I have just finished reading Cixin Liu's epic trilogy Remembrance of Earth's Past and I think I need to take a break from reading, from life, from everything. Cixin Liu has to be the most conceptually ambitious writer I've ever encountered. His canvas is not just the Universe, but several universes. If the writer is a god of his own creations, he's not satisified with that. He's going for GOD of ALL creation. And he just about succeeds. It's brilliant.
The series might be better known as "The Three Body Problem", the name and central concept of the first book, as that's arguably the most famous of the three books, if only because it has been around the longest and therefore has generated the most chatter among sci-fi fans. The three-body problem is a recognised physical phenomenon that relates to three objects, in this case three stars in proximity, in which the momentum of each body generates an instability. The chaotic dynamical system in this case sets in motion the action for book 1.
However, I think if there's a concept that might be considered truly central to this trilogy (that abounds in startling concepts -- the three-body problem being just one) then it would be the Dark Forest concept, which is the title of the second, and in my opinion best, book.
I'll set it out as plain as I can. It's a fantastic idea that works really well in sci fi, yes, but actually a version of it could be adapted to any literary setting because it's so relatable and human. In the context of The Dark Forest (the book) it's an answer to Fermi's paradox, which asks the question -- and I'm paraphrasing -- that if there are intelligent beings out there in the grand unknown, how come we never hear from them? Given the sheer magnitude of the place, it must be full of LGMs (little green men, to the uninitiated). Therefore the absence of such contact would imply that, other than us, the Universe is a cold and empty place. We're on our own, QED.
Not so, at least as far as Cixin Liu is concerned. His Dark Forest theory states that while the Universe is a cold place, it's not empty, and is in fact an unforgiving and even vicious place. Full of LGMs, yes. But the smart/still-alive ones know that if you've got any sense, you'll hide your light under a bushel. For the Universe is a pulsating forest of predators and as soon as you broadcast your existence, you are effectively announcing yourself as a danger to everybody. You could be as harmless as a grasshopper, sure, but across light years how is everyone to know? You could also be a scorpion. (I'm choosing grasshoppers and scorpions because they look like aliens in my brain.) And in fact the only safe bet is that you ARE a scorpion. And therefore... well, you can figure out the rest.
In other words, lighting a fire in the dark forest is a dumb thing to do, and will get you stomped on. Or in this case, annihilated by a photoid which, I've come to understand, is a rock going at the speed of light that can destroy a star in a moment simply by virtue of its velocity and consequent radiation, as a bullet might a person. (Cheerful fellow, is our Cixin.)
So that's the gist of it. Making yourself known to the cosmos gets you zapped, and this is something that is figured out with aplomb by one of the protagonists, Luo Ji, in the course of Book 2 and leads to a Mexican standoff of universal proportions. I say one of the protagonists because there are several. Although Cixin Liu does make an effort to centre his story around various characters, none of them could be considered THE central character through which we feel the story's passions. They are functional at best. We seldom see any character wrestle with the travails of life and love. Only one of them (Da Shi) has a sense of humour. In over two thousand pages we never see them eat and seldom see them, say, smoke or do other stuff that humans do. And quite a lot of them are physicists who bang on about scientific concepts as if they thought of nothing else. No, it's humanity, not any particular human, who is the central character of this series. And towards the end of the frankly bonkers but highly enjoyable Book 3, Death's End, we find out just how insignificant humanity is.
That said, it's all surprisingly addictive and readable stuff, and that's because Mr. Liu really does understand what makes his readers tick. In other words, even though these are Big Issues for Humanity, he makes them all about things that any of us can get. For me, it was the similarity with one of my all-time favourite movies, The Treasure of Sierra Madre, that came as a revelation.
