The novel’s heroine, Cheng Xi, is a brilliant and humanitarian scientist from our present who arrives in Earth’s future, in the midst of Luo Ji’s détente with the Trisolarans. Yes, there are exceptional people who make a difference, but it’s limited. TM: Finally, in the trilogy’s synthesis, Death’s End recalibrates the miracle of Luo Ji’s success to the hostility of the universe. In humanity’s darkest hour, Luo Ji finally grasps the truth of cosmic civilization, and miraculously forces a truce between Earth and the Trisolarans.
Or rather, love backed by the plausible threat of mutual assured destruction.
Empathy, cooperation, and individual dignity may be self-evident to us, but in the vast, dark emptiness of space, survival and suspicion are the true prime directives.Īnd yet, surprisingly, as The Dark Forest carries humankind inexorably toward annihilation by the Trisolarans, the novel’s hero, Luo Ji, discovers that the antithesis to You’re bugs! is … love. Like the illusions of benevolence and stability we perceive in the universe, our Enlightenment ideals also prove to be quirks of a unique perspective that emerged out of our species’ unusual pocket of good luck, as dependent on initial conditions as the irresolvable three-body problem itself. Advanced civilizations abound in the cosmos, perhaps on the order of millions or billions, but don’t expect them to sign on to the United Federation of Planets. 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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