Summary
14. Red Coast IV
In the present, Wang reflects that the Red Coast Project was ahead of its time. Questions about SETI were only pondered publicly recently. Scholars think it’s a bad idea for humans to make extraterrestrial contact, even at the most basic level. The Red Coast Project was slowly shut down, taking on non-SETI projects (which were largely Ye’s research, with Commissar Lei’s name on the reports).
Ye doesn’t talk much about her daily life at Red Coast, but (the reader learns) Wang heard about it from Sha Ruishan a few chapters ago: Ye married Chief Yang Weining four years after entering the base, without any drama. Yang and Lei were killed in an accident on base, and Yang Dong was born after her father’s death. Ye left Radar Peak in the mid-eighties and taught at Tsinghua University until retirement. Ye and Wang end on a melancholy note, with Ye saying she lives her life day by day; Wang can tell she is thinking of her daughter.
15. Three Body: Copernicus, Universal Football, and Tri-Solar Day
Wang Miao can’t calm down after leaving Ye’s home. He logs into Three Body, and he seems like a different person, entering the game with purpose: He is going to reveal the secret of the world of Three Body. He creates a new ID for his new role: Copernicus.
He’s once again on a broad, desolate plain, but the pyramid and dehydratories are now in a Gothic style. He enters the pyramid via a side door, illuminated by torches held by statues of Olympian gods. The men within wear Greek chitons or medieval robes, and Wang realizes that this is based on the European High Middle Ages—the game displays a distinct world for each player based on his ID. He speaks with Aristotle, Galileo, and Pope Gregory.
Wang proposes his theory: The sun’s motion seems patternless because their world has three suns, not one; this is the three-body problem, where three mutually perturbing gravitational attractions make their movements truly unpredictable.
Aristotle, Galileo, and Pope Gregory dismiss him and recommend burning him to death, but Wang argues well, explaining that from a distance only the sun’s core can be observed, so suns are observed from afar as stars. However, even though Leonardo da Vinci enters and argues in favor of Wang’s theory, preparations are made to burn Wang over a low fire. He’s tied to a stake. Wang yells that he’ll return, using a new computer, but Three Body records retinal scans through the V-suit, making returning impossible; however, if he's on the right path, he’ll be rewarded after death.
Right before Aristotle puts a silver Zippo lighter to Wang’s pyre, a knight interrupts, saying the world is ending—dehydrate immediately. Wang frees himself and runs outside to find a tri-solar day, as he’d predicted. The world ends with three massive whirling suns, and text appears from the hellish fire on the ground: Civilization Number 183 has been destroyed, but Copernicus successfully revealed the basic structure of the universe. Civilization will make its first leap—Three Body has now entered the second level of the game.
As soon as Wang logs out, his phone rings—Da Shi asks him to come to his office at the Criminal Division, where Wang meets computer specialist Xu Bingbing and, surprisingly, Wei Cheng, Shen Yufei’s mysterious husband. Wei Cheng says his life is in danger and tells a story, which the book includes in first-person italics.
Wei Cheng has always been lazy. He is supremely gifted at understanding equations, but this goes unnoticed until high school (when his teacher was an impressive scholar struggling to find suitable work during the Cultural Revolution). He becomes recognized as a successful mathematician, but has no passion, getting his Ph.D. without effort. However, he realizes he’s useless at everything else—he’s fired from teaching, so he moves to a Buddhist temple, where the abbot advises him that “emptiness” is not “nothingness.” Wei Cheng works on filling himself with existential emptiness, and he discovers a mental image of three gravitational bodies working upon one another. He becomes fixated on describing at least part of this elaborate period of repetition.
(Wang Miao interrupts Wei here to ask if he’d heard of Henri Poincaré; the footnotes on page 194 explain historical attempts at solving the three-body problem, sometimes called the n-body problem.)
Wei studies the three-body problem by basically using brute force to overcome precise logic, creating an evolutionary algorithm that studies the three-body system moment by moment. However, it requires larger computing power than humankind has now. Back at the Buddhist temple, he burned his scratch paper, but it was found by a young woman. She found him and insisted he come with her to continue his research. That woman was Shen Yufei; Wei says he agreed right away, as he had nothing to do anyway. That night, he observes her praying to Buddha that her Lord will break away from his sea of misery, but she won’t share who this “Lord” is. Though the abbot advises Wei not to leave with her, he does.
They eventually get married for convenience, and they talk only of the three-body problem. His research has been successful: Where other experts in the field have produced one or two stable periodic solutions to the problem (based on the initial conditions), Wei’s evolutionary algorithm has found more than 100 stable configurations. His goal now is to make a mathematical model that can take any initial configuration and predict all subsequent motion of the three-body system; this is also what Shen Yufei craves.
