Skip to main content

The Three-Body Problem (SF) - Cixin Liu ***

I'm reviewing this book at the suggestion of one of my Buy me a Coffee supporters. I put off reading it for quite a while due to a perverse aversion to reading a book, or watching a TV show, that everyone is raving about... but I had to submit in the end, and I'm glad I did. There are elements of the book I loved, and aspects that really grated.

What was brilliant was Cixin Liu's evocation of the impact of the Cultural Revolution in China on academics. The character whose life threads through the book, Ye Wenjie, an astrophysicist who witnesses her father's murder by Red Guards is remarkable and I would have been happy reading a straight lab lit novel of her experiences without the aspect of alien contact that takes over the plot. When I was at school, a young history teacher got in trouble by getting all the class to obtain a copy of the Little Red Book - learning about this period in China is one of the few details I remember from school history.

I was also impressed with the way that initially Liu brings in plenty of real science. I was thinking of commenting that this wasn't just SF, it was SCIENCE fiction until reading further. And much of the book is very readable. But there were also those issues.

Firstly, long chunks of the book feature a character's experience in a weird virtual reality game, called Three Body, of which the significance is not revealed until well into the book (so I won't give it away here). I found these sections tedious in the extreme - it was far too much like listening to someone's detailed description of their dreams. 

Then there was the underlying premise of alien contact and future invasion of the Earth. Of course, this has featured many times in science fiction, and Liu makes it different and interesting by factoring in the sheer length of time it's going to take the alien fleet to arrive at Earth. For that matter, the consideration of whether or not we ought to make aliens aware of our existence is always interesting. But the driving factor here of people hating humanity so much they want aliens to destroy us, or naively think, with no evidence whatsoever, that the aliens will be beneficial and sort out our problems for us, didn't work for me.

There were also some technical issues. I would overlook the history of science error of reading far more into the cosmic background radiation than would have been known in the 1960s. But I wasn't happy about employing the classic quantum entanglement fallacy of thinking that it can be used to send instantaneous messages (it can only send random values), and simply couldn't engage with the idea that two protons could be used to produce mass illusions and to give the appearance of adding randomness to the laws of physics. (Also if this randomness had happened, the physicists would surely be talking about Noether's theorem, which isn't mentioned.)

A final moan concerns the understanding three body problem itself - central to the plot. The assumption in the book seems to be that this classic gravitational interaction problem, where three or more bodies interacting become chaotic is intractable. In reality, while absolute complete solutions are impossible, we can produce very good approximate solutions - so the idea of pure chaotic unpredictability that lies at the heart of the book doesn't make sense. For example, our solar system is a far more than three body problem, yet we can predict orbits thousands of years into the future. Yes, there's some uncertainty. So, for instance, current modelling gives Mercury a 1% chance of leaving its orbit and hitting Venus in the next few billion years. But we have no problem making good predictions of what will happen in the shorter term.

I don't think I'm going to bother with the follow up books. It was an interesting read - but didn't work as well for me as it clearly has for many readers.

Paperback:   
Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...