#Three-Body Problem

[kyndaris]

The Art of Survival

When I first started reading the Three-Body Problem, I had high expectations. The science fiction trilogy, known formerly as Remembrance of Earth's Past, had been described as a seminal and poignant piece on the human condition. One that was being adapted to Netflix, no less (though by the time I eventually got to it, the Netflix series was already out). And, on paper, it ticked many of my boxes when it came to something I would want to read. More importantly, I wanted to see how the many disparate threads planted in the blurb would all come together. What with the video game element, the existence of extraterrestrial life hidden among the stars, and the Cultural Revolution.

Though it took me a little by surprise at how abrupt it was, I enjoyed reading about Ye Wenjie's past as she grew up during a difficult period in China's history. As someone born to Chinese immigrants, I had heard stories about how my family navigated those times. From the limited food rations, the biting cold of northwest China...

But I'd never quite understood, on an intellectual level, the utter devastation of those years. It wasn't until I picked up Frank Dikotter's The Tragedy of Liberation and Mao's Great Famine that I was able to actually gain a proper appreciation of the China my parents lived through. After all, it all seemed so far away when my own life was filled with plenty. Sure, there were still concerns about kidnappings and racist attacks but I'd never had to worry about stripping the bark off trees just to feed my belly.

Poverty, on such a national scale, is still a far cry worse from the current cost-of-living crisis we face now. That said, the struggles many face now cannot be so easily dismissed. Wage stagnation and the inflation of the prices for common everyday items means many families have had to go without.

Armed with this foreknowledge of what people had to go through during Ye Wenjie's childhood, I was quite sympathetic to the character. Especially when her father was killed before her and the family was torn apart by the need to comply with the dictates of an authoritarian leader.

Was it any wonder she lost faith in humanity and sold us out to the Trisolarians? And as a student of history, and a self-described misanthrope, I will readily admit humans are the biggest obstacle to solving many of the world's problems. If we ever want the world to be a better place, it, honestly, might just be better to eradicate us all.

Humans suck. What more is there to say?

Just look at the current state of the world if you think I'm talking out of my arse.

The only times humans ever band together over a common cause is when disaster strikes. See 9/11 or the Los Angeles Fires.

Of course, there will still be those out for themselves. It's human nature, after all, to covet what others have and take it for ourselves.

And so it was with the Three-Body Problem.

While most of the first book saw humanity try to uncover the plot behind the Earth-Trisolaris Organisation (ETO), which was dedicated to helping Trisolarians invade Earth and destroy human civilisation, the next two books of the trilogy were an examination of how humanity might deal with the threat of its very destruction at the hands of aliens. Strong premises which should have been interesting to explore...and yet I was let down by much of the plot and the characters.

It should be noted the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy was originally written in Chinese. As such, the books I read were actually the English translations. But for all the novel concepts being explored, I couldn't help but feel like some of the work could have been edited down. Of note were the second and last book.

While I understand Liu Cixin wanted to paint the bleak nature of what humanity faced, there were many moments that could have been described in a sentence or two - or wholly cut out entirely. For example, almost all of Luo Ji's interaction with his imaginary 'perfect' woman. Or even Wang Miao's exploration of the Three Body video game. Did we really need to see him witness all the cycles of Trisolaris society being consumed before finally coming to the conclusion the world was tangling with three celestial bodies? I mean, the title of the book is The Three-Body Problem.

Then, of course, there's my entire issue with the third book as a passive bystander. Was there truly a need to see humanity descend into barbarism when the Trisolarians decided to herd them all to Australia? I goddamn live in Australia. And having Cheng Xin's entire perception of the country I live in be boiled down to Baz Luhrman's Australia film felt...well, the less said, the better.

Or spend so long on the evolution of society that it was acceptable for men to adopt incredibly feminine appearances during times of peace? Before changing once more to their militaristic 'masculine' counterparts following the possibility of a Dark Forest strike?

One of my current sticking points when it comes to identity politics is the concept that good times breed 'weak' men and how hard times create 'strong' men. With the idea of 'weak' men being long-haired fem-boys and 'strong' men being roided out dude bros all clamouring to be the alpha. When, in all actuality, a demonstration of strength means rising above traditional ideologies of what constitutes masculinity and learning to be empathetic.

Not to mention the chapters dedicated to Yun Tianming's fairytales, the adventures with 4D space...

The list goes on.

Plot aside, my other main issue were the characters. Both Wang Miao and Luo Ji had an obsession with the women in their lives bordering on unhealthy. Their entire character arcs and motivations were centred on the women they liked. Luo Ji, especially, came off as a patronising socially inept incel.

