The Three Body Problem

Nothing is more real than sci fi

There is hardly any other genre of literature more factual, more realistic and more inseparable from social commentary than the sci-fi. It is exactly its non-serious, detached from reality, and seemingly abstract character that allows sci-fi to escape censorship and ostracism to a far greater degree than it is normally possible for a work of art, let alone for a work of scholarship.

It is hard to discuss reality of the present, or of the past¹ directly. You will violate too many unspoken taboos, break too many shibboleths, evoke too much pain and face too much anger. It is not only that you will be attacked for it, it is also that people will not even listen. An argument presented seriously will be scanned for heresy. Should they identify heresy, they will reject an idea at once, without even considering it.

Selling a heterodox idea is a tough job to do.

And serious framing makes it very much tougher.

What you can do is present your argument non-seriously. Should you do it in a straightforward way, they will devour you alive. If, however, you frame it as an account of events happening long ago in a galaxy far away, they will swallow it. And once they digest it, and interiorise it, then they will apply it to the present themselves. Without your even telling them to. That is the trick.

Sci-fi allows you to to present the most painful, insulting, insufferable, obnoxious, criminal and traitorous arguments in a non-serious way, as a fun, as a joke.

In this regard, it is far superior to any other genre of literature.

Compare three possible ways to sell a heretical argument:

Broke: Frame it as a real story, happening in a real world.

Woke: Frame it as a made up story happening in a made up world

Bespoke: Frame it as an impossible story, happening in an impossible world

Impossible account, of the impossible events, happening in an impossible reality allows you to feed them any heresy, and get away with it.

And that is what sci-fi serves for.

Quality sci-fi should be read as a self-reflection and self-criticism of the society it is written in.

If the Gulliver’s Travels is a reflection on Britain…²

And the Idiocracy is a reflection on the United States…

… then the Three Body Problem is a reflection on China.

Even more interestingly, and unexpectedly, it is a reflection on Chinese history.

The World of Three Bodies

The world of Three Bodies is a world of civilisation revolving around the triple star. As the star is triple, with three suns orbiting around each other, their orbits are mathematically impossible to calculate. As a result, the civilisation of Three Suns (Trisolaris) has neither a predictable change of seasons, nor a reliable calendar. What it has is the unpredictable sequence of stable and chaotic eras, of unpredictable lengths.

Stable era occurs when one of three suns drags the planet into its orbit. During a stable era, the planet is revolving around this sun on a predictable, calculable trajectory. The temperature is mild, neither too hot, nor too cold. The seasonal change is regular, and possible to adjust to. All of that creates paradise, Earth-likes conditions of life.

“Civilization can only develop in the mild climate of Stable Eras”

Unfortunately, know one can tell how long will this paradise last: