“The three suns took up almost the entire sky, and as they drifted toward the west, half of the formation sank below the horizon. The giant fan continued to spin, a bright blade occasionally shooting above the horizon to give the dying world another brief sunrise and sunset.”

The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu, page 188.

In The Three-Body Problem by Chinese physicist and author Cixin Liu, set in China just after the Cultural Revolution, Wang Miao is a Chinese scientist conducting experiments with nanomaterial whose life is forever altered when he notices small numbers appearing on any photos he takes. After analyzing these photos, he becomes increasingly concerned when he determines that the numbers symbolize a countdown that is continuing whether or not he is taking photos, and soon after realizes also that the numbers do not appear on photos taken by his wife or son on the very same camera. In desperation, fearing he is going crazy, he goes to visit Shen Yufei, a member of an organization called the Frontiers of Science, whom he had previously met briefly. She is completely unsurprised by his story and, giving him no justification or reasoning, tells him calmly to stop his nanomaterial research. No matter how hard he pushes her for an explanation, she simply responds: “Just stop. Try it. I’ve told you all I can” (Cixin Liu, 83).

Upon returning home, Wang wracks his mind for anything else he can glean from their conversation, anyone else he might go to for a better explanation. That is when he remembers how odd it was that such a stoic scientist was, when he entered her house, in the middle of playing a video game with a V-suit: a headset and complete suit that enabled gamers to experience the virtual reality of whatever game they were in. Because this had struck him as an odd hobby, knowing her personality, he had noted the site’s URL: www.3body.net. So, unable to think of anywhere else to turn, Wang gets a V-suit himself and logs on to the game.

He quickly finds himself immersed in a world with a dangerously unpredictable climate, with intense periods of hot and cold and an irregular sun, which often appears in different places in the horizon at different times. Wang realizes that the goal of the game is to determine why the climate is so unpredictable, and the following passage is significant because, after having logged in multiple times, that is where Wang solves the game: he realizes that this world has three suns rather than one, and are stuck in an unstable gravitational pull between them. This idea becomes one of the most important concepts in the novel, as it later becomes evident to the reader that this is not just a game as Wang had thought, but the reality of life on the foreign planet whose existence explains many of the mysterious happenings in the novel: Trisolaris.

The concept of these three suns reflects a real physics problem that many physicists have tried to solve, which is: if there are three bodies moving in space in orbit around each other, is there any way to predict the pattern of their movement, or is it completely random? As a physicist himself, Cixin Liu speaks to this problem from a scientific standpoint, introducing it as a problem that no one has found a solution to but that Wei Cheng, yet another scientist character, is researching over the course of the novel. Wei’s research in the novel is met similarly to Wang’s: he has a scientific breakthrough that is immediately followed by something unnerving. Only, in Wei’s case, it was an anonymous death threat if he didn’t stop working on the three-body problem, followed directly by his own wife (who happens to be Shen Yufei, the woman Wang saw with the V-suit) holding a gun to his head and threatening to kill him if he didn’t continue his research. Over the course of the novel, Wei never actually solves the three-body problem, but these threats make it clear that at least some of the characters in the novel believe him to be capable of doing so, which other physicists both in the novel and in real life have denied.

The technology of the game that shows the world of Trisolaris was crafted by the select group of humans who know of the existence of Trisolaris and the complex relations between the two planets. This group is a part of an organization called the Earth Trisolaris Organization, or ETO, and the game was designed as a subtle way to attract people to the idea of this otherworldly civilization, so that the ETO could identify them and, when they deemed it appropriate, recruit them (or send them anonymous death threats, as the case may be). Because Wang solves the game, he himself will be contacted by this group, which will spark the chain of events that finally will give him answers. In the end, he discovers why his nanomaterial research was relevant to all of this, how the countdown on his photos was related to the existence of this intelligent alien life, and why there were death threats to Wei if he did—or did not—continue his research, among many other mysteries revealed throughout the novel. While these revelations may not have brought him the peace of mind he was hoping for in explanation for those first weird occurrences of numbers appearing on his photographs, he does fit all of the pieces together; a journey which started—and ended, really—with this game and the repercussions of the three-body problem in the real world which it depicts.

Chapter 15

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