La mort immortelle

Humanity’s fate is on a savage roller coaster oscillating between euphoria and despair in these books. This, the third book in the Three Body Problem series, was in particular a brutal read.

Brutal and pessimistic for the future of humanity, but very memorable, imaginative, thrilling, revelatory, and wonderful at the same time.

And it’s impossible to talk about the experience without spoilers by the way, so I won’t try to.

If you recall, the second book, Dark Forest, left us on a positive note, where humans eeked out a win against overwhelming odds. Luo Ji gained humanity the ability to broadcast to the universe the coordinates of the Trisolaran solar system, which would annihilate Trisolaris but also by extension reveal the coordinates of Earth.

In Death’s End, we see how the political situation of mutually-assured-destruction gains humanity a new lease on life. Earth enters a new era where they have roughly equal political power as the Trisolarans, who must now accommodate Earth’s demands or else risk destruction.

Earth’s main two demands are that Trisolaris will only inhabit small portions of the solar system and that they will stop blocking humanity’s basic research and in fact assist said research.

This happens, and the future seems very bright for Earth. Tons of research breakthroughs happen and humanity enjoys great prosperity.

There is uneasiness underneath all of this though. All of this prosperity is built on a very fragile situation. With extremely powerful Trisolaran teardrop scouts lurking only a few minutes away from Earth, in the event of an attack on Earth, it would be only a matter of minutes that Earth would need to decide whether to push the button to send off the signal to broadcast the coordinates of Trisolaris.

The power to make that call is held, with a dead man’s switch, in Luo Ji’s hand. If he dies, then the signal will be broadcast immediately. This office that he holds becomes known as a swordholder.

And so he waits, and waits, and waits, fulfilling this over a hundred years of uneasy peace. And Luo Ji gets very old. Despite medical science doing the best it can, it can’t make him live forever. His precarious health becomes a worse threat than Trisolaris. A new swordholder is needed. That’s where Cheng Xin comes in, the main character of the novel.

But the enemy has been executing on a plan for the last hundred years. It has been endearing itself to human society so that people become trusting of them. The new generation is no longer suspicious of Trisolarans and views them as enemies. It reminds me of people who feed grizzly bears at the park, forgetting that under all the cute furriness is a ferocious beast who wants to eat you. The people want a soft swordholder, one who will be nice to their “friends” the Trisolarans. They choose the wrong person for the swordholder position and it immediately backfires.

Our heroine, Cheng Xin, is a savior-like figure who repeatedly fails her missions to protect humankind from the Trisolaran civilization. But the reasons she fails are always because she is so human—it’s a failure to turn into a monster (or to “transcend” her humanity as I’m sure some people’s perspectives would be). It’s precisely her compassion and lack of ruthlessness that makes her fail.

In contrast, you have the character Thomas Wade, who is her opposite (or complement depending on your perspective) in every way. He’s a swordholder candidate, and he wants the position, while she doesn’t, he’s unpopular, while she’s popular, he’s American, she is Chinese, he’s male, she’s female, he’s savvy and cruel and will do anything to win, and she undeniably won’t. He’s an unreadable bastard devoid of warmth.

And yet…Thomas Wade has plans and tactics that work, and that sometimes do save humanity as the plot unfolds, although the story ultimately does end in tragedy.

And so the overall effect of the story is a strange one. What message, if any, was intended? Perhaps is the message that it’s better to remain human and die rather than survive if survival means to become monstrous?

There’s the perspective added by Fraisse, a character who is her spiritual mentor of sorts. Fraisse is an aboriginal man who’s one of the greatest side characters I’ve ever read in a book. It’s hard to explain it but the way he lives his life so simply is a really healing balm to the modern mindset. I love Fraisse. The message from him might be something akin to: just live, don’t think about the past or the future. There is only now.

Another message is embedded close to the end of the book when a character tells Xin, “I want to let you know that you didn’t do anything wrong. Humanity chose you, which meant they chose to treat life and everything else with love, even if they had to pay a great price. You fulfilled the wish of the world, carried out their values, and executed their choice. You really didn’t do anything wrong.”

That’s a really intriguing perspective.

This is a book that made me think, which is my favorite kind.

There’s also a strange non-romance plot. Really, it’s the most non-romantic romance plot I’ve ever met, and adds another dimension to the brutality of this story.

Tianming’s character has utter loneliness and despair that was palpable for me to read about. His story is that of an incel taken to a deeply moving level. When everyone you know wants you to go ahead and die…that’s savage despair.

