No, this is not a political post.
I read through the Three Body Problem trilogy in the last half of this year and the final book, Death's End, has been bouncing around my head since I finished it. I'm not capable of pulling together a "prestigious review of books" style essay about it, but I have some thoughts I need to vomit out, so here we go.
*SPOILERS BELOW*
First, if you follow Warren Ellis' newsletter he may have already said all there is to say about it. I agree with him pretty much in that there ARE really weird sexual politics at play and it does seem to attack the very idea of a human society that prizes love, empathy and peace, at least within the context of the Three Body universe (TBU).
I made this mistake of reading reviews for the first two books before I read them. I thought they were giving me the set-up but instead gave me the reveal of both books. This didn't really kill my enjoyment, but I didn't love the spoilers. So if you want to read the series maybe come back to this post later. I'll just say I recommend it, although not if you're in need of a pick-me-up emotionally.
I loved quite a bit about this series, especially the big, bold ideas. These books are classic SF in the best sense and I was surprised at how much I had missed the genre. From the beginning, though, there is a persistent bud of bleakness that fully blossoms in Death's End. As wonderful as the big ideas are, the series is just once big disaster for the human race after another. Which is probably another reason why I loved it: I'm a sucker for disaster stories.
After the big reveal in the Dark Forest that the universe is actually quite full, and generally engaged in a ruthless competition for resources, this premise is unrelentingly taken to its bitter end. The series is gorgeous and graceful but takes a long, artful swan dive into oblivion in this final book.
Everything about this universe is decay. The context of the story is eventually revealed to be a universe slowly being fragmented and destroyed by war, tearing down the very natural laws of the universe over the long span of history. The first rule of the TBU is that resources are limited and all species are ruthlessly competitive for them, where genocide is considered common and understandable. These species all climb in power and understanding of the universe, and those who get there first eventually start using weapons that destroy the natural universe irrevocably. Not only will they destroy star systems, and all the inhabitants therein, they've been steadily reducing the speed of light as a defensive measure (or technological side-effect) and slowly destroying the higher dimensions of spacetime and retreating further and further into the lower dimensions (the idea being that a 10-dimensional being who is tossed into 9-dimensional space by a weapon will die). Dimensional warfare is so wildly successful at killing one's enemies, that the higher dimensions are slowly destroyed, with some species managing to survive by retreating more carefully to the lower dimensions.
By the time of Death's End, the speed of light is what we know it as, and the universe is down to 4 dimensions, the 4th of which is decaying into the 3rd (destroying everything in it, like all dimensions before it). Not naturally, of course, the result of an unending war that takes no prisoners and knows no limits. None of this is humanity's immediate problem at the start of Death's End.
Humanity's immediate problem is the trisolarans, the only species that knows about them, and is determined to take Earth from them. Normally an alien species would annihilate a nearby species, but the trisolarans live in an unstable trinary star system and desperately want the stability of Earth's relatively predictable orbit for themselves.
In the Dark Forest humanity learned its confidence in its own technology was misplaced after a single trisolaran probe destroyed thousands of human ships in the span of a few minutes. They are saved by the mysterious wall-facer who successfully bluffs the trisolarans with a deadman switch that will broadcast the location of both Earth and Trisolaris to the larger universe, ensuring the destruction of both. This leads to a new era of coerced but productive co-operation between cultures, which is where we pick up in Death's End.
From there the formula is roughly similar to the Dark Forest. A long period of peace, prosperity and advance, followed by a spectacular fall from grace. The first of which nearly destroys the solar system. The second of which DOES destroy the solar system, leaving a small, extra-solar remnant, and the 3rd of which is more of a tragic catastrophe for the protagonist in particular.
There is a tug of war between the most optimistic of human ideals and our darker, more totalitarian impulses throughout and I say it's bleak because time after time it's revealed that dark, masculine totalitarianism would have saved us and it's feminine compassion, love and hope that damns the species. Like Warren said, there are some weird gender politics in this book. The trisolarans attack the moment the deadman switch is switched from the gruff male wallfacer to a more compassionate woman who the trisolarans believe, quite accurately, will not make good on the bluff should they attack. This leads to a mass slaughter and incarceration of the entire species in Australia, which is turned into one big concentration camp. It is only the the dark authoritarians of an extra-solar ship who manage to call the bluff, and damn both Sol and Trisolaris.
This solves the problem of trisolaris for Earth, but replaces it with a broader existential threat of annihilation by unknown species who may not be aware of them. After witnessing the spectacular destruction of trisolaris shortly after its location is revealed to the broader universe, Humanity leaves Earth for the outer solar system, planning to use the gas giants as a shield, should their sun be exploded the same way the trisolarian's was. Around this time humanity discovers the idea of a drive that literally bends space to achieve light speed, but also discovers use of such a drive leaves permanent bubbles where light has a lower speed in it's wake. And further, that this drive and these bubbles are probably the reason trisolaris was targeted so quickly.