Of course, some of that could be attributed to Chinese culture or the imperfections of the translations but even when it came to Cheng Xin (the only female protagonist), her entire role was boiled down to what Yun Tianming (a man) bequeathed her with, using the money he had obtained. And she, smitten by the fact he had bought her the rights to a distant star, carried a torch for him until the very end of the book.

In my opinion, it would have been better if Cheng Xin was never gender-swapped to be a woman. In fact, I would have preferred a torrid gay love affair between a male Cheng Xin and Yun Tianming. And, instead, they should have gender swapped Thomas Wade (the psychopathic anti-hero who actually helped save humanity because they could make the hard decisions Cheng Xin could not).

If I'm being truly honest, the only character I liked in Death's End was 艾AA. Now, she was a woman who would have served as a better protagonist to hapless and indecisive Cheng Xin (who basically slept through most of the book, woke up, made a terrible decision that essentially doomed the human race before someone else came to fix her problem before repeating the cycle all over again). Much like Thomas Wade, 艾AA, was able to make hard decisions. Yet she was also affable and friendly, helping Cheng Xin along before the entire solar system was sucked into the second dimension.

I suppose my main issue is how the characters never felt like characters but simply vessels to drive the story forward. There is no real autonomy afforded to them. They are simply there to fill a hole as required by the plot Liu Cixin wished to write. Or perhaps to explore a concept he wanted to drive home.

Overall, Remembrance of Earth's Past provides an intriguing take of what it means to reach out across the universe and make contact with another intelligent civilisation even when it falters to the overarching plot and the characters. It is certainly something worth pondering over and if we, as humans, face a Dark Forest of our very own.

Of course, other films of first contact have pointed to possible positive relations to extraterrestrials.

I, for one, believe curiosity may stay the hand of any who may pay us a visit. But I also understand the underlying fear of what it might mean to stumble upon an aggressor in the dark depths of space. After all, why take the risk of being conquered and having one's home taken? It's not like that's happened in the history of humanity...right? *cough colonialisation cough*

So, perhaps it is easier to eliminate all possible threats to the continuation of our race than face extinction.

Food for thought, dear reader. Food for thought.

[peppermintschnapps]

me, 5 chapters into three-body problem: ... so do we think shi qiang and wang miao ever explored each other's bodies or

[fuckyeahbananafreak]

“you are bugs” is clearly the san-ti ren learning from humans about genocidal language

[cleverthylacine]

Netflix's bastardisation of Three-Body

Oh yeah. I haven't said anything about this. Probably because I've been screaming at people on reddit about it for weeks.

Extensive spoilers below of why you don't want to watch this show if you like the books and should watch the C-drama by Tencent Pictures instead. If you like both you can have fun screaming at this show except that after about 4 episodes even that stops being fun.

The first problem with this show is that they decided to set it in mostly England instead of mostly China, and then cleverly made most of the main characters nonwhite as well as non-Chinese, so that they could point at that as evidence that they're not racist for turning a book set in China with mostly Chinese characters into a show set in England with mostly characters who grew up in the global west (even Cheng Jin/Xin has been raised in New Zealand).

The second problem with this show is that they're adapting a trilogy of 500+ page books and they shoved the first book into 5 episodes and the first part of the second book into 3 episodes. A lot of important and interesting material got cut.

The third problem with this show is that the main character of the novel and the C-Drama is Wang Miao, who is a very sensitive, nonjudgemental and caring male character, the kind of male MC we rarely get. He's also a good husband and father and he's adorable with his daughter. Wang Miao is able to make many connections between people and information because he is able to listen to people, even when he knows they're dangerous, with empathy and refrain from judging them at least until they've finished telling him the stuff that he actually wanted and needed to know.

The character they replaced him with is argumentative, judgemental, and angry. Auggie frequently storms out of conversations with key people in the story in high moral dudgeon without having learned a thing.

Cleverly, they made her female, so that anyone who dares criticise her for being generally terrible is hit with accusations of Skylar White syndrome and being unable to handle angry WOC.

The fourth problem is that they changed the relationship between Mike Evans and Ye Wenjie and in so doing obliterated the internal conflict within the Earth-Trisolaran organisation.

