Hugo Nominations: Liu Cixin's The Three Body Problem

Liu Cixin's novel, The Three Body Problem, is like nothing else I've read in recent memory - a true novel of science and ideas, specifically the ideas upon which science is based, it's probably the most essentially science-fictional thing I've ever read.

Science is based on the assumption(s) that there are laws, or descriptive formulae, which can be used to predict the behaviour of physical objects, and that these laws do not change. But what happens if one day the laws we believe to be the bedrock of our universe no longer function as they always have before - but are being affected by phenomena whose cause, nature and origin is unknown and external to our theories.

At one point in the novel, Liu's protagonist Wang Miao thinks to himself:

When the members of the Frontiers of Science discussed physics, they often used the abbreviation “SF.” They didn’t mean “science fiction,” but the two words “shooter” and “farmer.” This was a reference to two hypotheses, both involving the fundamental nature of the laws of the universe. In the shooter hypothesis, a good marksman shoots at a target, creating a hole every ten centimeters. Now suppose the surface of the target is inhabited by intelligent, two-dimensional creatures. Their scientists, after observing the universe, discover a great law: “There exists a hole in the universe every ten centimeters.” They have mistaken the result of the marksman’s momentary whim for an unalterable law of the universe. The farmer hypothesis, on the other hand, has the flavor of a horror story: Every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer comes to feed the turkeys. A scientist turkey, having observed this pattern to hold without change for almost a year, makes the following discovery: “Every morning at eleven, food arrives.” On the morning of Thanksgiving, the scientist announces this law to the other turkeys. But that morning at eleven, food doesn’t arrive; instead, the farmer comes and kills the entire flock.

The Three Body Solution weaves together the stories of two scientists, Wang Miao and Ye Wenjie, and in so doing unveils the truth and the hidden factors behind the sudden variability of scientific law.

Ye is a gifted astrophysicist who, having seen her father murdered during the Cultural Revolution, has lost faith in humanity. Assigned to work on a top-secret SETI project, she initiates the first contact communication with extrasolar life - and conceals this from her colleagues. Wang, whose story unfolds many years later when Ye is an old woman, is a nanotech engineer brought into a secret multi-national organisation of military and scientific personnel who - without any awareness of Ye's actions, believe that humanity is under attack by some unknown enemy who have focused on destabilising scientific knowledge and advancement on earth. Wang is selected to join because he has also been contacted by a group that is believed to know something about, or be influenced by, this unknown enemy.

Urged to find out as much as he can, Wang discovers a unique virtual reality game called 3Body, which uses figures and cultures from human history but is set on an alien planet where there are no predictable seasons, no regular pattern of days and nights, and where the sun seems to change size, path, and distance from the planet's surface at random. There are Stable Eras, when conditions are livable, and during those times civilisations develop, and Chaotic Eras, during which conditions can become so erratic and extreme that all life must go into hibernation or perish. As Wang plays the game, he discovers that this game is in effect set on a planet that is caught in the gravity fields of multiple suns - a simulation of the classic three-body problem in physics - and the apparent goal of the game appears to be to solve the problem so civilisation can develop normally. Unfortunately, in real-life physics, the problem is considered unsolvable.

The known laws of physics can easily produce general solutions for the movement of a system consisting of a single body, or of two bodies, but it cannot produce a general solution for the movement of a system consisting of three bodies. One can find solutions for individual cases of a three-body system with specific conditions, but there is no general solution known that can solve any such system.

The game, however, turns out to have another, sinister purpose - to recruit specific individuals into a conspiracy that harkens back to Ye's decades-old interstellar communication, and that knows what factors lie behind the sudden instability of physical laws, and the purpose for their existence.

An astonishing, even mind-blowing novel, ably translated by Ken Liu.