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The Three-Body Problem

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The Three Body Problem (2006) is the inaugural novel in Cixun Liu's trilogy, The Remembrance of Earth's Past. This Hugo award-winning novel became available in English in a translation by Ken Liu in 2014. In the novel, astrophysicist Ye Wenjie, whose scientist father had been killed in the Cultural Revolution, communicates with an alien civilization. Nanotechnology professor Wang Maio later finds himself drawn to the role-playing game Three Body. Disaster looms when the game invites players’ ethical responses to a civilization that can only survive if it leaves its planet to colonize another. 

The novel's title comes from a celebrated puzzle of quantum physics; the novel explores the possibility of nanotechnological advances, particle physics, and interstellar communication as it invites reflection on environmental degradation, despair, and the worst and best that humans can offer.  As the Trisolarans emerge as the threat that humans are only just coming to understand, the novel invites reflection, by analogy, on far more understandable threats to the earth's sustainability caused by industrialization and indifference.

Excerpts, The Three-Body Problem

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