Cixin Liu (刘慈欣) is probably the best-regarded contemporary Chinese science fiction author, and The Three-Body Problem (2007, 2014 in English) his best known novel (certainly, at least, in the English reading world). It is what is sometimes referred to as hard science fiction, which usually means there is at least as much attention on the science as on the fiction.
That is certainly the case here. The protagonist, Wang Miao, is a nanomaterials specialist who is gradually drawn into a plot involving interstellar contact with a race that lives on a planet orbited by three suns. Gravitational attraction and orbital relationships between four bodies (the planet and the three suns) are incredibly complicated, and the title of the novel refers to a classic set of problems in physics concerned with predicting future states given initial positions, mass, and velocity of three objects in relation to each other.
The novel is most interesting, however, in the window it gives into Chinese scientific society in the second half of the 20th century. The devastating impact of the Cultural Revolution is in play, both in the immediate death and dislocation of many, but also in the way scientific advances in the later Maoist and post-Maoist years required a philosophical justification for their adoption.
The response to the Trisolarians is also fascinating: Cixin Liu posits an underground, yet sizable (and global) movement that welcomes the arrival of the Trisolarians as a disruptive and even destructive force. The notion is that the cultures of Earth are beyond redemption, and the necessarily violent intervention of a more advanced alien culture would be a welcome “reboot” of the whole thing.
The bleakness of this outlook is never really questioned, and its relationship to the cultural context is never explicitly raised, although I think such links can be inferred.
There is an intriguing use of a role-playing video game that simulates life on the Trisolarian’s home planet, but most of the novel is heavier on the science and its potential advances than on traditional characterization or plot. Still, an interesting read, and if the Hugo Award given to the book feels more like a lifetime achievement for a foreign writer, there is enough here to warrant picking it up ≡ (if you don’t know that stand for if and only if, this book may not be for you) you are interested in the science behind the fiction.
#WhatIWishICouldDo
Ground my alternative universe settings as deeply in understood scientific principles. One of the challenges of writing magic is ensure that it has rules, costs, benefits, etc. If you aren’t careful in that construction, books bottom out in well, why didn’t they just fix it with magic to begin with?