The Alien Other in The Three-Body Problem

Since its publication in 2006, Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem has become a veritable smash hit in its native China, sweeping all the nation’s science fiction awards. With the publication of Ken Liu’s translation into English, the juggernaut travels west. Opening in the chaos of China’s Cultural Revolution, it focuses on the experiences of a young woman, Ye Wenjie (all names follow Chinese naming patterns, with the surname first, though the author’s is rendered in the Western manner). She and her parents are scientists, and science was often seen as dangerously counter-revolutionary; the rules of the universe refuse to conform to political theory, both then and now. Her father is killed, her mother abandons her, and the scholars who nurtured her are broken up and scattered.
Zhetai is exiled to a labor camp for “political rehabilitation” through forced labor. As the tides of the Cultural Revolution change, her formerly seditious scientific knowledge lands her at a secret military base nearby. She’s still suspect, but useful as a pawn in a very political game of science. First contact comes to this woman, who is isolated and broken, betrayed on so many levels by so many people. She makes irrevocable choices for all of humanity based on her experiences.
The novel then jumps forty years into the future, into a murder mystery of sorts. Wang Miao, a scientist working with nanomaterial, is called into a smoke-filled room by a strange collection of military officials, foreign dignitaries, and other scientists, and asked to infiltrate a group called the Frontiers of Science. It seems a large number of scholars committed suicide in the last year, most of them associated with the group, which operates with a mandate to consider the limits of science: how deeply and precisely can we understand the nature of reality. Wang reluctantly agrees, after a number of alarming experiences test his faith in the very laws of the universe (how did the background radiation of the universe flicker?).
From there, Wang plays the flatfoot, traveling around and interviewing members of the Frontiers of Science and relatives of the dead. He also begins playing a game called Three Body, which takes place on an alien planet and is peopled by historical Chinese figures and scientists from all over history. The game turns out to be a recruitment tool orchestrated by a group planning for an inevitable alien invasion. They’re working on a very broad timeline—due to the immensity of the galaxy and the limits of relativistic space travel, the extraterrestrial force won’t arrive for hundreds of years.
The group is divided as to their interpretations of the aliens’ motives. Some see them as saviors, a belief predicated on the idea humanity needs saving from itself, and that technological advances correlate with moral advances. Others assume much less benevolent intentions, but are so disgusted with their own species, they are willing to allow the invasion continue apace. A third group wants to mount a defense, but the aliens’ technological superiority is considerable. Invasion stories are, on one level, about alienation, and the dislocations of time, space, culture, and history in The Three-Body Problem are thought-provoking and effective.
Why it will win:
My grandfather, who was a high school chemistry teacher, had a story he loved to tell his students: he and my grandmother visited Hong Kong in the ’70s. They had only rudimentary Chinese, and despite the British administration of the day, most people didn’t speak English. Grandma cut herself somehow, and grandpa ducked into a pharmacy to get her bandaids and hydrogen peroxide. Bandaids were easy —they’re pictured on the box—but he had to ask about the peroxide. After a bit of pantomime with the pharmacist, Grandpa wrote H2O2 on a sheet of paper and slid it over. The man lit up in understanding, and they ended up having a strange conversation, mediated through scribbled formulas and wallet photographs. They were both men of science, and could speak the same language.

I got into science fiction through filching my grandfather’s paperbacks, and The Three-Body Problem would fit right in with the Golden Age novels that populated his shelves. I wasn’t surprised to see Liu invoke Arthur C. Clarke in his afterword; something here reminded me of Childhood’s End (or to a lesser extent, 2001), from the sweeping historical view, to the clearly explained ideas, to the almost magical science. (Clarke, you’ll recall, famously said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”) The Three-Body Problem explores the central concerns of science fiction: the intersection of science and politics, our response to the alien Other, the nature of humanity itself. Nebula voters have a distinct preference for this kind of novel, one of Big Ideas, written on an expansive canvas, grounded in the universal languages of science.
Why it won’t win:
In a postscript, translator Ken Liu (no relation) describes the challenge of translating as, “breaking down one piece of work in one language and ferrying the pieces across a gulf to reconstitute them into a new work in another language.” As far as I can assess it, I think he succeeded, unobtrusively slipping in the background I needed to make sense of foreign relationships and references. Liu is a science fiction writer in his own right (with a whole raft of awards to his name), and he clearly knows the idioms of the genre inside and out. But while works in translation have always been eligible for the Nebula, The Three-Body Problem is one of only two translated novels ever to be nominated in the novel category in the award’s 50-year history. (Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is the other. It did not win.)

For better or for worse, the Nebula voting pool is made up of members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and judging by the lack of nominees-in-translation, the preference for English language work is obvious. Cixin Liu lives very far away, and has fewer professional ties with American SF/F writers, certainly a factor in an award voted on by members of said profession. In terms of its genre credentials, the novel is impeccable—an important component of a genre award—but the English language version is, on some level, a collaborative effort, and the question of how much is lost (or added) in translation may trouble some voters.
The Three-Body Problem is a strong novel, so strong it was able to cross languages and cultures to be the first Chinese novel considered for both the Hugo and the Nebula. I completely enjoyed my first experience with a science fictional tradition just that much different from my own, but the first of anything must break the ground; it’s the later books that really take root. The second of this trilogy, The Dark Forest, will be out next year, and we’ll see what happens then.