Tianming seems to be utterly incapable of developing close relationships with others. We see life from his perspective and it’s bleak and sad and we feel for him.

He loves Cheng Xin but never tells her. When he gets diagnosed with a terminal illness, he gets pressured from his sister to go ahead and die (euthanasia becomes legal) so that he doesn’t use up all her inheritance. He decides to do it; he feels that nobody will miss him when he’s gone.

Right before he’s supposed to die, he stumbles into unfathomable wealth. But he has nothing worth spending it on because what would be the point of going on vacations or doing any kind of experience if he were just going to do it alone?

And so he makes a useless gesture. He buys Cheng Xin a star anonymously and has it donated to her.

Xin has no idea who gave her the star. Tianming has never breathed a word to her of his love for her and in fact hasn’t spoken to her in years.

Meanwhile, she is on the search for someone to send out into space on the Staircase Project. They need someone who would be willing to sacrifice themselves to be a brain that is jettisoned out into space to meet the Trisolaran fleet in an attempt to somehow interact with them in hopes that might give them compassion for us or somehow sabotage their plan. But who would sacrifice themself for that? Their job would be to be sent out into space utterly alone and then be captured by Trisolarans and probably tortured infinitely for information. Who would sign up for that?

Cheng Xin finally comes up with a name: Tianming.

Bear in mind she has no idea that he’s the one who bought her a star.

When Tianming figures out what she is asking of him, he laughs a bleak, dark laugh. Her reaching out to him was a wonderful moment at first, until he realized that she’s asking him to commit himself to a fate worse than death. And it’s a repeat of his own sister wanting him to kill himself. That’s a very low point for his story.

He accepts.

It’s only after he’s signed up that Xin realizes that he’s the one who bought her a star. She does everything she can to prevent him from going but the ruthless Thomas Wade prevents her from preventing it. Tianming goes.

This becomes a critical fact in Cheng Xin’s story. This single fact, that she sent a man who loves her off into space to suffer something worse than death, weighs on her soul so drastically that it becomes a central part of the story because it becomes a part of her. This toxic guilt causes her spiritual death. She becomes very depressed and stops caring about herself. Not only has she failed humanity multiple times over, but she has failed an individual, and one that loved her, in such a dark way. Her mind becomes filled with darkness.

This is not an uplifting novel in tone. Her story compounds the bleakness of—again, massive spoilers—the destruction of almost all humankind towards the end of the book. The glimmer of hope is that Cheng Xin and her friend AA escape the destruction of the Solar System. They go out to meet Tianming at the star that he bought her.

But let me go back just a moment, because I just skipped over the most fascinating part of the story. Tianming is captured by the Trisolarans and they don’t torture him to death. They build a farm for him (using seeds that Cheng Xin packed for him) so he can grow his own food and live there and they can study him and learn from him.

Meanwhile, in the main plot, Trisolaris gains the upper hand over Earth, and then Earth broadcasts the coordinates of Trisolaris (and by extension Earth). Now both civilizations need to flee their solar systems in search of a different home before the Dark Forest strikes arrive.

But before the Trisolaran ambassador leaves Earth, she permits Luo Ji one question that they will answer, because of their great respect for him. And the question he asks is very insightful: is there a safety message one can post to the universe that would make others think we are harmless and cause them to not target Earth with a dark forest strike?

The answer comes back: yes.

But Trisolaris will give absolutely no more information than that. They don’t want to help humanity.

Scientists, politicians, and people of all sorts try to imagine what such a safety broadcast would be and conclude that whatever it is, we have no idea what it would be and it must be beyond our current technology level. Humanity seems to be at an impasse.

But then comes the most interesting part. The Trisolarans grant Cheng Xin a request to have a conversation with Tianming in real-time across space via sophons. This conversation is humanity’s big chance to learn something from Tianming about the secrets that the Trisolarans are keeping back from them.

The way the conversation is conducted is fascinating. The Trisolarans don’t want any sensitive information transmitted so they rig up a system with green light, a yellow light, and a red light. The yellow light warns them when they start talking about topics that could lead to sensitive information. If any sensitive information is exchanged, the red light lights up and both of them are exterminated immediately so that Cheng Xin cannot convey that information to Earth’s government.

Tianming does something brilliant and embeds all the information they need into three short fairy tale stories, which are reproduced in full in the book.

It was an awesome, scintillating task for me to try to decode these puzzles. You gave me, the reader, a chance to decode fairy tales that have embedded cosmological truths that just might save humanity!?!? Wow. I’ve never had such a thrill when reading.

