Remembrance of Earth's Past – Cosmic game theory
Warning: Contains spoilers
Clarke’s Third Law teaches us that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, but magic does not necessarily make for a good story. This is the fundamental weakness of Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, which starts with The Three Body Problem. Over the course of three books, Cixin Liu introduces us to a dazzling array of cosmic wonders. Amidst this onslaught of speculative tech, human agency becomes so marginal that the story devolves into a mere mechanism for delivering a steady stream of scientific curios.
I chose to review the series in its totality, so this is a longer post than normal. What follows is a brief overview of each book, followed by a conclusion on the entire series.
The Three Body Problem
In the first book, humanity discovers that it is not alone in the cosmos. Not only do extraterrestrial civilizations exist, but there is one literally next door in the Alpha Centauri system, a mere 4 lightyears from Earth. Unfortunately, our interstellar neigbhours have already set out to conquer Earth as a way to escape their home planet, which is caught in an unpredictable dance between Alpha Centauri’s three stars, creating conditions extremely hostile to life. These ‘Trisolarans’ are however faced with a problem: Even when traveling at ~1% of lightspeed, it will still take them centuries to reach Earth, during which time humanity may achieve the technological upper hand. To prevent this, the Trisolarans engage in interstellar sabotage and send ‘sophons’ – AI-operated dimensionally engineered protons – to disrupt scientific development on Earth.
Appropriate to its title, the Three Body Problem consists of three strands which orbit each other. One tells the story of Ye Wenjie, a Chinese astronomer come of age during the Cultural Revolution, who makes first contact with Trisolaris. Two follows Wang Miao, a nanomaterials researcher who gets roped into a government-led attempt to unravel a mysterious conspiracy targeting physicists. Three narrates the harsh history of Trisolaris as a result of the eponymous three-body problem.
These latter two strands intertwine, as Wang Miao discovers the origin of Trisolaris through an elaborate VR simulation of the their history, created by the ‘Earth-Trisolaris Organisation’ (ETO) to identify potential recruits. The ETO acts as a pro-Trisolaran fifth column on Earth, contributing to the disruption of Earth’s scientific development. At the novel’s conclusion, the first strand combines with the other two, as we find out, not altogether surprisingly, that Ye Wenjie is the leader of the ETO.
At its core, The Three Body Problem asks a very interesting question: What would happen if we knew extraterrestrials existed and were on their way, but it would take centuries for them to reach Earth? It is a welcome departure from Independence Day or Star Trek style stories where the aliens just rock up and either simply invite us into the galactic community or try to eat us. The disappointment of The Three Body Problem is that it doesn’t give an interesting answer. The ETO’s motivations remain obscure, and come down to either a deep misanthropic hatred of humanity, or a religious veneration of the Trisolarans (or both). We are told that the ETO consists mostly of disaffected intellectuals, but as Cixin Liu’s writing style is predominantly ‘tell don’t show’, we never experience the psychological motivations for what to the reader is clearly irrational behaviour. It is as if in this universe too many people walked away from watching The Matrix with the notion that Agent Smith was right, actually.
The Three Body Problems’ treatment of its mathematical namesake is intriguingly represented through the recurring VR game, allowing the reader to gradually intuit what is going on, and generating sympathy for the sentient beings whose civilization gets knocked back time and again by the snake eyes it rolled in the game of cosmic dice. It is therefore rather anticlimactic when we discover that this strand is narratively redundant. In the universe of Remembrance of Earth’s Past, spacefaring civilisations annihilate each other as a matter of course, suggesting that the Trisolaran origin story was reverse-engineered purely to embed the famous mathematical puzzle. Retrospectively, it makes the investment in Trisolaris’ history both unnecessary and contrived.
The Dark Forest
The Dark Forest is the fulcrum of the trilogy and sets out its central conceit: the ‘dark forest’ doctrine. It is the weakest book in the series, because a Hobbesian version of the Fermi Paradox is not compelling enough to hold an entire story together.
At the opening of The Dark Forest we have moved on from most of the central characters in The Three Body Problem. Our new protagonist is Luo Ji, a washed-up astronomer who is made into a ‘Wallfacer’. Wallfacers are a solution to the contrived scenario where the sophons have the Earth under complete surveillance, but because they cannot read minds and the Trisolarans helpfully have no concept of deception, humanity can try to outmaneuver the aliens by selecting four individuals to devise secret strategies in the privacy of their own minds.
