Warning: massive spoiler alert for Death’s End. Reader’s discretion advised.
A brain gets shipped to outerspace, embeds itself into Trisolaris civilization, finds success as a fairy tale writer, and rendevous with his crush deep in space to send a cryptic warning back to human civilization in the form of a fairy tale.
Four dimensions collapsing into three, and three dimension ultimately collapsing into two. A tale that spans billions of years, dimensions, and universes, yet tied together by a singular thread of human (the writer’s?) warmth.
Such is the vastness of the world that Liu Cixin built in Three Body Problem.
In masterly fashion, Liu Cixin threads the socio-political space as comfortably as he threads the space of popular science. This perspective is refreshing. Through his novels, you can feel a deep sensitivity to the twists and turns of history, the shifting of the human tides, the unexpected singular events and the varied consequences. You walk away feeling like you have a new lens to observe current events with.
Australia’s appearance in the novel is also hilarious. Of course alien civilization would banish the entire human race to Australia. And not missing an opportunity to exploit the irony, Liu brings to the forefront an aboriginal character, Fraisse, who in humanity’s most chaotic era, showed great temperament and benevolence.
The idea of dark forest, expounded upon throughout the pages as a terrifying idea, is in fact essentially darwinism expanded into the scale of the universe. In this regard, there’s nothing much quite novel there. It is both a ruse, and a central driver of plot. The imagery it connotes,however, is rather gripping. If one takes some time (maybe somewhere where you can observe the starry night sky) to truly contemplate the universe, one can feel the force of this concept. Where else is life? Surely it’s impossible that we’re the only life on this universe so vast. What is the nature of those life and their relationship to us? Kindness? Perhaps not.
Cosmological warfare that involves weapons that alter the fundamental laws of physics is also deeply exhilerating. You manipulate the speed of light to create black holes. A packaged 2-dimensional collapser can also be sent with surgical precision from one corner of the universe to another, with the ultimate purpose of absorbing all three dimensional material upon itself, collapsing everything into a flat plane. Can the ultimate destruction of the world be so spectacular and beautiful?
And to please those amongst us who crave for a bit of juice amongst the destruction, Liu Cixin adds in just a dash of transcendent romance to perk us up. Love that involves a gift of a star and eventually a universe; a romance that literally spans light years and eons; a date on a distant star somewhere in the milky way. I wouldn’t know how any of my tinder dates could compare.
Perhaps a more subtle feature of Liu Cixin’s chosen narrative technique of exploring the ‘present’ from the perspective of a future narrator (which we eventually discover is Cheng Xin) is that he is able to historicize events and cast a sociological gaze on distinct periods to reveal their underlying currents. These diversions add a lot of texture and weight to the plot. Take, for instance, this excerpt where the narrator was recounting the period where hibernation was invented:
When viewed from the perspective of sociology, the biotechnology breakthrough of human cloning was far less complicated than hibernation. Cloning raised moral questions, but they mostly troubled those with a moral view influenced by Christianity. The troubles brought about by hibernation, on the other hand, were practical, and affected the entire human race. Once the technology was successfully commercialized, those who could afford it would use it to skip to paradise, while the rest of humanity would have to stay behind in the comparatively depressing present to construct that paradise for them. But even more worrisome was the greatest lure provided by the future: the end of death. As modern biology advanced apace, people began to believe that death’s end would be achievable in one or two more centuries. If so, those who chose hibernation were taking the first steps on the staircase to life everlasting. For the first time in history, Death itself was no longer fair. The consequences were unimaginable.
We know that deep down, Liu Cixin craves for truth. He weaves these truths as speculative sociological conjectures within the novel, such as the moment after Bronze Age’s captain was tried for crimes against humanity:
“When those of us aboard Bronze Age found out that we were doomed to wonder space forever, we formed a totalitarian state as well. Do you know how long it took? Five minutes.”
‘I don’t have much to say except a warning. Life reached an evolutionary milestone when it climbed onto land from the ocean, but those first fish that climbed onto land ceased to be fish. Similarly, when humans truly enter space and are freed from the Earth, they cease to be human."
The universe started with eleven dimensions, but it is through interdimensional warfare that caused it to shrink to just three. Ultimately, it will shrink to a one dimensional singularity. The big bang will happen once more and a pristine eleven-dimension universe will be birthed anew. That is…just an immaculate idea.
As I snap back into my reality, living with my dad and a tenant called Pedro in the west of Singapore, I have never felt so situated in the present. In the expansive depth of time, what ultimately matters? Perhaps nothing, and perhaps everything. The world around feels surreal when I walk through the park near my house with my mind still stuck in deep space. Time is a strange thing.