I got a couple details right but eventually gave up on trying to decode the entire thing. I went ahead and kept reading to find out what the stories represent. But this was easily the best part of the book, and not because there’s a lack of other awesome parts! It was so incredibly fun.

Humanity goes about trying to solve these questions. The solving of these stories is in itself a fascinating story, which I won’t try to reproduce here. But suffice it to say, I absolutely loved this plot in the later half of the book. Solving these stories is the key to everything.

Without getting into all the details of the ending, but basically, even though the stories are decoded, humanity is not ultimately saved in time. Everyone in the human race is obliterated except for a small handful.

Yeah. It’s hard for that kind of ending to not take the wind out of your sails, and I must say I was surprised by this. I thought the trilogy was going to have a happy ending. I think this will be a tough pill for most readers to swallow.

But personally, I have managed to recover. In an odd way it’s almost refreshing to have some stories that surprise me by ending in tragedy occasionally; else how could I ever feel surprised? How could I ever read anything and believe that the good guys could really loose? So I can appreciate the move.

And life is simply this way: things don’t always go the way they “should” or we want them to, regardless of all our heroic efforts to the contrary. Life can just be that way, and reconciling ourselves to that fact is one of the great struggles in a man’s, or woman’s life.

As I’ve settled into reflecting on the book the last few days, what’s been interesting is that the sad ending is overshadowed by the fact of how intriguing the book’s ideas are and how amazingly imaginative the series is.

It’s imaginative in a rather unique way. Cixin Liu has taken the laws of physics, as well as some of the mysteries of physics, and used them to spin entire worlds, plots, politics, and conspiracies out of them. It’s so imaginative and intriguing.

Some would use the word “far-fetched” in a derogatory way about this book, but I wouldn’t, because the areas explored are based on the more intriguing parts of physics which are wild crazy things that feel like they “shouldn’t” be true: the fact that light’s speed is a constant, the facts of quantum mechanics and how particles behave differently when observed. All of this feels totally far-fetched, but it’s bedrock science. And so speculations based on trying to explain these things are, well…imaginative in a healthy way.

Same goes for the sociologist questions related to Fermi’s Paradox. Isn’t such a fundamentally important question (“where are the aliens?”) worth exploring from a sociological perspective? I think it really is. And that’s the beauty of these books. It explores questions of great existential importance to humans and does so in ways that are based off of science and logical reasoning.

And really, you can’t beat this unique blend of hard science fiction, imagination and wonder, conspiracy theory, perspective of someone who grew up in Communist China, lots of tension and huge stakes and reversals that make it intriguing the whole time, and just some of the most interesting ideas out there in science fiction when it comes to answering important questions with science.

Just one of the many intriguing ideas to talk about is the metaphor of the Universe being a great paraplegic because of the speed of light limiting any information going from one area to the other, and that being exacerbated by the fact that the Universe keeps expanding.

Oh and can I just talk about the fact that FINALLY we have a book where it’s largely not just Americans leading the way in saving the Earth from the aliens? In these books there’s a clear Chinese bias but I’m all for it. Anything but just every single book being USA = “the world” is nice, please and thank you. So that’s a nice bonus.

There’s so many things I don’t have time to talk about. But I’d recommend this series to practically anyone who enjoys reading science fiction with one caveat: can you get over not having a happy ending? If you can remain open to a book being amazing without having a happy ending, then read it.

Personally, I can’t wait to read more literature by Liu or in his universe. My research turned up the fact that while this is a complete trilogy, there is an additional stand-alone novel written in this universe by a different author, with Liu’s blessing.

It’s called the Redemption of Time, and it delves into Tianming’s story more, revealing what it was like for him being taken in by the Trisolarans and what happens to him later. He gets embroiled into a far future war between them and even more powerful galaxy-spanning aliens. Honestly it sounds really awesome. I’m looking forward to reading it.

I love these books.

The story looks complete by the end of the second book. The third one feels weak, as well as the third book's protagonist

Great book. The development of the story is amazing. It scratches all the sci-fi itches and it's highly addictive.

My only complaint about this book is that it's the last written by Liu Cixin (in this series) and the ending seemed too quick for me. I would love to have more development and many more books on this universe to read.

In between significant and smaller blind spots—including, like Goethe, promoting a stalker's idea of love—is a work of phenomenal imagination. It's the most absorbing book of the three, and excitingly explores ideas of humans in time and space.