the three body problem the wandering earth

Liú Cíxīn’s trilogy is available in English and Mandarin is not a big problem. ‘Death’s End’ is the third volume in the trilogy, in which a devastating dark forest attack occurs. The central theme becomes “Mutually Assured Destruction”, which seems to echo Chinese worries on using nuclear deterrence with a more powerful USA. The snag is that the location of Earth will also be visible and it will probably also be destroyed. If the location of their planet is ‘published’ into the galaxy, some third civilisation in the dark forest will destroy Solaris. A possible defence for Earth against the technologically superior Trisolarians becomes apparent to Luo, the main character, who is a ‘wallfacer’. This is a metaphor for intelligent life in the galaxy, in which every animal must keep silent to avoid attack by every other animal, or risk extinction. The second novel is the “The Dark Forest’. The formal name of the trilogy is “Remembrance of Earth’s past”. While brilliantly imaginative, there is a nagging issue for those who read AC Clarke: the plasma from the cannon would need to be travelling at earth escape velocity, more than 11 km a second. His imagination is fleshed out with the precision of a power engineer, which was his first profession. “The Wandering Earth”, for example, involves the world government using enormous plasma cannons to propel the planet out of range of the sun, which is about to become a red giant. Readers are invariably startled by his imaginative scope. Clarke as a major influence, so many of the themes in his novels could equally well be written by this Brit or an American. Liú Cíxīn is a nine-time winner of the Galaxy Award, China’s most prestigious literary science fiction prize. Their surveillance devices are already here and their fleet will arrive in 400 years’ time. They are looking for a new planet and have chosen Earth. Their evolution has forced them to be extremely resilient because of the planet’s erratic orbit, but now they realise the planet will be drawn into one of the suns. Very intelligent aliens originate on a planet in an unstable three-star system, so they are called the Trisolarians. The actual problem for all people of Earth is even more challenging. The ‘Three-Body Problem’ is a difficult to solve mathematical puzzle left for us by Isaac Newton.

The three body problem the wandering earth