Peel the Onion｜The Three-Body Problem: or how Chinese sci-fi seduced the world

By J. B. Browne

A few months ago, a friend asked me if I'd ever read the Three-Body Problem. No, never heard of it. It's an extraordinary Chinese science fiction novel. Ok, didn't see that coming. Any good? Trust me, read the first fifty pages, you'll be hooked. Intrigue struck. Sure enough, our next meet involved me receiving the mysterious book I knew nothing about, handed over with a grin like some sacred text or best-kept secret. What mind-melting worlds awaited my synapses?

In 2008, an oddly titled science fiction novel called The Three-Body Problem appeared in China, almost as mysteriously as it had appeared in my hands. In China, there are three volumes of a trilogy called Remembrance of Earth's Past to which the official English title for the first book is The Three-Body Problem. Chinese readers colloquially refer to the whole work as "Three-Body." The author is Cixin Liu, a Chinese science fiction writer born in 1963 who is a nine-time Galaxy Award winner, China's most prestigious literary sci-fi award.

What my initial reaction represented was the fact that through a process of cultural osmosis, I'd somehow concluded western sci-fi had seen a decline in recent years. I don't mean just any old sci-fi flick like Disney's goofy take on the Star Wars franchise. But the cultural shift away from the "thinking person's sci-fi" where vital questions about the human race, our purpose, the way we live, our relationship to technology, time, and the cosmos gets explored. If The Avengers do space travel, it's in the name of action and entertainment, not for science or education. If Interstellar does intergalactic, it does so trying badly to be sentimental, sappy even.

And just as the rapid technological and sociological changes of a mid-20th century western-hemisphere allowed conditions for writers such as George Orwell and Arthur C. Clarke to emerge (Liu cites both as important literary influences), China's massive growth and affluence within the last 40-odd years have allowed Chinese writers to create new sci-fi worlds of their own.

In recent years, Chinese sci-fi as a genre has become a global phenomenon, thanks mainly to this trilogy by Liu Cixin, which this past July became a best-seller in Japan. The English edition of the first novel, The Three-Body Problem, was published in 2014, gaining notable fans with surnames like Obama and Zuckerberg. Even Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin had this to say on the back of my copy: "a unique blend of scientific and philosophical speculation, politics and history, conspiracy theory and cosmology." High sci-fi praise indeed.

As the space fiction literature world came to grips with its newest contender, talk inevitably erupted over plans for a big-screen adaptation. By this time, Liu's trilogy was already the subject of pyretic speculation for both a blockbuster movie or TV series. For years the project flirted with the stigma of development limbo. Rumors included Amazon wanting to turn this unfilmable premise into a billion-dollar screen project. That was until the massive success of Chinese blockbuster The Wandering Earth in 2019, based on one of Liu's short stories.

On September 1, 2020, as I was writing this, Netflix announced its acquisition of the rights to produce the English-language series adaptation. Liu will serve as a consulting producer, and David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are executive producers. On the Netflix website, both producers released a joint statement describing Liu's work as "the most ambitious science-fiction series we've read, taking readers on a journey from the 1960s until the end of time, from life on our pale blue dot to the distant fringes of the universe."

So how did a science fiction book written by a lowkey former software engineer from Yangquan, whose wife and daughter never read his work connect so widely? There are likely a few reasons. The first would be the excellent and relatable translation by Ken Liu; an American ex-corporate lawyer turned translator and sci-fi writer who has fluency in Mandarin and is familiar with Chinese culture, history, and sci-fi tropes. It was Ken Liu who, in 2012, embarked on the English language version, with one of the most significant edits to start the novel with a mid-story flashback of scenes from the Cultural Revolution.

The second reason Liu's book has traveled so well in the Western world, particularly in America, follows from the first; Chinese sci-fi appeals to Westerners' views and imaginings of modern China. A trippy smorgasbord of insane history, technological utopia, incomprehensible growth, and a vast population and landmass with a large capital C. The riveting, politically charged, and bloody opening scenes of the first book play on western audiences' long-held suspicions of China, in their eyes, an authoritarian state, paranoid and hell-bent on power and progress at all costs.

Anyone who knows anything about the Cultural Revolution will feel shocked and appalled as the novel opens on a hard-to-read-can't-put-down "struggle session" in Beijing, 1967. A now once esteemed physicist is being humiliated, bullied, and talked down to by former students and later his wife. The political upheaval has turned them all into vicious Red Guards, demanding of the teacher why his views on the universe do not comply with the Party's anti-science revisionism. In the crowd is the teacher's youngest daughter, also a physics student. In a scene reminiscent of Arya Stark watching Ned Stark's beheading in front of a baying crowd, the young overzealous Reds beat the unbreakable man until he lies motionless.

The Three-Body Problem is essentially the story of the daughter, Ye Wenjie, done with humanity after witnessing the revolution and her father's purging. Ye eventually seizes control of a secret government program aimed at making contact with extraterrestrials. But because of the novel's disorderly timeline, Ye's youth story jumps back and forth to the present day centered on another scientist and a police detective who both retrace the consequences of Ye's actions in her youth.

At its core, The Three-Body Problem is an era-spanning story that flicks between the present day, the Cultural Revolution, and a mysterious video game. But as one would expect from an engineer, the story's focus is on plausible science-based fiction, not necessarily its thinly written characters. It's a missed opportunity because of the background, premise, scene-setting, and imagery from the in-novel VR game Three Body. Instead, character motivation is explained straight from the horse's mouth—"Desperation turned me from a pacifist into an extremist." But also clunky philosophical passages—"Is it possible that the relationship between humanity and evil is similar to the relationship between the ocean and an iceberg floating in its surface? Both the ocean and the iceberg are made from the same material. That the iceberg seems separate is only because it is in a different form. In reality, it is but a part of the vast ocean..."

Despite these grumbles, it's the compelling ideas of Three-Body that keeps the reader turning pages. There's a thriller element to the syle of how chapters end and make you want to keep going. The big ideas—"To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race," are resonant not just in China but also for humanity and never more so than in 2020. And of course, since we've all been Hollywooded with America as saviors-of-humanity vs. extraterrestrial threats for decades, it's only natural that Liu pivots his sci-fi world around his own country. But aside from these easily swappable elements, what then, are the differentiating characteristics of Chinese science fiction? It would seem not much other than being a fascinating departure from Western science fiction's tropes, brimming with enough actual science that you might learn something about humanity while being entertained. Don't wait for the Netflix series. Read the books first, hopefully, with a stellar translation. 

As he would refer himself, J.B. Browne is a half "foreign devil" living with anxiety relieved by purchase. HK-born Writer/Musician/Tinkerer.