Cixin Liu burst on the the American science fiction radar with his remarkable Three-Body Problem, which imagined an intergalactic conflict between humanity and a a race of people called the Trisolarans, named such for their planet and its three suns. News of this contact kicked off a crisis era in humanity. The Dark Forest continued the conflict between these two systems, establishing the Wallfacer project which aimed to coordinate humanity’s resources to confront the threat, eventually establishing a Dark Forest Hypothesis of intergalactic civilization—that secrecy is the best defense because there is always a more powerful civilization that may well decide to eliminate any potential rival. This hypothesis led to Dark Forest Deterrence, best compared to mutually-assured destruction of the Cold War, and a Swordbearer with the sole authority to send out the intergalactic signal. Such is the circumstance at the start of Death’s End, the brilliant conclusion to this trilogy.
Much like its two predecessors, Death’s End is a self-contained story that spans both space and time. This time, the primary protagonist is Cheng Xin, an aeronautical engineer involved in the Staircase project, a program meant to get a person to Trisolaris. (Because of weight restrictions, they only launch the brain of a terminally-ill classmate of Cheng Xin’s, Yun Tianming). Cheng Xin then goes into hibernation and awakens at the very end of the Deterrence Era, the period during which Luo Ji ensured mutually-assured destruction on the basis of the Dark Forest Hypothesis—that is, that there is a force even more powerful than Trisolaris—in part so that she can be elevated as the new Swordholder.
However, Cheng Xin is not Luo Ji and she is not capable of deterrence, leading to a period of Earth’s subjugation by Trisolaris, except that the Trisolaran ships sent to destroy Gravity and Blue Space, two ships that also possess the capacity to broadcast the location of both systems, are unable to fulfill their missions. An advanced civilization ignites on the of the Trisolaran suns, which prompts humanity to create artificial habitats in the shadow of Jupiter (the so-called Bunker Era). But even this facsimile of life on earth will not last and the solar system is collapsed into the micro-universes where the speed of light is reduced where the seemingly-last humans live out an eternity waiting for the rebirth of the universe.
If all of this seems like a big haul, well, it is.
The Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy is a throwback to an old style of science fiction along the lines of an Asimov or Stapledon. It is a story that takes place on an enormous scale and explores the rise of fall of civilizations. I cannot speak to the “accuracy” of the mathematics or science but thought that the future history of humanity became progressively more compelling as the series developed.
Liu’s fascination with the science and big ideas also has a tendency to simplify humanity into a single society as defined against the alien races. As plausible as this vision of humanity is over the long haul, it also has a way of erasing the complexities of the contemporary society in which these books were written. Human on human violence, for instance, is largely limited to personal political power or how humans ought to interact with alien races. But Liu is the crown jewel of a Chinese-government program to promote science fiction that coincides with a rapidly-developing science sector. At the same time, the Chinese government has been interning Uyghur ethnic minorities in the Northwest, allegedly for reeducation, but by all accounts for the purposes of indoctrination—not to mention reports of torture, imprisonment, family separation, forced birth-control, and abuse.
In the New Yorker profile linked above, Cixin Liu downplayed the influence of the contemporary context on his fiction, but he also trots out familiar apologetics for the camps: a benevolent government saving them from poverty and giving them economic opportunity. Liu is in a difficult position given the nature of the news in China and his relationship to the Chinese establishment, admittedly, but he is also wrong to suggest that he is able to escape this baggage. The result is a dark cloud that looms over this deeply engaging series even as David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the show-runners behind Game of Thrones, are reportedly beginning production on a Netflix adaptation.
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I am well into the crush of the fall semester at this point, which is cutting into both my reading and writing time. I have nevertheless finished I.J. Singer’s The Brother’s Ashkenazi, a yiddish family drama set in Poland, and Dreyer’s English, a romp through the English language as told by Benjamin Dreyer, the copy chief at Random House. I am now reading Drago Jančar’s The Galley Slave.
Noodlings 