MS: In The Dark Forest, the trilogy’s middle act, the nature of the universe is revealed to be even darker and more brutal than humankind’s encounters with the Trisolarans in the first book suggested. But Liu’s references to China’s Cultural Revolution and environmental degradation emphasize that this kind of instability isn’t really so unfamiliar, and his thesis isn’t so speculative as we’d prefer.
Earth, with its stable solar orbit and sentimental humans, is ripe for invasion: our own luck is about to run out.
The moments of stability, when civilization can flourish and advance, are lucky exceptions to the chaos. Their culture is ruthlessly utilitarian, because they’ve had to progress in an environment in which no one knows, no one can even guess, whether any sun will come up tomorrow or the sky stay dark for a hundred years. What we see as our patrimony-a temperate Earth, a rational universe, a stable society-is really just a pocket of luck.įour light-years away, the Trisolarans have evolved in a trinary star system whose complex, unpredictable orbital pattern (the titular three-body problem of classical mechanics) makes the system’s lone planet unbelievably harsh and uncertain. Theodore McCombs: The thesis introduced in The Three-Body Problem, the trilogy’s first book, can be handily summed up in a line from one of its last chapters: You’re bugs! The cosmos is not, apparently, an orderliness gradually unveiling itself to humanity’s delight, and the dream of individual self-fulfillment looks embarrassingly naive.
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