If a time comes when we meet an impossibly advanced civilization, who will you support? The flawed humans or the advanced aliens?
Do you even humanity is worth fighting for?
These are the questions that Cixin Liu's Hugo award winning masterpiece raises. Set in the backdrop of the Cultural Revolution in China, we see our protagonists experience tremendous hardships. The kind that make you hollow, that make you lose faith that humanity could be redeemed.
And why should that faith of redemption even exist? Humanity is responsible for one of the biggest mass extinctions in Earth, an extinction that is still ongoing. We’re making a mess of our planet through pollution and global warming. And we just can’t stop fighting ourselves.
This is the kind of stuff that makes you believe that only help from elsewhere can save us from ourselves.
***
Three Body Problem uses clever techniques to explore the history and the motivations of the aliens. For instance, there is a game that uses a body suit to simulate sensations of heat or cold. At first, I was wondering what the author was doing with this arc, but then the pieces fell in place.
There is also a decent amount of hard science in the book, if the title of the book didn’t give you any indication. The three body problem refers to a problem in physics about the orbits of 3 masses (say, stars).
While with 2 masses the orbits may be stable and predictable, with 3 bodies it becomes chaotic and unpredictable. For some time, you might have stability, but other times there’s complete chaos.
A person in a planet will face utter chaos in such a triple star system. For some years there may be warmth, moderate temperatures, and flourishing lives as the stars are neither too far nor too close.
Then as the chaotic era approaches, the flames of the stars almost lick the planet. The person simply burns into a crisp.
The heart of the book is also to be about civilizational ebbs. The stable and chaotic eras not just haunt the aliens, they also haunt any society. And nowhere is this more evident than in China.
Marred by death or famine in one century, and prosperity and growth in the next, China’s history is full of Stable and Chaotic Eras.
Perhaps, the aliens in the Three Body Problem aren’t that different from humans.
Do you even humanity is worth fighting for?
These are the questions that Cixin Liu's Hugo award winning masterpiece raises. Set in the backdrop of the Cultural Revolution in China, we see our protagonists experience tremendous hardships. The kind that make you hollow, that make you lose faith that humanity could be redeemed.
And why should that faith of redemption even exist? Humanity is responsible for one of the biggest mass extinctions in Earth, an extinction that is still ongoing. We’re making a mess of our planet through pollution and global warming. And we just can’t stop fighting ourselves.
This is the kind of stuff that makes you believe that only help from elsewhere can save us from ourselves.
***
Three Body Problem uses clever techniques to explore the history and the motivations of the aliens. For instance, there is a game that uses a body suit to simulate sensations of heat or cold. At first, I was wondering what the author was doing with this arc, but then the pieces fell in place.
There is also a decent amount of hard science in the book, if the title of the book didn’t give you any indication. The three body problem refers to a problem in physics about the orbits of 3 masses (say, stars).
While with 2 masses the orbits may be stable and predictable, with 3 bodies it becomes chaotic and unpredictable. For some time, you might have stability, but other times there’s complete chaos.
A person in a planet will face utter chaos in such a triple star system. For some years there may be warmth, moderate temperatures, and flourishing lives as the stars are neither too far nor too close.
Then as the chaotic era approaches, the flames of the stars almost lick the planet. The person simply burns into a crisp.
The heart of the book is also to be about civilizational ebbs. The stable and chaotic eras not just haunt the aliens, they also haunt any society. And nowhere is this more evident than in China.
Marred by death or famine in one century, and prosperity and growth in the next, China’s history is full of Stable and Chaotic Eras.
Perhaps, the aliens in the Three Body Problem aren’t that different from humans.