Ye Wenjie is significantly older than Mike Evans and serves as a mentor and sympathetic ear to him while he's in China. She already has had her daughter by her late husband.

in the English show she's his lover and it's gross. I am not even someone who generally objects to age gaps in fiction or even reality as long as everyone's an adult, but this is gross. For one thing, Evans is obviously mentally ill and vulnerable. He becomes the father of her daughter. They then obliterate the faction war that started between Wenjie and Evans. This is important and awful because Wenjie's faction wants aliens to come to Earth and save us from our own idiocy. Evans' faction is anti-human and wants the aliens to come to Earth and save the planet from humans. (Why he thinks they will preserve the animals he values more than people, I don't know. These aliens are fucking ruthless.)

The result of this is that they portray the secretive and malevolent eco-terrorist Evans as a cute elderly space-obsessed grandpa surrounded by little kids that his antinatalist ass would have never supported his followers having (and that anyone who followed him would never have.)

The upshot of this is that we get to see dead children's severed limbs after Our Heroes retrieve crucial information. And we don't know that it is crucial information because they have Wenjie in custody and it is therefore not clear that Evans has been talking to the aliens, they no longer talk to Wenjie, and what they're trying to take is the records of all the conversations Evans had with the aliens, which could maybe be important if you wanted to know in advance how bad the aliens are and what they are planning to do.

I don't want to see murdered children. There is enough of that on the news, thanks. It's an emotionally manipulative choice on the part of the writers. It does make Auggie's worst temper tantrum understandable, but if they had made her the kind of character Wang Miao was, that wouldn't have been necessary. Wang Miao did object to all the adults-only carnage, but he also was able to understand that there were plot-related reasons all those grown-ass ecoterrorist assholes had to die.

So now everyone who thinks Auggie is a rotten replacement for Wang Miao is not only a misogynist but pro-murdered children. And the neckbeards who actually haven't studied cults are all like "of course they put kids on the boat! a cult should have kids!" because they're not aware that there are cults other than the FLDS and the Branch Davidians. Aside from the ecoterrorism aspect, the recent cult that Evans' group is most like is Heaven's Gate, who were so anti-sex and anti-breeding that some of them castrated themselves.

They also added a white male character who was rich. Sadly, he was hilarious and entertaining in a very Seth Rogan/James Franco kinda way, so of course he was one of the first main characters to die.

The usual suspects are claiming that the adaptation was fucked up by "wokeness". I don't believe that, but I do wonder exactly why the extreme environmentalist/animal rights/super vegan/anti-natalist/anti-human bad guys were written out of the story.

Because climate change is important and the environment is important and we really have to fix it. We really do. We have to save our planet, we're the people who live here!

But all good movements have their dangerous fringe people, and people who would do what Mike Evans did in the books exist. For instance, there were animal liberationists who let prion infected squirrels loose 20 years ago and suddenly now in Appalachia, where poor people hunt squirrel, we have an epidemic of prion-related dementia.

(And those of you who read me regularly and know that I've worked in medical research schools most of my life know that I haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate these kinds of "environmentalists" so yeah I'm a little bit mad that I didn't get to see Evans die horribly lmao.)

In other words: this show is so bad that it actually makes me contemplate right-wing Hollywood conspiracy theories for a hot second before dismissing them.

They also added a lot more explosions and a lot more interpersonal drama, because that's what Americans like. Yeah fuck you Netflix.

[qubiste]

The Three-Body Problem is The Da Vinci Code of science-fiction

[tagnoob]

CCP's Andreesen Horowitz Backed Blockchain Bullshit Game is now Called EVE Frontiers

Am I letting my bias show in that headline?  Well, I just got back from a week’s vacation and am feeling refreshed and unwilling to pull punches.  So let’s go, because I am just getting warmed up. [If you are a blockchain fan, you might just want to just move along because I am not going to say a single nice thing about it.  If you want something less inflammatory you should check out Noizy’s…

[lonerebel]

Alien Species: Trisolaran

13.08.2023 / GIF / 376 x 383 / 90 Kb.

Character from Remembrance of Earth's Past  book series by Chinese writer Liu Cixin

Trisolarans are a species native to Trisolaris, the only planet in the Alpha Centauri System. They intend to invade the whole universe as a substitute for their endangered homeworld.

[terast]

[monarchetype]

Some modern Sci-Fi classics:

The Moon Blew Up and Now Seven Women Have To Have a Lot of Babies! by Neal Stephenson

The The Universe Used to Have Eleven Dimensions but Every Alien Species is Mean so Everyone's Totally Screwed and also Femininity is Too Soft for this Cruel World trilogy by Cixin Liu, consisting of: This VR Game is Actually a Recruitment Tool for a Cult... Run by Aliens?! I Have Infinite Resources to Save the World but I Just Want To Find My Imaginary Girlfriend! and My College Stalker We Sent to the Aliens as a Spy Sent Me Crucial Information In the Form of a Children's Story?!

