To Infinity and Beyond

No, this story is not about Buzz Lightyear. But Buzz's catchphrase is actually a neat description of The Three Body Problem, an epic saga of Earth's contact with alien races written by the Chinese author Liu Cixin.

Oh no, not another Star Trek tale! I hear you say. I promise you that it is not. This is so-called hard science fiction, meaning that it is characterized by concern for scientific accuracy and logic. No phasers, no "beam me up, Scotty".

This is actually a trilogy. The first book has The Three Body Problem as its title; the second is The Dark Forest and the third is Death's End. Spoilers ahead.

The tale starts in the era of Mao's Cultural Revolution, where scientists, as well as many others, suffered purges and arrests. Ye Wenjie, an astrophysics graduate from Tsinghua University, witnesses her father beaten to death. She turns out to be one of the few fixtures throughout the three books. At the end of the trilogy, many centuries have passed in Earth's history.

Ye Wenjie later, as an astropysicist, sends a message into space to see if there are any extraterrestrial civilisations. The message is received by the planet Trisolaris, the only remaining of the original twelve planets of the three star Alpha Centauri system, 4.37 light years away from earth. Scientifically, the three bodies - in this case the three stars of thew system - rotate around each other chaotically. This causes Trisolaris to go through many eras of alternating prosperity and disaster but now the planet is nearing its end as it is drawn inexorably towards collision with one of the suns. Trisolarians have been looking for a planet in another, more stable, system in order to spread their civilisation there. Hence the message from Earth is a potential blessing and, realising they are much more advanced technologically than Earth, they make plans to colonise it.

On Earth, scientists realise that the Trisolarians have built an invasion fleet which will arrive in just over four centuries' time. Thereafter, the trilogy deals with the ways in which Earth responds to this - technologically, culturally, sociologically and individually.

Each of the three books has a main protagonist and, as the saga develops over the centuries, it grows in scale from a planet-focused tale to a galactic epic.

The science includes known astrophysical concepts such as the three body problem itself, dark matter, dark forest theory, suspended animation and multidimensional space. As the story goes far into the future, new theoretical concepts are explored.

But this is not by any means a scientific treatise, or even a story of a battle between alien races but more about the development, innovation and ebb and flow of civilisations. I wish I was an experienced literary reviewer, so that I could give you a better description and impression of these amazing books. It's like asking someone to describe The Lord of the Rings in a few paragraphs. I hope this brief description, coupled with my enthusiasm for the books, will persuade some of you to give them a try. They are complex works; the first book particularly requires patience as the background to the tale evolves, but the pace grows, and the direction becomes clearer, as the centuries pass.