As a genre, science fiction is well-suited to small, one-off narratives that, nevertheless, have great impact.
The Isaac Asimov Robot stories, each a self-contained narrative, nevertheless served to popularize the idea of a humanized android in popular science fiction, and his Foundation novels inspired concepts like the city-planet and the Galactic Empire found in massively successful media like Star Wars. Likewise, Orwell’s 1984 became the foundation of the booming dystopian science fiction subgenre enjoyed by millions, and William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer, short and relatively strange, almost single-handedly mainstreamed cyberpunk.
And yet, some science fiction works are impactful in and of themselves, and among this number I count Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past series, most commonly referred to by Chinese readers as The Three-Body Problem trilogy.
As a science fiction writer, Liu has an impressive pedigree. In 2015, a translation of the first book in the series, The Three-Body Problem, into English won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the very first Asian novel to do so. Subsequently, other books in the series have also won or been nominated for various science fiction awards. The Three-Body Problem has sold at least 8 million copies, with 1.5 million being sold outside of China. Write-ups in The New Yorker and The New York Times touted Liu’s first novel in the trilogy, and it gained endorsements from high-profile figures like Mark Zuckerberg and then-President Barack Obama.
His works are best known for their ability to transfer themes from Chinese history, politics and society into a story relatable to Western audiences (thanks in large part to translations on two of the books by Ken Liu, another Hugo Award-winning novelist). For example, much of the plot of The Three-Body Problem revolves around the Cultural Revolution which took place in China from 1966 to 1976. The main characters of all three books are Chinese, and much of the plot is also set directly in China.
Speaking of plot, without giving away too many spoilers, the trilogy revolves around the development of human civilization after contact with a hostile alien race. The first book, The Three-Body Problem, concerns the first steps that Earth takes to combat the threat. The second novel, The Dark Forest, details the formation of a dĂ©tente with the invading aliens. Finally, Death’s End details the professional life of Cheng Xin, an aerospace engineer who (through a combination of hibernation and life extension technology) is able to experience the rest of the history of civilization in the Universe.
A primary challenge of Liu Cixin’s approach is that his setting retains (despite many flights of theoretical, technological fancy) certain hard limits imposed on space travel by physics. For instance, there are no faster-than-light ships and exotic elements that have become tropes of the science fiction genre, like psychic abilities and energy swords, are absent. Overall, the laws of physics appear in the series as an obstacle more serious than the threat of destruction from an alien civilization, and form some of the greatest tension in the work.
Some writers would struggle with the vast spans of time necessary for the narrative to play out, but Liu is an expert at using well-placed characters to bridge the gaps of time for the audience, showing us all the exciting bits and leaving out a great deal of the boring details.
Liu excels most obviously in these long-ball connections made within and across novels. He has an uncanny knack for introducing a concept and letting the reader simmer for 200 pages before delivering the payoff. Another thing Liu does expertly, which many science fiction writers struggle with, is explaining exotic concepts (like picotechnology and extra-dimensional space) in an approachable way for the average reader. Or, at least, the average reader of science fiction. Even I have to admit that the Remembrance of Earth’s Past series is a lot brainier than most science fiction, primarily due to the large part in which technological development and theory play a role in the story.
The most memorable supporting character of the series is probably Shi Qiang, “Da Shi,” a police detective from the 21st century who is a major supporting character in both The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest. Unfortunately, he doesn’t appear again in Death’s End. He isn’t the only character who goes in and out of frame quietly.
The inconsistency of the perspective and main supporting characters in the three novels is probably the sharpest criticism one can level against them. Each novel has a separate perspective character, with Three-Body and Death’s End having much stronger perspective characters in Wang Miao and Cheng Xin (in my humble opinion) than Luo Ji, the protagonist of The Dark Forest. While Luo Ji returns into the narrative as a supporting character in Death’s End, Wang Miao never makes an appearance after Three-Body and is only mentioned one other time. It’s disappointing to have a main character simply drop out of frame without so much as a description of their death, but Liu does this twice. That can make it hard for people who are particularly attached to the characters to keep reading.
Another criticism of Liu’s work is that it is unsentimental and unidealistic. By the end of the trilogy, the timescale and scope of the novel has expanded to the point of the end of the Universe. While it shares the quality of space to turn human beings and human concerns into motes of dust in comparison to the Universe, it nevertheless defies traditional storytelling conventions of bringing a story to completion with a kind of meaningful finality.
I personally found the way that the series ended poetic, intriguing and just a little bit haunting. But I could easily see someone else finding it frustrating. The trilogy shares a lot in common with Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in terms of sheer scope and breadth of what it is attempting to describe, as well as a non-conventional, open ending.
Probably the biggest criticism I have of Liu is that he expects a great deal of patience from his readers. The payoffs in his novels are long coming and some particularly frustrating payoffs don’t come at all.
Nevertheless, the sheer enormity of Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, and its fantastically realized worldbuilding, intricately-structured, long-developing plots, as well as poetically translated prose thanks in large part to Ken Liu make these novels truly impactful in the history of science fiction and well worth the many hours it will take you to read them.
Image Credit / Tor Publishing
