Recently, a trilogy of science-fiction books has come under my radar. When I started reading it, however, a terrible curse befell me: I could not, for the life of me, put it down! The series in question is “Remembrance of earth’s past” by Cixin Liu, a sci-fi epic spanning multiple centuries of scientific discovery and innovation.

To start, I will give you my (mostly) spoiler free review of the first book in this trilogy, ‘the three-body problem’. Then, I will go into more detail about the book and discuss it more freely. This second part will contain spoilers.

 

If you have already read the book, stick around till the end for a detailed explanation of the science behind one of Cixin’s ideas.

The spoiler-free review

The main events this book revolves around are the Chinese cultural revolution from 1966 to 1976 and its aftermath in the present day. In the past, we mainly follow Ye Wenjie as she gets wrapped up in the secret operations of a military base. What they are doing is unknown, but we get a feeling that it is rather impactful. Over on the present side of things, the story revolves around a nano-scientist named Wang Miao. When a detective named Shi Qiang (a.k.a. best character) asks him to look into the mysterious suicides of theoretical physicists, strange things start to happen around him.

One interesting thing about Cixin Liu’s novels to mention is that they are more so event-driven than character-driven. Instead of having characters struggle through which they can develop, you see the story unfold through a large string of events in which the characters merely play a part.

A plot as compounding as physics itself

If you have read a book by Cixin Liu before, you’ll know him for his extraordinary attention to detail. It can sometimes feel like you’re reading a scholarly retelling of a historical event, even if that event is entirely made-up. Because of this eerily realistic storytelling, there is never a moment where an outlandish idea Liu proposes would cause you to lose emersion.

 

What’s more, this attentiveness makes for a fulfilling story wherein you will find that loose ends are tied up neatly. At first, the story will make you feel like you can’t see the forest for the trees, but slowly the yarn of plot unravels itself and everything starts to click. The plot is truly woven like a fine tapestry.

Sci-fi at its best?

This book puts the Science in science-fiction, with a capital S even. Every tiny scientific process, real or imaginary, Cixin Liu describes in detail, sometimes devoting entire chapters to some scientific invention. The book is, as we call it in the genre, a hard science-fiction novel. It is, admittedly, an acquired taste.

Although I really enjoyed the slow chapters where physics took the forefront, I can see how it could be a tad boring to some. If you already have a hard time keeping up with sci-fi, then this can turn out a confusing mess of a book because of all of the exposition. Luckily, the story and political intrigue is good enough so that you won’t mind these (possibly) tedious bits as much.

It is also a relief that this exposition is put to good use, because it lends itself to some of the most marvellous physics you’ll ever lay your (minds) eyes on. The inventions are just delightful, and when you recognise some of the physics they are based on, they become even more wonderful to read.

Final thoughts

I have been utterly obsessed throughout all of the 400+ pages of this novel. If you want my review in numbers, and I know physicists love numbers, I’d have to give it the following scores:

Story: 5/5

Characters: 3/5

Readability: 4/5

Magic-y science: 5/5

Final score: 85/100

If this overview sounds like your type of book, I’d say read it as soon as possible, become part of the Shi Qiang cult, and live happily.

If you feel like this isn’t the book for you, then it probably isn’t.

 

The spoiler area

If you don’t want to get the book spoiled, I am warning you:

Do not read!

Do not read!!

Do not read!!!

So yeah, that story though

It was a blast, like, full on, my mind just got radio-waved through some micro-wave cavities in the sun far into space with how my expectations were blown through the roof. First of all, the whole thing about getting to know Trisolaris through means of the 3-body game, though a bit slow at times, was very unique. Not knowing anything about what was happening to theoretical physicists and Wang Miao was also a mystery that kept me on edge till the end. And after the ball got rolling, it felt like it never really stopped.