The Vampire Captain of This Spaceship Just Beat the Shit Out of Me to Send a Crucial Message to Humanity?! by Peter Watts

How I Went From the Only Normal Human on this Spaceship Full of Transhumans, Science Cultists Who Want to Kill God, and a Vampire, to the Herald of an Alien Super-Non-Intelligence's Invasion of Earth! by Peter Watts

Moving on to fantasy...

I Was Just A Street Urchin but Now I Get Superpowers by Eating Metal and Have Joined the Ultimate Heist Crew! by Brandon Sanderson

The Weird Fairy Thing I was Talking to Is Actually a Piece of God and Now I Can Fly?! by Brandon Sanderson

I'm Actually the Reincarnation of the Fallen Hero who Went Crazy and Destroyed the World and Now All Men Who Can Use Magic are Destined to Go Insane?! by Robert Jordan

Drawing Cool Symbols to Bend Probability is a Woman's Job but I Really Want to Help Evacuate Wounded Soldiers in World War 1! by Tom Miller

I Just Got to New York City and Now I'm Literally the Borough of Manhattan?! by N.K. Jemisin

Contemporary Japanese light novels and classic American sci-fi are basically evil opposites when it comes to their titling conventions: both titles will be long and rambling, but the former will be a prosaically descriptive phrase that lays out the story's entire premise, while the latter will be a line from a poem the author liked that tells you absolutely fucking nothing.

[elizabethtai]

3 Body Problem is a bit of a problem

The #Netflix drama's depiction of China is, well, problematic. How did the people of China react to it? In this issue I highlight what Chinese viewers think about the 3 Body Problem. #CDrama #CDramas #ThreeBody #LiuCixin #SciFi #Netflix

In my last newsletter, I explained that the main issue I had with Netflix’s 3-Body Problem is the dumbing down of the book’s plot. For example: The ETO is now a cult of religious, fanatical alien worshipers. The fight against the ETO also seems very small. Goodbye, world cooperation to defeat the Santi. Instead, the crusade against the EVA is now led by … one man’s shady organisation? The…

[rickchung]

3 Body Problem (prods. David Benioff, D. B. Weiss & Alexander Woo).

Netflix's cerebral, big-budget international television adaptation of the acclaimed but dense and long considered unfilmmable (as evidenced by a never released 2015 film) Chinese hard sci-fi novel trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past by computer engineer Cixin Liu hardly skimps on its ambitious scope. Layered with an alien first contact narrative and theoretical astrophysics conundrum, the series rushes through its Cultural Revolution political backstories, scattered character relationships, and mysterious plot machinations reloving around a life-liek virtual reality video game.

[peppermintschnapps]

do you mean to tell me that the writers of the Disney Plus exclusive, MCU shitshow "WandaVision" trusted the audience enough to explain Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) in an episode...

but the writers of the Netflix adaptation of the acclaimed HARD SCI-FI SERIES "The Three-Body Problem" chose to omit the CMBR event that was present in the novel, and instead go for flickering lights... 🤔

[emiliosandozsequence]

3 body problem (2024-present) cr. david benioff, d.b. weiss, & alexander woo / teaching stone to talk, anne dillard

[diamantdog]

just saw a bunch of posts about netflix's "3 body problem" reblogged on my dash, so a friendly reminder that the chinese adaptation, which has entered multiple lists of best c-dramas in 2023, is available for free on youtube with engsub & also on tencent/wetv app (where' i'm currently watching to spite d&d lol).

eta: i probably should have added this a while back; i didn't check the notes until recently. but i have been told by someone in the replies that there are only 2 of 30 episodes available on youtube now. idk when this change happened. as i mentioned above, i watched the drama on my local wetv app for free. however, i'm aware that the app in other countries may have different rules or w/e. so, yeah, please be kindly informed.

[elodieunderglass]

Bill, Bren, & Blaw - I'm surprised they're not collectively known as "The B-sides"

(in reference to original character Killie's father, uncle and aunt.)

That's a great idea, I bet they could've been in their wild youth. They were definitely inseparable.

there's no bond on earth like siblings who murder a guy and cover it up together.

[tagnoob]

Quote of the Day - Hilmar's Ongoing Obsession

We’ve been really releasing some of the science fiction behind the game, which takes place around three black holes that are spinning around each other in a sort of a “three-body problem” with black holes. -Hilmar Petursson, VentureBeat Interview This interview had to be over at VentureBeat because I don’t think any serious video game news site takes the idea of blockchain based video games…