Chinese author Liu Cixin’s monumental science fiction book The Three Body Problem, which has now been adapted into a Netflix series under the punchier title 3 Body Problem, has a little something to annoy just about everyone – from climate change activists to skeptics, Chinese Communists to anti-communists, nationalists to open-borders fanatics. It is a big story with big ideas, and like most great works of fiction, not even the author can fully control how its events are interpreted.
Liu should be applauded for having the intellectual honesty to insert both ideas he might personally favor, and contrary or skeptical notions, into his massive tale. The Three Body Problem and its Netflix adaptation are only the beginning of a trilogy, continued in The Dark Forest and concluded with Death’s End.
The following review will necessarily contain major spoilers for the first book and the Netflix series, so avoid reading further if you prefer to remain unspoiled.
The title of Liu’s first book refers to a complex mathematical problem about predicting the movement of a planet in a solar system with three suns. The book lays out the Three Body Problem in considerable detail, while the Netflix show pithily summarizes it by having someone explain that you can’t predict the movement of a planet between three suns, at least not for long.
The Three Body Problem is a very big problem indeed if you happen to live on a planet orbiting between three suns, because it would be sheer hell. Your world would be alternately frozen solid and baked to a crisp. You might have a golden age of perfect climate and lush growth for a few decades, and then watch in horror as your planet was torn asunder by massive earthquakes. Everything you built would be obliterated on a regular basis.
If you lived on such a world, you would evolve into something very tough, vicious, and focused on survival at all costs. Perhaps you might find a way to preserve knowledge between those random planetary apocalypses, and a way to hibernate until the world became habitable again. Perhaps your species would endure that way for a million years, achieving fantastic advances in technology… and then, one day, a very bitter Chinese lady sends you a radio signal from four light-years away describing her beautiful, stable planet, and complains that her lousy species is doing a terrible job of caring for it.
You’d think about migrating, wouldn’t you? It would take four hundred years to reach your new home, but your species long ago learned to hibernate, to be patient and ruthless, and your culture values survival as the highest goal, beyond all human notions of morality. You might come to see the relatively primitive inhabitants of your new home as inferior and untrustworthy.
Can the inhabitants of Earth really complain about the horror that will unfold when you arrive? They know perfectly well what usually happens when a technologically superior force decides to colonize a primitive land.
The Three Body Problem has plot beats that could be claimed as vindication by every side of any current debate. The most obvious example is climate change. Some readers and viewers see the story as philosophical vindication for climate activists, because the human protagonists are forward-looking people who insist on making sacrifices to prepare for an invasion that will not arrive for four hundred years.
Some of the characters insist there is no reason to worry about a seemingly inevitable disaster that won’t happen for generations, long after everyone they know and care about has died. They object to spending trillions of dollars to prepare for an alien attack in the distant future, when that money could be spent improving life on Earth right now. These characters could be seen as allegories for “climate denialists.”
On the other hand, the cultish human servants of the oncoming alien conquerors are very much like today’s climate activists. Their relentless hit woman is basically Greta Thunberg with a license to kill. They claim the mantle of science and proudly declare themselves above human religion, but their movement has all the trappings of religious extremism. They’ve literally embraced the super-advanced aliens as their “Lord,” and they reject all arguments and evidence against their beliefs.
The human servants of the aliens share the supreme arrogance and contempt for humanity that climate extremists display. The aliens regard humanity as “bugs” and plan to exterminate most of them upon arrival – a plan many climate and overpopulation extremists in the real world would wholeheartedly support.
The cultists are happy to condemn the rest of humanity to misery and death, but they believe they, and their descendants, will be granted special privileges. They are utterly convinced of their own superiority. They would say the science is settled, and their enemies are denialists.
Late in the Netflix version of the story, one character suggests that people should simply have fewer children, so the human race essentially dies out before the aliens have a chance to murder us all. This is not far removed from the thinking that has produced demographic death spirals in countries around the world, including China.
A crucial early detail is that the woman who condemns the human race to extinction is a big fan of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring – one of the earliest and worst examples of junk science, a doomsday environmentalist tract that condemned millions of people to death by malaria based on falsified and exaggerated evidence and hysterical appeals to emotion.
The aliens themselves are fleeing from an environmental catastrophe, but it is nobody’s fault – their world is horrific and doomed because it was born that way. The aliens hint that charlatans have seized power throughout their history by claiming they could predict the weather and blaming natural catastrophes on sinful behavior.
The alien invasion can also be seen as a grim parable for mass migration. The people of Earth will be given no say in whether the migrants of the stars should be welcomed or rejected. The aliens come from an awful place, and they are bringing all of their negative cultural baggage with them. Their culture is inherently authoritarian, unified, and focused upon conquest – their motto is, “If one survives, all survive.” They are casually murderous, having no concept of individual rights, and they place no value upon individual life.
The aliens are disturbingly similar to real-world authoritarian governments like the People’s Republic of China. They shrewdly play upon the perceived weaknesses of free societies and manipulate human compassion. They wage information warfare on a delirious scale, using a technology that lets them communicate with Earth centuries before they will physically arrive. They recruit human agents using a propaganda-laced virtual reality game – it’s like TikTok, except you can smell it.
Many readers, and now viewers, of The Three Body Problem have been fascinated by its harsh portrayal of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. How could Liu have slipped something so critical of Communism past the million-man army of Chinese censors? (Answer: he moved the Cultural Revolution scenes to the middle of the book, where the censors were less likely to dwell upon them, but he believes those scenes belong at the beginning of the story, as they are presented in the English translation and Netflix show.)
The evils of the Cultural Revolution are only one of many provocative ideas contained in Liu’s sprawling work, culminating in the existential question of whether it really matters, in the cosmic scheme of things, who “owns” the Earth. Is humanity worth fighting for? Is it possible to defeat an adversary that wants to live more than we do? Is it possible to co-exist with an utterly alien civilization, or should they be terrified of each other? Do the problems of two little intelligent species amount to a hill of beans in this crazy universe?
A great story has something for everyone, which means it also has something to irritate everyone. A great war story must convey the enemy’s point of view, and that is bound to be uncomfortable when contemplating an enemy of the entire human race. At the conclusion of its first act, The Three Body Problem asks readers and viewers to consider the possibility that whatever they think of humanity, they might be wrong.