I do have my gripes though. I feel like that ball’s moment of inertia was a bit high, because it took a while to get going. I went in hoping to find a grand-scale alien story, and was greeted by a story about – the cultural revolution? I will say that the second half of the book has influenced a bit of my judgement on the first half, finally seeing it all fall into place and stuff, but looking back I wasn’t as on board with this trilogy as I am now.

No real space for the characters

The characters on the other hand, I did not really like (except you Da Shi, you’re a real one <3). As stated earlier, they mostly act as a vehicle for the plot, making all but the most important characters feel a bit shallow. It can often feel as if only a few of the characters are truly alive, while the rest are just props for them to interact with. Lei Zicheng, Wei Cheng, Shen Yufei, even Wang Miao to some extent; all characters that I really do not remember that well looking back.

In some twisted way however, this actually didn’t feel like that much of a problem. It felt rather fitting for a world in which such grand events were about to occur to have insignificant people inhabiting it. It really is like humans are just tiny bugs in the grand face of the dramatic events that will unfold in the coming centuries. Of course, the main character that has been handled with proper care, Ye Wenjie, felt like a delicately crafted character that really developed and had her own motivations. Again, fitting because she was the one person to significantly impact the future of humanity.

Science that is out of this world

Of course, you can’t have sci-fi without science, and this book was full of it. To start, you have the Sophons, which were just genially implemented in the story as some mysterious, almost magical force that could later be explained through (rather vague) science. When these things were introduced, I was just imagining all of the possible applications they would have in our world if they were to be invented.

There is also some other Trisolarian tech, like the impressively complex 3-body game, which seem a bit too well-programmed at times, or the whole Trisolarian race as a whole, with their interesting biology. The whole hydrate-dehydrate biology is also a very interesting evolutionary trait, and it is weird enough as to make Trisolarians stand out from the human race.

And then you have the ‘solar mirroring’, which was used to amplify the transmission signal that would ultimately reach Trisolaris. While I was reading this, I was wondering if it had any real scientific basis, because it sounded quite plausible. As it turns out, it does!

The science of solar mirroring

In 1995, Guang Li et al (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/027510629500026O) discovered that electromagnetic waves can actually be amplified through the non-resonant wave particle interactions between electrons from an electron beam on one hand and the plasma of the atmosphere of the sun on the other. To put it simply, when electromagnetic waves created by the electrons (which oscillate) pass through the plasma (basically a medium with such high energies that the charges of atoms have separated), the free charges interact in such a way as to amplify the electron’s electromagnetic waves.

To put it not so simply, because of Pauli’s exclusion principle (discussed in more detail in The NTC thermistor and absolute zero), there must be a lot of high-energy particles in the volume of plasma because not all particles can occupy the lowest energy state. These particles oscillate, and this causes them to create electromagnetic waves.

These EM-waves can often be found in the spectrum of microwaves, and the interesting part is that these oscillation-waves will interact with outside waves. If they have a lower energy than the wave, the electrons will gain velocity and thus the reflected incoming wave will be damped. This is known as Landau damping. Inversely, if the waves have a lower energy like with radio-waves to micro-waves, the instability of the plasma medium will give a huge propulsion to the incoming waves when they are non-resonant, acting as an amplifier. This is akin to the effect in the book! If you want to know more about this, I suggest you read Wave-particle interactions in quantum plasmas – arXivarXivhttps://arxiv.org › pdf by Misra and Brodin.

Final final thoughts

So, I hope I have been able to share some of my enthusiasm about 3-body with you all. The people that have come this far will probably have read the series by now, or have decided it’s not worth their time (a shame, because there’s always time for Da Shi). I’d love to hear what you all think about this book, and the series as a whole. Feel free to comment down below and maybe start a discussion about how the Sophons are (not) overpowered or something.

I also really enjoyed writing about the solar mirroring. Once I’ve wrapped up some other projects, maybe I’ll try finding a scientific basis for all of the inventions in the series, so look forward to more content like this in the future!

Anyway, that’s all, I’ll teleport back to bed, and you have yourself a wonderfully magical week.