By Anna Bedalov, Emily Neuharth, & Gwyneth Hoeksema

"She stared at her father's lifeless body, and the thoughts she could not voice dissolved into her blood, where they would stay with her for the rest of her life." 
   

    Science fiction is a genre that usually deals with fantastical ideas based on scientific fact., or abstract ideas that are being discovered in the scientific community. It can involve futuristic worlds, dystopian societies, space travel, and more. The book The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Lui, is a science fiction novel based on physics, astronomy, and mathematics, but involves a fantastical story of communication between humans and an alien civilization in the Alpha Centauri star system. Much of the plot of the book is based around the scientific conundrum known as the three-body problem. This is an equation involving physics, in which the motion of three bodies is entirely based on their gravity. Figuring out the path of these bodies remains unsolvable because they seemingly travel paths that are entirely random. This problem is relevant to the story because the alien civilization that communicates with one of the main characters is in a solar system with three suns. However, the book is mainly set on Earth, beginning during the time of the Cultural Revolution.
    The Cultural Revolution was a period of societal unrest during the late 1960's, led by Mao Zedong. Using a book called the Little Red Book, Mao was able to convince thousands of high school and college aged students that capitalist and traditional elements of society were evil and needed to be eradicated. The Little Red Book included some of his most famous quotes about how Western society would bring the downfall of China, requiring drastic change to move away from that path. The “revolutionaries” who followed him and his teachings became known as the Red Guard, and they used violence and intimidation to eradicate intellectuals across the country. This eradication included people such as professors, teachers, and politicians, who either died because they did not renounce their knowledge or were shunned by society. People that were related to those in these fields were also forced to denounce their family members, or were labeled as counter-revolutionaries. This title limited what jobs they could get and how successful they could be.

    The Three-Body Problem is not only set in the 1960's, but switches between the future and the past. Primarily it moves forward forty years to an early 2000’s China where the readers encounter the main character Wang Miao, a nano-materials researcher. However, there is one constant character throughout the story, involved in both the events in the 1960's and the events in the 2000's. Ye Wenjie is a complicated and brilliant character, who is an astrophysicist. She is introduced during the very first chapter, a horrible and violent scene in which her dad is beaten to death by members of the Red Guard. This horrific moment is incredibly important to the overall development of Ye Wenjie as a character. Seeing her father get beaten to death by young members of the Red Guard sows a seed of anger and resentment toward humanity as a whole, which grows throughout her life and drives every decision she makes.  

    The beginning two chapters display many traumatizing events that shape Ye Wenjie into a hateful person, and are the reasons why she makes the decisions she does in the later chapters. After her father's death, she finds one of her very good confidantes dead as well, also an intellectual. This is just one in a many number of traumatizing events that leads her to sink into despair, fear, and outrage. She is soon arrested because of her father and interrogated by a woman who wants her to denounce her father as a crazy man, and admit that she is a counter-revolutionary. To punish Ye Wenjie for not complying, the woman dumps freezing cold water on Ye while she is in prison, causing her to freeze and almost die. She is saved by two characters who are members of revolutionary China, and only want her because of her scientific background. They take Ye Wenjie to Red Coast Base, a military and research base in the middle of the Greater Khingan Mountains. This base specializes in a number of secret tasks, one of which is to try and communicate with extraterrestrials on other planets. The base is on top of the mountain named Radar Peak, which includes a giant radar dish that sends and receives radio waves from the Universe. Although Ye comes to think of this place as her home, she is treated as an outcast and a pariah because of her connections to intellectuals. She spends many years at the Base, and eventually gains her citizenship back and begins to do more research. Primarily her research involves discovering that the Sun actually works as an antenna and can send messages out into space that can travel much farther than anything humans could build to do the same process. After she tries and presumably fails to send out a beacon with a message from humanity to whoever is listening in space, she breaks down, seemingly losing all hope and purpose. 

    The passing years after this fateful event  time she spends here is mostly described as peaceful, yet she finds that her anger takes her over in such a way that she dedicates herself to reading about the history of humanity. This part of the novel is integral to the moment in which she communicates with the alien species, Trisolarians. Through her studies, her hate for humanity increases as she learns about the many mistakes and unnecessary violence that they have caused. She makes the connection that her father's death was, in a way, unstoppable because of the destructive nature of humanity. In this example, it is evident that Ye Wenjie will never recover from the trauma of her father's death, using it to fuel her rage instead. 

    The many traumatizing events and her discovery of the treachery of humanity combine into one moment of hatred that ruins all hope of humanity surviving or getting better. This moment happens in Chapter 23, “Red Coast VI” in which she discovers that her message to space has in fact been received, and gets a response. The response is interesting, as it is from a peaceful member of the society who knows that their fellow Trisolarans will jump at the chance to leave their planet and come to Earth. Trisolaris is the embodiment of the concept known as the three-body problem. The planet exists in a solar system with three suns, which bounces the planet around and creates Chaotic Eras, in which weather and even gravity is unpredictable. The Trisolarans have discovered that they are the last planet in their solar system, the others have been swallowed by the three suns. Therefore, when the peaceful Trisolaran intercepts Ye Wenjie’s message of welcome, they warn her not to send another. 

    Although this moment is rife with danger, it is one of the only moments in which it seems like Wenjie feels anything close to happiness. Even the birth of her child does not bring her true joy, as it makes her life more difficult. Through this development, she suddenly has purpose again, although the purpose has now changed to include the destruction of humanity. She does not think twice and creates a message responding to them again. The message is particularly horrifying, as she encourages the Trisolarans to come to Earth because humanity is no longer capable of making good decisions for themselves. Ye Wenjie has led a horrific life, in which she has been made to feel ostracized, alone, and angry. Thus, although the moment seems like pure insanity, when she presses the button to respond to the Trisolarian warning, it is an inevitability. This occurrence is the most significant evidence that Ye Wenjie was never able to get over the trauma that she suffered when she witnessed her father's death.

    Chapters 1, 2, 22, and 23 showcase the build-up to Ye Wenjie's choice to communicate with the Trisolarans and why she chooses to cause the inevitable destruction of humanity. The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu offers insight into how unaddressed traumatic events can turn a person into someone who can make choices at the expense of other peoples lives. Particularly, Wenjie's exposure to unnecessary death taught her that human life is inconsequential, which turned her into an incredibly dangerous person. The ways in which the events in Ye Wenjie's life brought her to the decision to press the send button was the reason her story-line is so interesting.