisolaris’s plans of Earth domination. The game, by the way, is where I lost interest. Many, many iterations of the game are described early in the novel, stopping Ye’s story cold and substituting a lot of farcical, heavy-handedly satirical conversations with such Earth luminaries as Einstein, Confucius, and Galileo.

I found this section of the book, which takes up quite a lot of its territory, pretty tedious. I have seen this problem before in other novels. Why do we need to hear practically every faux-Shakespearean line in Scott Lynch’s otherwise delightful The Republic of Thieves?–to use a speculative fiction example. Why do we hear much too much about ‘way too many productions of Our Town in Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake?–to use a non-speculative fiction example. (Random thought–interesting that these tedious interludes often feature some type of performance.)

Once I got out of the weeds of the gameplaying (disclosure: I’m a gamer myself but that didn’t help me appreciate the novel–when it comes to games, guess I’d rather play them than read about other people playing them), the plot picked up steam and became pretty entertaining. One big issue, the topic of this blog post, is how the Earth scientist Ye communicates with an alien civilization. The answer appears to be something very mysterious called a “self-translating code,” perhaps using quantum entanglement carried by something called “sophons.” The Trisolarans also use sophons to embed a kind of malware that will disrupt Earth’s technological and scientific progress.

There’s an entire Reddit thread devoted to this Trisolaran communication method and whether it is possible. The Redditor consensus says it’s not, but see for yourself HERE. Don’t worry about the spoilers–they are hidden unless you choose to un-redact them. Not being a physicist myself, I wouldn’t know, but the novel is coy about how the process works. As in, very very vague. At first blush, it appears the aliens of Trisolaris are calling Earth in perfectly understandable Chinese. But a closer read reveals that Ye creates her first message to the Trisolarians in the above-mentioned “self-translating code,” whatever that might be, even though we readers get it in Chinese (well, English in my case, because I don’t read Chinese and had to settle for the Ken Liu translation). A good bit of smoke and mirrors seems to be involved.

Okay for space opera. But a novel like this? Maybe I’m too dense to get this book, but I just didn’t. . . get. . . it. (That said, all the parts about the Chinese Cultural Revolution were fascinating.)

This novel reaches for a solution to the alien communication problem only a bit more sophisticated than the usual space opera hocus-pocus. Don’t get me wrong, I love space opera. But this book purports not to be, and I want a solution I can believe, or at least willingly suspend my disbelief to accept. A lot of these First Contact SF fictions are very careful about how the alien-to-human communication happens, and this one doesn’t do it for me in a believable way. I’m thinking of the 2016 film Arrival, for instance–I wasn’t totally convinced of the way the communication problem was solved, but the film tried hard, and a film has to compress these matters into a shorthand without the leisure to explore a complex issue at length, as in Embassytown or Translation State or The Mountain in the Sea.

Sorry, Three-Body Problem fans. Maybe my experience is simply a cautionary tale about how every reader is a different animal from every other. Maybe something gets lost in translation. It’s a mystery, and it’s what makes reading a fascinating de-coding communication problem all its own.

A note about the Netflix streaming series:

Out of curiosity, I just watched the first episode of season 1, and it was pretty intriguing. I don’t know if I will continue, or if I will read the other books in the trilogy. From a very brief look, I can say that, for me, the depictions of the game in the streaming series are much more compelling than the first book’s description, the acting in general gives me a better take on the characters than the (translated) writing, and the sequence of scenes gives me a better idea of where the plot is heading. This might be a case where I’d enjoy the streaming adaptation more than the book. I don’t really know that to be true, though, and knowing me, I’d want to read the other two books in the trilogy first, which I don’t think I’ll do. I always want to experience the first iteration of a fiction before I go on to an adaptation, whatever medium that may be. (For example, I played Fallout 76 before I watched the streaming show–good decision–and I regretted watching the streaming show of The Last of Us before I played the game.) It might be interesting to read on, though–two different translators for the three books of the series. What will that do to me the reader? Above all, I hold to this principle: The book is not always better than the movie. Substitute for book and movie whatever medium is appropriate.

But anyway, to do The Three-Body Problem a little more justice than you may think I have, here’s a fascinating quotation from the book for my next. . .

Speculative Fiction Advent Calendar of quotes. I give you the quotation for Day Four, Dec. 4, 2025: