Death’s End

Author: Cixin Liu
Translator: Ken Liu
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates 2016

A few years ago, I attended a talk given by a scientist at the Royal Asiatic Society Auditorium at Green Path with a close friend of mine. At the end of the talk, my friend got up and asked:

"Why isn’t anyone doing research about going faster than the speed of light? Why do we still take for granted assumptions of a hundred-year-old theory? Shouldn't we question those theories we have learned in colleges and universities?"

He meant the speed of light in a vacuum.  

Footnote 1: In 1998, Lene Vestergaard Hau and a team of scientists from Harvard University and the Rowland Institute for Science slowed a beam of light to about 17 meters per second in a medium.

Footnote 2: Later, this same friend told me that he learned in school that Buddha was born in India, and he accepted it without questioning. Now, he believes that Buddha was born in Sri Lanka, and I stopped reasoning with him after a while.

This is the third and final part of the "Three-body Problem" science fiction series. Liu should have concluded the story at the end of the second book. This extension is unnecessary and contains absurd claims, akin to those propounded by my friend.

I enjoyed the book up to about halfway through, specifically until the end of deciphering the riddle of three fairy tales. After that, it quickly went downhill. The narrative delved into discussions about advanced civilizations—far more advanced than human civilization—living in two-dimensional space, civilizations capable of altering the speed of light in a vacuum, civilizations capable of changing the laws of physics, civilizations able to create their own universes, and much more nonsensical content.

If this were my own copy of the book, I would have stopped reading halfway through. The rationale behind this decision is that if someone later claimed the ending was good, I could always return to it and give it another try. However, since this is a library copy, I endured it all the way to the end.

I had awarded four and a half stars to the first two books. However, I cannot give more than two stars to this book.

The Dark Forest

Author: Cixin Liu
Translator: Joel Martinsen
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates 2015

A civilization that can access ten of the eleven dimensions, that can program a proton by bringing it down to three dimensions, that can use those programmed protons to sabotage all your scientific experiments and halt all scientific progress, leaving you stuck with 21st-century technology until they arrive on Earth in 400 years, is coming to eliminate humankind and take over the Earth.

Your telescopes have actually observed thousands of starships and several probes when they crossed a debris field 4 light-years away. Two of the programmed protons are already here, halting all progress in physics, and those protons are entangled with two protons in the alien world, providing instantaneous access to information for the aliens.

On top of all this, an organized group of human traitors is spying for aliens and in constant touch with them.

Humans are unified to face the incoming danger, even though they have no real hope of stopping the aliens. The United Nations has selected four people, known as "Wallfacers," and has given them any resource they request to come up with a plan or plans to stop the aliens. Wallfacers work independently. The aliens select "Wallbreakers" from the group of traitors to sabotage the work of Wallfacers. 

For some reason, aliens fear only one of these Wallfacers. They want to eliminate him. This Wallfacer does not know why the aliens want to kill him. Once, he was interested in investigating "cosmic sociology," but he has not gone beyond two obvious axioms of this cosmic sociology:

Axiom 1: Survival is the primary need of civilization.

Axiom 2: Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant.

Do the aliens fear that this Wallfacer would make progress with "cosmic sociology"?

This is the sequel to the "Three-Body Problem." Cixin Liu is a master science-fiction writer. He maintains the high standards that he established with the Three-Body Problem in this sequel as well.

Three-Body Problem

Author: Cixin Liu
Translator: Ken Liu
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates 2014

Ye Wenjie observed the killing of her father, a professor and a theoretical physicist,  by unruly young red guard girls during the cultural revolution in China.  She, herself, an astrophysicist was sent to Inner Mongolia to clear forests and 'to learn from workers and farmers'.

There was a secret Governmental facility near the village she was 'serving', and she was recruited to this facility due to her astrophysics background.  Through hard work, she earned the trust of the authorities and was cleared to participate in the “sending” and “receiving” functions of the facility.  

She managed to send a radio message vastly amplified by the sun acting as a mirror and an amplifier.  A few years later, she received a reply to this message.  It said “Do not reply” three times.  She has grown quite disenchanted with humankind.  Despite the warning, she might choose to ignore it and put the entire biosphere in danger by replying.

Soon into the book, before the author revealed it towards the end, I realized this 'three-body problem' he was writing about. It refers to the nearest star system to our sun, which is also a triple star system: namely, Alpha Centauri A (a slightly larger star than our sun), Alpha Centauri B (a bit smaller than our sun), and Proxima Centauri or Alpha Centauri C (a very small star compared to our sun—a red dwarf). Proxima Centauri b is an Earth-sized planet orbiting Proxima Centauri within its habitable zone.

I remember all the excitement about this exoplanet when it was found—Earth-sized and in the habitable zone, etc. It orbits Proxima Centauri in approximately 11 Earth days and is tidally-locked with its sun. This means one side always faces the sun, much like one side of the Moon always faces the Earth (the Moon is tidally-locked with Earth).

However, the excitement soon waned when people learned about the hazardous environment of the planet. Close-in planets orbiting low-mass stars are exposed to intense energetic photons, particle radiation, and harsh space weather.

Proxima Centauri b was discovered in 2016, decades after Liu Cixin wrote this book. In other words, Liu Cixin had imagined such a planet orbiting the three-star system before its discovery.

The translator Ken Liu has written the following in his postscript.

When I was asked to translate the Three-body problem, I was incredibly honored, but also full of trepidation: Translating another writer’s work is a heavy responsibility.  It is almost like being asked to care for someone’s child.

I’ve also tried, whenever possible to avoid shading Western interpretations into those passages dealing with Chinese history and politics.

In translating, my goal is to act as a faithful interpreter, preserving much of the original’s nuances of meaning as possible without embellishment or omission.  Yet a translator must also balance fidelity to the source, aptness of expression, and beauty of style.

I would say Liu Cixin is well-versed in both science and science fiction, standing on the shoulders of scientists and some renowned science fiction writers while crafting this marvelous story. The translator has added footnotes to explain certain aspects in the book, which proved very helpful. It was through these footnotes that I learned about Isaac Asimov’s 'The Billiard Ball' (Footnote 13 on page 70). Similarly, I discovered Alain Chenciner and Richard Montgomery’s 'A Remarkable periodic solution of the three-body problem in the case of equal masses,' published in Annals of Mathematics, 152 (2000), 881-901 (Footnote 30 on page 199).

However, on page 321, there was no footnote explaining 'Bill Mathers’s ‘contact as symbol’ theory,' and I found myself perplexed. After spending some time searching for this theory, I eventually discovered that it was a ruse crafted by the author.

(See Bill Mathers.)

I am confident that Liu Cixin must have read 'The Physics of Star Trek' by Lawrence Krauss when estimating that it would take 450 years to travel from Proxima Centauri b to Earth at ten percent of the speed of light (the distance between Proxima Centauri and the sun is about 4 light years). I am also certain he delved into Arthur C. Clarke’s 'The Fountain of Paradise' when contemplating space elevators.

This book is an excellent piece of science fiction, and I look forward to exploring the next installment in the series soon.