Spoiler Warning, basically the entire book will get spoiled here.

The Three-Body Problem

Unlike Hyperion I didn’t do a chapter by chapter breakdown, but perhaps that was the exception and not the rule. That breakdown made sense for a collection of short stories that were largely independent with overlapping themes, but for a normal narrative like this I think stream of consciousness as I read the book makes more sense.

• Book starts off in the communist revolution in China
• I get why people from China/Russia are anti-socialist/communist, if that’s their only interaction with socialism and communism of course it sounds evil and absurd
• In the book they would call everything that didn’t agree with them as reactionary, and a threat to their socialist/communist state (which is so stupid to me, if your idea can’t hold water during an argument then it’s a shitty idea).
  • They said that general relativity/Einstein was reactionary, a capitalist puppet trying to destabilize their glorious revolution
• People sold each other out at every opportunity, reminds of the death of Stalin movie, but not funny
• Communism vs Capitalism.
  • The way its described in the book, the communist party just deluded children into thinking that books/knowledge/intellectualism was bad and for capitalists, and they just have to buy in to what their superiors tell them. I feel like Marx would be ashamed, but I should do more reading into his direct words
• There was an analogy in the book that the struggle sessions across China for the revolution were like a bunch of CPUs working in parallel, with their output being the revolution. I thought it was a silly analogy at first, but this is also the first Chinese sci-fi I read, I wonder how the analogy comes across in the original language. Would it have made more sense to me if I was brought up speaking Mandarin?
• The book mentioned concepts of The Shooter and The Farmer. Basically both are about lower order intelligences building a model of their universe based on what they can observe, but the real fundamentals are outside their grasp.
  • The Shooter is about a guy with a gun doing target practice on some piece of paper, shooting a hole every 10 cm. If there were 2D intelligences living on the surface of the paper, they would accept as fact that there were holes every 10 cm, but not know why, and it could change at any moment.
  • The Farmer is about turkeys on a farm, who accept as fact that every day in the morning, the farmer gives them food. Until Thanksgiving rolls around and they become the food.
  • The point of these analogies is that we could be the lower order intelligences, and our fundamental laws of physics and how the universe operates could be false.
  • This reminds of False vacuum decay.
• During one part of the book, the narrator sees timestamps in his photos as a warning to some countdown, and that he must stop his work or else. I just found the repetitive timestamps annoying, but that could be because I was working out while listening and that affected my mood/how I perceived it. I get the effect the author was going for, showing how regular this impossible occurrence is and that something is going on, trying to get us into the mindset of the character.
  • The word Kafkaesque comes to mind, but I’ve never read any Kafka…or wait maybe I read a little bit in high school. Regardless, I’d like to read some more, I’ll add him to Books to read.
  • Similarly, there’s another segment where he’s seeing Morse code from flashes in the cosmic background radiation, and the author writes out short long etc. many times, felt a bit grating but perhaps that’s the point.
• Carey mentioned that perhaps it sounds weird to me due to the translation, I should try seeing if there are translator’s notes anywhere that I could reference (would need to make sure that the audiobook uses the same translation).
• The formation computer was an interesting concept, where humans are transistors and raise colored flags for 1s and 0s, and groups of humans would form gates, and then complex circuits. People with notepads would be storage space, and people on horseback travelling up and down the formations would be the message bus.
• In Trisolaris, the suns have a gaseous outer layer that seems to be what we would normally describe as the visible sun, and when they get far enough away, due to an optical illusion with the atmosphere of Trisolaris, the suns’ gaseous layers seem to disappear suddenly. Is this a real effect?
  • Another effect that I’m not sure if real is the ability of stars in universe to amplify radio waves. Apparently there is some research that supports this, or at least makes such a scenario plausible, but not proved completely. Some guys on the internet think the book is pseudoscience while others say that the author went to great lengths to make it as accurate as possible. I’m no physicist so 🤷‍♂️.
• The idea of the proton computer was interesting, but that was the most pseudo-sciencey part of the book in my opinion. Definitely want to look more into the folding/unfolding of objects into higher/lower dimensions.
• The authoritarian Trisolaran society reminded me of communist China, perhaps that’s what the author was trying to invoke.

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Overall the book was pretty good, I had way more notes of my own while listening to this one than for other books. I wonder if that’s because the author is Chinese and the way the book is written/which things are emphasized are different from what I’ve come to expect from the mostly western sci-fi books I’ve read. Definitely going to finish the trilogy eventually.