To everyone’s astonishment, himself included, Luo Ji is selected as the fourth Wallfacer. The other three Wallfacers immediately embark on projects that are equal parts grandiose and obscure. Luo Ji, not wanting to be a Walfacer, uses his newfound dictatorial powers to sulk in a lakeside manor in Europe. At the same time, the remnants of the ETO select four ‘Wallbreakers’ to work out the plans of the Wallfacers and expose them. Well, actually only three because ‘Luo Ji is his own Wallbreaker’, but also the ETO apparently cannot be bothered to allocate more people to what is their single most important mission.
We are then left slogging through the interminable machinations of the three other Wallfacers, none of whom turn out to believe in human victory and therefore come up with patently insane plans with marginal relevance to the overall plot. Luo Ji’s arc is not much more compelling: he first spends his time fantasizing about his perfect woman (the terms ‘soft’ and ‘delicate’ feature heavily), then using his Wallfacer powers to acquire his perfect woman (who helpfully reciprocates his obsessive affections), and then being forced by the Planetary Defence Council to actually do something useful after they take both the woman and her child with Luo Ji hostage by hibernating them until the arrival of the Trisolarans. At which point Luo Ji has a set of coordinates beamed into space and is then placed into hibernation following a failed ETO assassination attempt.
Where the first half of the book is merely boring, the second is properly implausible. We rejoin Luo Ji as he awakens from hibernation, to find that human civilization has gone through a period of crisis but has now emerged into a new era of prosperity. For reasons that are as baffling to Luo Ji as they are to the reader, humanity feels fully assured of its victory over the Trisolarans, solely on the basis of having lots of bulky space battleships. Collective amnesia means nobody remembers or cares that the Trisolarans are capable of dimensionally rearranging subatomic particles, and hence may not be all that frightened of railguns and lasers. Cue Earth’s fleet being duly and wholly predictably destroyed by a single probe made out of nuclear strong force material. Humanity is only saved when Luo Ji reveals he has the power to destroy Trisolaris. It turns out that this galaxy is filled with advanced civilizations, but because of cosmic game theory they must all kill each other on sight. Luo Ji has given Earth the ability to broadcast Trisolars’ location, but only by also revealing its own, thus creating the conditions for deterrence through the fear of mutually assured destruction (MAD), producing a fragile truce between Trisolaris and Earth.
Death’s End
Death’s End starts with another human golden age, this time resulting from technological and cultural exchange between Trisolaris and Earth, although we still do not meet any Trisolarans. Focus has shifted from Luo Ji to Cheng Xin, another astronomer. The third book wholeheartedly pushes the accelerator for cosmological technologies, giving it more grandeur than its two predecessors.
At the start of the book, Cheng Xin is briefly involved in sending a brain into space as an envoy to the Trisolarans, although even when the brain is later on reconstituted as a human, the relevance to the plot is marginal. She then enters hibernation and awakens during the golden age ushered in by Luo Ji’s dark forest MAD. Humanity’s deterrent depends however on a single person being responsible for pulling the trigger, and Luo Ji is by now well past retirement age. For opaque reasons, Cheng Xin is eventually elected as the next to hold the trigger, and predictably doesn’t fire it when the Trisolarans attack the second she is sworn in. None of this matters though, as there was an independent gravitational wave broadcast system conveniently cruising on the edge of the solar system, which the Trisolarans fail to destroy because an even more conveniently four-dimensional rift passes by, allowing the humans to destroy their otherwise invulnerable escorts. If this sounds rather random, that’s because it is. Unfortunately for humanity, these coincides were not indicative of divine protection and so despite spending decades relocating to shelters in the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, humanity is still exterminated when instead of having their star blown up (survivable), the entire solar system is collapsed into 2D space (not survivable). Only Cheng Xin and her friend AA (yes, that is a name, not a typo) escape by virtue of having the only lightspeed capable ship, eventually linking up with humans who had left the Solar System earlier.
The escalating deployment of Kardashev Type III level technologies is intellectually entertaining, but as with any series of deus ex machinas, irrecoverably collapses the narrative tension. The sheer randomness of events prevent any investment in either the main characters or humanity as a whole, given that none of the actions taken by either have any meaningful impact on how the story unfolds.