Unlike the Three Body Problem series (There, see? It's easier), The Treasure of Sierra Madre has rich and memorable characterisation. Set in a gold rush (if not THE Gold Rush) in 1920s USA, its anti-hero is Fred C. Dobbs, played brilliantly by Humphrey Bogart. Fred is a drifter, jobless, reduced to begging on the streets. Like us all, he dreams of the good life, sure, but really what's on the line is his own survival; he's just trying to make a buck. Fred's arc from an every-day joe, if somewhat cynical and opportunistic, to a monstrosity of paranoid gold-lust is a blog posting all of its own. But despite this riveting aspect of the film, and the equally amazing performance of Walter Huston as an old prospector who guides Dobbs and another drifter (played by Tim Holt), the real main character in this film is not any human but a thing; gold. Or rather, what gold stands for -- wayward lust for money, and survival. And the repercussions of such a thing.
What piqued my interest was one particular scene (thanks to @sjmay92) that popped up in my Twitter feed recently. While weighing some gold the characters have found, Walter Huston's character, who is wise to what gold can do to a man, is discussing who should carry it.
He says it should be him, as he's the most trustworthy; not honest, he's keen to point out, but trustworthy. As an old man, he could be easily caught and overpowered by the others should he try to make off with it. In this scene, you see the gold lust burning in Bogart's eyes as Huston delivers his unshakeable, Liu-esque logic and you realise that, in this world up in the mountains away from the trappings of civilised society, there are no such silly things as "honesty" and "friendship"; there is no morality, for the simple reason that it's not practical. Trustworthiness is all about who is the least likely to double cross you.
This cold logic lies also at the heart of the Dark Forest, in which humanity must decide how to avoid a Dark Forest strike and annihilation, in the stark realisation that the Universe is, effectively, out to get us. Just as gold turns us into savages, so does the loneliness of space. And, in revealing Earth's location at one point in the story, humans realise that they're in danger. One considered solution is to present ourselves as a "black domain". This concept involves slowing down the speed of light (as you do) within our Solar System, thus disabling ourselves from ever achieving light speed travel, thus sending out a clear message that we're harmless and benign, much like Walter Huston. Despite the fact that this, in my awkward retelling of it, might come across as a hutch of chickens clucking to the dusky, fox-infested fields "Don't kill us, please!" it is, nonetheless, taken seriously by many humans in the book. The other options -- pursuing light speed travel, for example, and exploring the cosmos -- are considered too reckless. "Let's forget about what makes us human," the humans seem to cluck, "and hide out here in our little solar system." As it turns out, the black domain solution is too complicated and our poor humans compromise, taking the arguably equally cowardly/dumb course of hiding behind Jupiter. And, well, let's just say that turns out to be not the wisest thing to do.
The Treasure of Sierra Madre does take a turn, however (it is Hollywood after all), and I don't think I'll be spoiling anything by saying that Fred C Dobbs gets what's coming to him and the good guys Tim Holt and Walter Huston in particular discover real happiness, thus also getting their just desserts if not their gold. "Lust is bad," says the film, and no amount of logic-ing is going to get around the darkness in the hearts of men, which will ultimately destroy us. Poor old Fred loses his gold, yes, but we know he's lost far more; he has lost his humanity.
Cixin Liu is just as uncompromising in the Universe's punishment of humanity for its cowardice, though I should say that, though it's all very bleak, like all bleak works, there is lots of positivity to be extracted from it. Actually, all three books, which work well as stand-alones, have happy endings.
But nothing can take away from the cold core of both works, which are both focused on the vagaries of survival. There's a dark lesson to be learned, or at least discussed. Is the meaning of all human culture, all human endeavour, whether that's in the Sierra Madre or in the Universe or indeed in the world in which we ourselves inhabit, all about human happiness? Does it even matter? Or does human survival trump this?
And of course there's another insight to be extracted, and that is, like the Treasure of Sierra Madre, and equally the work of the great songwriter David Berman of Silver Jews (whom I only bring up because I'll blog about him next), the Three Body Problem series warns us about the coldness and isolation that just might be at the heart of all reality. It's not saying it is. This is fiction after all! But it is saying that it could be. There but for the grace of God -- or Cixin Liu -- go we all.
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