Summary
31. Operation Guzheng
Wang Miao, Da Shi, Ding Yi, General Chang, and many others, including Colonel Stanton of the U.S. Marines—representatives from every world superpower—meet to discuss ways to get the Trisolaran messages off of Judgment Day without giving the crew time to delete those messages. After exhausting many possibilities, Da Shi (rudely, especially to Colonel Stanton) demonstrates his plan using cigars: when Judgment Day goes through the Panama Canal in four days, they can use “Flying Blade” nanomaterial filaments from Wang’s lab to slice it apart. They decide the exact location for the filaments—they’ll be 50 centimeters apart vertically, so Da Shi recommends attacking during the day so that most crew members will be standing up (i.e., most people will be killed). When Wang asks if innocents will be killed, General Chang tells him not to worry—someone else will make the call. After the meeting, Colonel Stanton gives Da Shi his personal cigar box.
Four days later, at the Gaillard Cut in the Panama Canal, Wang and Colonel Stanton observe Operation Guzheng (named for the structure’s similarity to an ancient Chinese zither). The nanofilaments work, slicing through Judgment Day, though the back half of the ship tries to adjust. Soldiers descend to put out fires.
Three days after that, Ye Wenjie is interrogated (presented as a transcript). The interrogator tells her that Mike Evans died on Judgment Day, but the Trisolaran messages have been received—about 28 gigabytes worth of them, revealing the reality of Trisolaran civilization.
32. Trisolaris: The Listener
Ye reads a section of the preliminary analysis of the Trisolaran messages. It includes no information on what they look like, so she pictures them as humanoid, filling in the gaps with her own imagination. We can interpret the following narrative to be part fact, part Ye’s imagination.
On Trisolaris, the listener at Post 1379 hears Ye’s message during a lonely Chaotic Era. Earth is paradise, and he loves imagining it. Due to pressures from life expectancy, job scarcity, forced burnings of the unproductive, and mating, the listener frequently asks Is this all there is to life? and finds himself answering Yes—until he receives Ye’s message. He finds a chance to make his humble life glow by protecting Earth, sending his own message: Do not answer! Do not answer!! Do not answer!!!
The listener from Post 1379 is questioned by the princeps of Trisolaris, and the listener argues that the survival-focused, authoritarian, “metallic” Trisolaran spirit has infiltrated their cells and solidified. Even if they did move to Earth, they couldn’t become a free and beautiful people. The listener will happily give up his life to save the distant, beautiful world he’s fallen in love with. The princeps determines the listener is guilty, the worst criminal in all of Trisolaran civilization, but he won’t be dehydrated and burned; as his punishment, the listener will live until the day he knows without doubt that Earth's civilization will be destroyed.
Even though it’s impossible to determine exactly where Ye's message came from, the princeps prepares to send the Trisolaran Fleet in the approximate direction of Earth—with the risk of Trisolaris being destroyed by the three suns any minute, they have no choice but to make this gamble.
33. Trisolaris: Sophon
This chapter is particularly long, and it continues the story of Trisolaris as interpreted by humans (not just Ye) based on messages intercepted on Judgment Day.
85 thousand Trisolaran hours (about 8.6 Earth years) later, the princeps orders an emergency meeting of Trisolaran consuls under the Pendulum Monument. (This makes Wang Miao think of Three Body; his perspective on the Trisolaris narrative is included in brackets.) The princeps stops the monument—God has blessed Trisolaris, so they no longer need to hypnotize him.
Trisolaris has received Ye’s response message, so the fleet has now turned toward Earth, but this isn’t all good news. Because Earth's civilization has progressed exponentially from the Hunter-Gatherer Age to the Information Age, by the time the fleet reaches Earth, humans very likely will have developed more advanced technology than Trisolaris. The princeps proposes spreading dissent on Earth, using tricks to create “miracles” on Earth. For this, they have Project Sophon, a large particle accelerator that will turn protons into supercomputers. Another 60 thousand hours later, the particle accelerator in space unfolds a proton into one dimension—a failure, since they wanted two dimensions—and the resulting infinitely thin, 1,500-light-hour-long string falls to the surface of Trisolaris, covering everything in a strange light. Its visible qualities break up over time, but it greatly upsets and annoys Trisolarans.
The second attempt is a failure: the proton is broken into three dimensions, creating enormous reflective shapes of all kinds (spheres, cones, tori, tetrahedrons) that cover the sky, then slowly disintegrate, starting to look like eyes—which, again, freaks out the Trisolarans. The science consul discusses the possibility of intelligence within the microcosmos. Soon, the smaller eyes move together and form one big eye, then a circle, and then a parabolic mirror. The parabolic mirror directs sunlight onto the Trisolaran capital, causing intense heat and brightness before the city is destroyed. After a debate between the science and military consul, the princeps approves one more attempt to unfold a proton.