Conclusion
Reading Remembrance of Earth Past with awareness of its many accolades, I cannot help but be deeply disappointed. Undeniably, Cixin Liu has written an epic that breaks away from the infantile ‘WW2 in space’ mould in which so much science fiction remains stuck. It ranges all the way from subatomic particles to multiverses and cosmic realpolitik, presenting us with a galaxy brimming with life that yet is more hostile than the empty void. But a Who’s Who of speculative technologies does not a compelling story make, and the trilogy makes this worse by deploying many of them in a way that is clearly designed to simply move the plot forward. Dimensional rifts show up when and where the plot demands, protons can be made into sentient ‘sophons’ that then conveniently malfunction in certain parts of space, and space-curving FTL drives degrade the spacetime continuum across their path. The sense of plot-driven arbitrariness is exacerbated by the randomness with which humanity does or does not acquire some of the wilder technologies. For example, the Trisolarans can create sophons centuries before they build FTL ships, yet humanity doesn’t manage to pull this feat off at all in the books, for no obvious reason, other than that it doesn’t fit with the plot. (You would think that sending out undetectable, tech-disrupting spy drones that travel at near-lightspeed would be the first thing humanity would do.)
As Ursula K. Le Guin never tired of teaching us: science fiction is at its most powerful when it encourages us to reflect on who we are. Remembrance of Earth’s Past has traces of this reflective mode in its contemplation of humanity’s reaction to finding itself in a hostile cosmos. Sadly, this facet of the novels never develops, but remains stunted by Cixin Liu’s inability to write psychologically compelling humans, either as individuals or collectives. Most characters are woefully one-dimensional, with their dialogue stuck in robotic exposition, and their actions frequently inexplicably naive or implausible. Wang Miao in The Three Body Problem springs to mind, who, after being recruited by Chinese intelligence to infiltrate a scientific community linked to mysterious and sinister suicides, decides to consult an optician rather than his new handlers when a countdown clock appears in his vision and the cosmic background radiation blips for him personally.
The one-dimensionality is even more pronounced at the societal level, where humanity is presented either as a monolithic bloc, or at best as a set of monolithic factions. This reaches its nadir in The Dark Forest, where humanity inexplicably believes it can defeat the Trisolarans, and again in Death’s End where it happily assumes that humanity’s erstwhile enemies are now its benefactors.
One could argue that reflection is not the point of Remembrance of Earth’s Past, but that its purpose is the articulation of the dark forest doctrine, with humanity, Trisolaris and their attendant technologies cast in supporting roles. Certainly, it has now earned its own Wikipedia page. But making an idea the centrepiece of an epic is difficult, and Remembrance of Earth’s Past does not manage to pull this off. This is is not because the idea of a ‘kill or be killed’ universe is intrinsically less plausible than the usual trope of multispecies galactic federations, but because the books fail to engage with any of the obvious counterarguments. For one, you would expect it to be observable if stars were prematurely blown up on a regular basis. Dark forest doctrine also takes as axiomatic that all sentient species will expand exponentially. But there is no reason why civilizations could not reach a steady-state equilibrium, or expand at a pace that can be accommodated by a energetically bountiful universe.
Most implausible though, is the proposition that dimension-bending species would nonetheless still feel so threatened by any nascent spacefaring civilization that they would feel forced to pre-emptively terminate them. If you have reached the point where you can deploy a dimensional rift at any point in the galaxy within a few years from detecting life, then really you are not going to be technologically overtaken by a species that has only barely managed to crawl out of its own gravity well. You could afford to communicate. But the only inside view we get of one of these hyperadvanced civilizations is used to show how to them, nuking a star is as interesting as taking out the trash. It does not explain why they would be terrified of the trash to begin with. The failure to engage with such obvious counterarguments undermines the integrity of the dark forest concept, asking the reader to take the gravitational centre of the entire story on faith.
All this means Remembrance of Earth’s Past is much like the universe we probably actually inhabit: grand but lifeless. Its many ideas shine as brilliant stars in the night sky, inspiring momentary awe and wonder, but ultimately too distant, isolated and detached to have any permanent effect down here on solid earth.