However, a man called yesterday and threatened to kill him, with no details or caller ID. At night either today or yesterday, Shen Yufei threatened Wei at gunpoint to continue his research or she would kill him, saying he’ll be a sinner if he stops. With illegal firearm possession as an excuse, Da Shi leaves for Shen Yufei’s house with Wang, Xu Bingbing, and two other officers. On the ride, Xu talks to Wang about Three Body—she’s in charge of monitoring it for the police, though no one knows where the game originated.
They find Shen Yufei dead, shot and lying in a pool of her own blood. Wei Cheng recalls seeing her argue yesterday with the environmentalist Pan Han. Their fight seemed to be about a “Lord” and his desires—either the elimination or the salvation of humanity. Privately, Wang asks Wei for an outline of his three-body evolutionary algorithm, which Wei gives him. Wei advises Wang to live the rest of his life in peace, without worries: Wei would never bother telling the police this, but the human race is long past anyone listening to their prayers.
17. Three Body: Newton, Von Neumann, the First Emperor, and Tri-Solar Syzygy
The second level of Three Body begins with a pyramid, like the first level. Wang (as Copernicus) sees two men in European dress dueling (Isaac Newton and Leibniz) and a third man trying to stop them (Von Neumann). They’ve come to the east to find 30 million people who can do the mathematical computing required to solve the three-body problem (they’ve never heard of computers). From a joke he makes, Wang deduces that Von Neumann is a real person playing the game, not an NPC, and that he’s Chinese.
Wang, Von Neumann, and Isaac Newton meet with Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor, whose eyes are the same as King Zhou and Pope Gregory’s. Von Neumann uses three of Qin Shi Huang’s soldiers to demonstrate different “gates” using white and black flags: 30 million people doing basic tasks can emulate a modern-day computer. Qin Shi Huang agrees. In-game time speeds up; after three months, the Qin I computer is ready. Another year and four months pass while the computer operates, with some breaks for Chaotic Eras. The computer calculates the suns’ patterns for the upcoming years.
However, instead of a normal sunrise, there’s a tri-solar syzygy event in which the suns are in a straight line, moving around the planet at the same angular speed. With gravitational forces altered, things begin to float away from the planet’s surface, accelerating toward the suns. They all die ghastly deaths. Civilization Number 184 ends; they’re invited to log on again.
Right as Wang logs out, a Three Body system administrator calls asking for Wang’s personal information so he can continue the game. Wang answers truthfully, and he’s invited to a meet-up for Three Body players tomorrow night.
18. Meet-Up
The meet-up is in a coffee shop, and it’s only seven people, including Wang. None of them are typical gamers, and Wang already knows two: a famous scholar and an avant-garde author. Others include the VP of China’s largest software company, a doctoral student, a reporter, and a State Power Corporation executive. The meeting organizer is Pan Han, prime suspect in Shen Yufei’s murder; Wang texts Shi Qiang.
When the players—the top seven highest scorers in the game—ask, Pan Han reveals that the world of Three Body is real. Trisolaris is a real place, where inhabitants have the ability to dehydrate and the three suns truly exist. The game uses the aesthetics of Earth to create a familiar environment for players, but Trisolaris itself is different, and Pan Han isn’t really sure how. The Trisolaran-formation computer is real, likely indicating that Trisolarans’ bodies are purely reflective and can form any shape.
The goal of Three Body is “to gather those of us who have common ideals”—that is, to connect people who believe the arrival of Trisolaran civilization on Earth would be good, even at the expense of the human race. Wang shares as little of his own thoughts as he can. The software company VP and the power company executive disagree, so they’re kicked out of the meeting and their IDs are removed from Three Body. Pan shakes each remaining member’s hand, saying “We are comrades now.”
19. Three Body: Einstein, the Pendulum Monument, and the Great Rip
Wang Miao logs into Three Body for the fifth time, and he finds the United Nations Headquarters where the pyramid used to be. He watches a moon move across the sky, while a homeless man plays Mozart on a violin. The man is Einstein, who can’t find work; he and Wang discuss general relativity. Wang joins the UN General Assembly Pendulum Initiation Ceremony, where they’ve constructed a massive pendulum as a monument and tombstone for Solaris—it commemorates the end of the effort to solve the three-body problem. When Wang shows them Wei Cheng’s three-body mathematical model, all of the General Assembly members lose interest in him. A science advisor explains that many other models like this exist, and most are more advanced. It’s been definitively proven that the three-body problem has no solution. God is a gambler, and if Trisolaran civilization is to survive, they have to gamble as well.