Determined to present an unappealing target, humanity outlaws space drives, while against all odds it builds thriving habitats in the outer solar system. At some point, the protagonist, who remains the center point of a story covering a very long time-span through a combination of suspended animation and light speed travel), once again chooses to stop a grim authoritarian man from forcibly pushing through space drive technology in favor of democracy, compassion and hope which, again, turns out to be the doom of humanity.
As it turns out, hyper-powerful aliens who have survived in the dark forest of the universe for any length of time are not stupid, and they drop a dimensional bomb into the solar system which reduces the dimensionality of sol space from 3 to 2 in one of the most spectacularly beautiful and terrible sequences of the book. These weapons, it turns out, do not have a limit. They just slowly collapse the dimensionality of space in an ever-expanding radius. There's an interesting moment where aliens who do it justify the use of such a weapon to themselves because use of these weapons is common. So, fresh off the horror that the 4th dimensions is nearly collapsed completely into the 3rd (killing everything in it), we are made to see that our three dimensions are slowly collapsing our universe into 2, as careless alien gods casually drop these bombs into offending star systems and either have plans to retreat into 2-d space themselves or simply don't care about inevitable universal destruction that surely must be many millions of years away.
Finally, as the protagonist has escaped the doomed solar system in the only space-drive enabled ship (although not before seeing the destruction of everything first-hand), we are left with a smaller set piece nearer to the end of time. The one extra-solar ship of grim authoritarians who revealed and thus destroyed Trisolaris and Sol have managed to restart the human race elsewhere, now fully aware of the two rules of survival in this universe, "hide and cleanse." This means hide from other species, cleanse any who look dangerous if you can. She is on her way to meet her star-crossed lover who has survived this long in his own crazy story only to be caught in a new kind of bomb, resulting in tragedy.
As the dimensions collapse and the universe winds its way to a grisly end, there are some groups who have come to believe the only solution is to collapse the universe and start with a new big bang. These are death worshippers essentially. In orbit above her lover's planet, a bomb goes off that reduces the speed of light dramatically in the entire system, causing her ship to shut down. She manages to survive it and land, but lower speed limit or no, relativity still applies and she finds millions of years have passed while she was been moving at the new light speed in orbit around the planet. Her lover is long dead, but has left a pocket universe for her.
She and one other survivor spend some time in the pocket universe and make a life there, determined to wait out the collapse and big bang with hopes to start over in a new universe. Unfortunately, most advanced species have had this same idea and too much matter has been taken from this universe and stored in pocket universes for the gravitational pull of the universe to be sufficient for collapse, and so the book ends with them finding some barely hospitable planet, returning all their stolen matter, and going through the door to wait for the end. Cheery, huh?
I'm not saying it wasn't compelling and gorgeous and page-turning. It very much was. But my god, the bleakness of that philosophy and that universe. I'm not sure it was the best choice of reading material after the election (for those of us who were seriously bummed out by the election), but I don't think I regret reading it.
In some ways, though, I found the book very refreshing and even kind of a warning of sorts. It's not too often you have someone point out quite as bluntly as Cixin Liu does here that the universe doesn't particularly care about our high-minded ideals and there's a reasonable chance any alien cultures we meet won't share them either. That, in fact, as a species we run the serious danger of believing our high-minded stories about who we are and are destined to be and how the arc of the universe bends towards justice and peace and prosperity which are certainly good and motivational ideas in the short term on this planet, but which may cause gaps in our survival logic should we eventually be faced with bigger existential questions than we are now. In short, the universe has no particular stake in our survival and the greater context of our existence in this galaxy could be far scarier than simply neutral and indifferent. So it's bleak, yes, but maybe it's a bleak idea we need to consider as a possibility from time to time.
As far as the warning goes, it almost feels like a message to modern civilization. Assuming the metaphor of the dark forest can be applied to Earth's political competition for resources, what might Liu be trying to say? That this thread of civilization is more fragile than we think it is? That arms races logically end up with the entire destruction of the habitat? That our self-confidence in our advances and the inevitable march of progress are potentially counter-productive delusions that can come crashing down around us at any time? That we will never truly unify as a species and our only hope is an authoritarian culture that proves better at surviving than it's neighbors? I'm not sure. And I wouldn't agree with all of that if so. But it's at least interesting to have someone pose these kinds of questions.
So there you have it. I'm not sure why I needed to summarize the whole damn book, but I guess it's what I needed to get out. I left out some details, both beautiful and bleak, but I think I got the gist across. The TBU is beautiful, depressing, incredibly thought-provoking and a perverse delight to visit. But I don't think I'd want to live there.
