They’re so named because their planet revolves around three suns, which orbit in an unstable configuration. The message reaches the Trisolarans, who inhabit a star system four light years away from Earth. In a moment of despair, Ye Wenjie secretly broadcasts a message to the cosmos magnified by the sun, it invites any listening extraterrestrials to take humanity to task on its various moral failings. Here’s a bit more as background: During the Cultural Revolution, the daughter of a persecuted physicist gets involved with the Chinese effort to contact extraterrestrials, before the Americans and Soviets get to it first. A science fiction trilogy that starts out during the Cultural Revolution, imagine that. Three Body is primarily about first contact with aliens. I’m not familiar with either, instead his books remind me of Neal Stephenson’s: Full of science and philosophical engagement, with exposition of stunning ideas, all wrapped up in a tasty plot. Liu Cixin’s favorite science fiction authors are Arthur C. And like Thiel’s ideas, a layer of pessimism covers a radiantly optimistic core. It’s about how humans build new technologies, not how all scientific development culminates in dystopia. It presents a blueprint for how technology can advance, from building particle accelerators and fusion plants to colonizing the solar system and harvesting energy from different planets. The series emphasizes the importance of interiority and independent thinking.

The most important idea: When I hear Peter Thiel saying that we can imagine the future with the help of science fiction, this is the kind of story I feel he means.

As usual, my posts on books focus on the ideas I found most striking. I enjoyed the first two books, and thought to record some thoughts on the series as a whole, with spoilers kept to a minimum. Liu Cixin’s Three Body series is a science fiction trilogy that offers a vision of optimistic determinism.

The dark forest three body problem