The moon rises again. The science advisor explains that the moon is a result of the great rip. Civilization 191 observed a frozen flying star—a terrible omen—and then all three suns moved past the planet in quick succession, ultimately breaking the planet into two pieces. It took 90 million years for Civilization 192 to appear after that. Researchers have learned other devastating things about Trisolaris: there used to be 12 planets in their stellar system, and the others were destroyed; the gaseous layers of the stars expand and contract dramatically over time; and the next expansion of the suns—and the end of Trisolaris—will happen in one thousand years. The only hope for Trisolaran civilization is to emigrate to a new galaxy and find a new world.
Wang, Einstein, and the others watch the enormous pendulum in motion. Wang wonders if it represents the yearning for order, or the surrender to chaos; his eyes blur with tears. Lines of text appear, explaining that Civilization 192 was destroyed 452 years later, and the goal of Three Body has changed: “Head for the stars; find a new home.” Wang logs out of Three Body, then logs in 30 minutes later to find an unexpected line of text on a pitch-black background: “The situation is urgent… Three Body will now go directly to the final scene.”
20. Three Body: Expedition
Wang thinks he’s looking at a bare desert at dawn, but he realizes it’s actually a sea of hundreds of millions of Trisolarans waiting in silence. In the sky, Wang sees a formation of lights. The person next to him explains that this is the Trisolaran Interstellar Fleet, which can travel at one-tenth the speed of light. They’re going to the nearest star, about four lightyears away. Wang and the Trisolarans watch the fleet fly away.
Game text explains that the Trisolaran Expedition is still in flight. Three Body is over. Wang is invited to another meet-up of the Earth-Trisolaris Organization if he remains true to the promise he’s made.
Analysis
This section once again distances the characters' knowledge from the reader's knowledge. Sha Ruishan told Wang Miao about Ye Wenjie's marriage and her time at Red Coast Base before Wang saw the cosmic microwave background flicker, so not only did we not receive the "full story" of Wang's conversation with Sha Ruishan, we don't have access to Wang Miao's mind. (These facts about Ye are wrong, too, and will be corrected by Ye Wenjie the next time she talks about Red Coast Base; her husband didn't die in a workplace accident.)
Three Body progresses quickly once Wang Miao figures out that the game is presenting a three-body problem. (How he didn't figure this out earlier is a mystery, and it kind of makes Wang Miao look silly. The game's title is the solution. Shouldn't he, a scientist, have figured it out faster? However, it's worth acknowledging that this book, The Three-Body Problem, made the orbital mechanics problem much more popular; perhaps before this book came out, we also might have had trouble figuring out what "Three Body" could mean.) The aesthetics of the game change based on his username—changing from Hairen to Copernicus takes him into a more Greek build—and some things update anachronistically, like the use of the Zippo lighter.
Many famous scientists are evoked in the game, though they seem to be mostly NPCs, unlike Wang's Copernicus. Three Body was supposedly an attempt to recruit the lower classes to the ETO's cause, but it instead attracts just more high-status people, and here we can kind of see why. Imagine Da Shi encountering a conversation with "Einstein" that includes jokes about being out of work. Surely if the game were truly trying to recruit members of a different mindset, the story wouldn't be populated by jokes about Leibniz and Newton—it would be accessible even to people who didn't recognize or get excited by those names.
Regardless of the game's intention or success, Wang Miao ends up at a Three Body meetup with Pan Han. In chapter 18 it's finally revealed that, yes, the world of Three Body is a real place. Trisolaris is real, and the horrors of Three Body are happening to them in real time. However, Pan Han admits that the aesthetic of Three Body is based on Earth. This accomplishes a lot of things—it makes the world familiar to the player, drawing them in; it allows for jokes about scientists—but most of all, it makes it easy for Liu Cixin to explain to us as readers. If he had to describe an actual alien aesthetic and walk us through the mysteries of Three Body, this book would have been much longer.
These Three Body passages clearly progress the plot (we just learned aliens are definitely real, after all) but structurally, they slow down the in-world action. Shen Yufei has been murdered, and Wei Cheng has been threatened, both by Shen and by someone else. Something is clearly afoot in the real world, and it's resulted in real-world murder. The long passages of Three Body gameplay slow the momentum of this mystery down, building suspense, because we're left wondering: Did Pan Han really kill Shen Yufei? Is Wang Miao in danger, sitting in that coffee shop with him? Who threatened Wei Cheng?
There are both terrestrial and extraterrestrial mysteries at work in The Three-Body Problem, creating an interesting point about the "contact as a symbol" theory discussed at the start of this section (page 176). Yes, the mere fact of contact alone is enough to hugely influence human psychology and culture, resulting in murder and Battle Command Centers worldwide. This particular contact isn't just fact, though—as Wang Miao has now seen, the Trisolaran fleet actually is on its way, with millions of Trisolarans eagerly watching.