The third attempt succeeds. The proton unfolds in two dimensions, looking to observers like a giant mirror. Thousands of spaceships work thousands of hours to etch circuits onto the proton. When it’s finished, the science consul tests the sophon computer, guiding it from two dimensions to three (a giant sphere), four (looks like a distant star), then six (50 centimeters across). This is just Sophon One—once there are more, they’ll be able to interact with the macro world while folded into eleven dimensions.
Sophon Two, Three, and Four are created successfully, then adjusted to the eleventh dimension. Sophons One and Two are fired to Earth, and Sophons Three and Four remain on Trisolaris for instantaneous communication. Their first job will be to interrupt collision experiments, making Earth physicists believe that physics is unpredictable (recall Ding Yi and Wang Miao playing pool). This, plus creating “miracles” like Wang's countdown, will stop humans from progressing meaningfully toward defending themselves against Trisolaris.
Ye Wenjie finishes reading the messages from Trisolaris. The Battle Command center meets, and General Chang announces that they are being monitored in real time by sophons—there are no more secrets. Three seconds after this, Trisolaris sends a message—the last one they’ll send for the remainder of all attendees’ lives—into the retinas of the attendees: You’re bugs!
34. Bugs
Shi Qiang enters Ding Yi’s home to find Wang Miao and Ding Yi already very drunk. They’re celebrating the decadence and depravity that comes with the guaranteed end of the world. Da Shi forces them into his car and drives them to his hometown, where the wheat fields are plagued by locusts. He asks if the technological gap between Trisolaris and Earth is greater than the gap between locusts and humans; as if doused with cold water, Wang and Ding understand Shi Qiang’s point. Though humanity has killed bugs for the entirety of human civilization, bugs haven’t been defeated. The scientists thank Da Shi, pour their remaining wine out in a toast to the bugs, and head back. There’s so much to do.
35. The Ruins
Ye Wenjie has become silent since learning the truth about Trisolaran civilization. Her one request is to visit the old Red Coast Base, which she does alone (though with other visitors). The base was dismantled, so there are no ruins, as if Red Coast never happened. Ye discovers the base for the antenna that sent her original message. She sits on the lip of the cliff where she killed Lei and Yang. She looks over the clouds, knowing that a small village called Qijiatun is beneath them. With the last of her strength, she stays upright, seeing one more sunset at Red Coast Base. It’s bloody red. “My sunset,” Ye whispers. “And sunset for humanity.”
Analysis
The Three-Body Problem's concluding section includes long flashback chapters following the Trisolarans. This is an unconventional choice, introducing an unnamed princeps in the final section of the novel. If this book were a murder mystery, these chapters would be the "revelation of the killer" passages, in which the detective explains the murderer and their reasoning in detail. For science fiction, this structure is a bit odd, so it's worth thinking about, particularly as a jumping-off point into the next book in the trilogy.
No human can exactly imagine what a Trisolaran looks like. Because of that, the chapters about Trisolaris are filtered through characters' imaginations of what those scenes could have looked like. This difficulty of imagination comes into play in the experiments with sophons, too—such abstract activity takes many pages to describe, and structurally, it comes at the "climax" of the novel, immediately preceding the denouement. Liu Cixin's imagery of shapes, eyes, and objects gliding through the sky is powerful, but it certainly makes for a strange climactic passage.
The true action climax of the novel is the destruction of the Judgment Day, on which Mike Evans is reported to have died with no fanfare. The description of the ship being cut apart by Flying Blade is on page 344, and it's especially rich with literary devices: the ship "spread open like a deck of cards," the noise "like countless giant fingernails scratching against glass." By the end, "Judgment Day was spilled on the shore like a stack of plates carried by a stumbling waiter," "soft as cloth." The heavy reliance on mundane imagery pulls away from the literal (and likely horrific) destruction of the large ship and numerous lives, instead emphasizing its strangeness, layering image atop image.
We also see a climactic character moment for Ye Wenjie, as she realizes that her belief in Trisolaris was wrong. In the final interrogation section, Ye Wenjie admits why she believed in Trisolaran civilization's goodness, despite the lack of evidence: "A society with such advanced science must also have more advanced moral standards" (page 345). She learns that this logic was flawed—Trisolaran civilization is shown to not be any more moral than human civilization. After this, she falls almost entirely silent, rarely speaking for the rest of her life.
Chapters 34 and 35 each depict the end of one protagonist's narrative. The first ends the story of Wang Miao, drunk with Ding Yi and then inspired by Da Shi. His chapter ends on a hopeful note, reflecting on the dignity of life on earth, saying "There's so much to do" as he, Ding Yi, and Da Shi look toward the future. Conversely, the second chapter ends on a downbeat note: it closes the story of Ye Wenjie, alone on the cliffs where Red Coast Base used to be. She doesn't look toward her pleasant past at Qijiatun, but rather toward the setting sun as blackness closes in on her vision. These chapters could easily have been swapped, ending on the hopeful note of Wang Miao's dialogue; instead, we end on the image of a bloodred sunset, leaving an ominous coda to what is, in the end, a story about humanity's demise.
