Back when I was reading and saw Luo Ji constantly searching for Zhuang Yan and the child, but the authorities refused to release them, I always worried that Zhuang Yan might have died long ago. Thankfully, she showed up again in the end.
If the dark forest existed, then humanity should currently be able to observe the sudden destruction of any star. But we haven't—we only see stars being born and dying naturally.
There is too much empty space in the universe, which contradicts the notion of limited resources.
The Trisolarans were already able to use instantaneous communication tools. By extension, future civilizations will naturally be able to use such tools—and then the so‑called chain of suspicion would cease to exist.
Both the Trisolarans and Earth later discovered black domains. As for more advanced civilizations, they engage in dimensional warfare—so they wouldn't bother with an ant like us.
From The Supernova Era to The Three-Body Problem, Liu Cixin has written a great many substantial full‑length science fiction works—especially The Three‑Body Problem, which revitalized Chinese science fiction. But it has been sixteen years since Three‑Body, and he hasn't published another full‑length novel. Even with his short stories, readers are in a "read while we can, and cherish each one" state of mind.
Is this a case of his talent running dry (which I certainly don't think so), or has Liu Cixin made Three‑Body into a mountain in front of him—a peak he must somehow surpass?
In any case, I'm still looking forward to his next masterpiece.
And what are your guesses about Liu Cixin's current state?
If the Trisolarans' thoughts are displayed on their bodies, as someone in the book imagines, then couldn't they just wear clothes or cover themselves with some other opaque material? I can even imagine it becoming their tradition: when visiting someone's home, both parties must take off their clothes and hang them outside as a sign of sincerity.
If humanity needed to migrate to another planet, would we, like the Trisolarans, wipe out civilizations less advanced than our own?
If there were a choice—say, between terraforming Earth or invading another planet—what would humanity choose?
And if that planet had no civilization built by intelligent beings, only primitive, less developed life forms, what would humanity choose then?
In the original novel, Ye Wenjie contacts the Trisolarans and brings about the attack, which has drawn criticism from some readers.
Suppose we change the plot: Ye Wenjie is killed before she can reply to the Trisolarans. Her classmate A takes over her position at the Red Coast Base, contacts the Trisolarans, and promptly reports it to the authorities. Through the ensuing communication between human governments and the Trisolarans, the attack is triggered, and the rest of the story follows the original.
Under this alternate scenario, would Ye Wenjie still be guilty? Who would be to blame—or is it all simply humanity's ignorance and arrogance?
In the novel, the droplet is practically deified. It seems Liu Cixin fell into a flawed logic—believing that only a material of equal hardness could destroy it. But in reality, sufficient kinetic energy is enough to destroy anything. That means the droplet's strength, as he set it, is hundreds of times harder than the hardest substance in our solar system—something that simply couldn't be true as portrayed in the book. Liu Cixin says that only by mass‑producing strong‑interaction materials can humanity destroy the droplet. But in truth, destroying the droplet doesn't require strong‑interaction materials—it only requires enough kinetic energy. Humanity can already accelerate warships to 15% of the speed of light. If they truly had that capability, given the strength level set in the book, the droplet wouldn't be able to withstand it at all.
How do you evaluate the fact that many people still think pushing Earth is less cost‑effective than building spaceships? This is clearly explained in the setting guide. In the Wandering Earth universe, humanity's ecological recycling system is not robust; relying on spaceships alone would make it very difficult to survive for long. Moreover, it wouldn't be possible to carry that many people aboard spaceships to escape.
So far I've read from The Three-Body Problem through to Death's End and have entered the Shelter Era.
First, let me say that as a work of science fiction, Three-Body is astonishing in its imagination and its exploration of future technology and the cosmos—it's definitely an excellent piece of sci‑fi.But I still have one gripe that I can't hold back:
Many of the characters in Three-Body feel like they're only there to move the plot forward. They show up when needed, and then they're gone for most of the book.
(I was taking notes on names and identities while reading, only to find that most characters appear just once or twice—what a fool I felt.)
Even after Chang Weisi's death, the various governments just become background scenery.
To highlight the protagonists, the government is portrayed as utterly ignorant.
The ETO, which was heavily featured early on, is quickly written out once its purpose is served. Later, the depictions of governments and the masses are also quite extreme—either they're unanimously for something or unanimously against it.
In reality, every era has its political disagreements and factional divisions.
Even someone like Luo Ji couldn't possibly be loathed by all of humanity.
Yet when Luo Ji was Swordholder, and when the second Swordholder was replaced, it was always the former.
There are also some descriptions in Three-Body of individuals swimming against the tide with noble integrity, but not many.
For example, when a male soldier on Gravity visits a female soldier and makes derogatory remarks about Blue Space, she immediately gets angry and expresses understanding for the officers and crew of Blue Space.
Having read two‑thirds of the way through, I feel that many of the characters remain rather hollow with the exception of Ye Wenjie.
Build multiple gravitational wave broadcast buttons and pick ten people—even if they were all like Cheng Xin—the combined deterrence level would be a hundred percent.
One detail from the novel left a deep impression on me: Earth had predicted the droplet's impact point to be somewhere in North China (where Luo Ji was located). Luo Ji prepared himself for death, but at the last moment, the droplet suddenly decelerated. The energy released by its braking was so intense that people in the Northern Hemisphere could see it clearly with the naked eye. Luo Ji felt as if a divine palm was descending from the sky, but at the final instant, the arm suddenly withdrew. The droplet eventually settled at the Sun‑Earth Lagrange point L1. Liu Cixin's description made me feel as though the droplet had changed its original course.
The Trisolarans' first droplet chose to jam the Sun's communication with Earth rather than kill Luo Ji first—perhaps because it didn't have enough remaining energy. For the same reason, the droplet could not destroy the stellar‑class hydrogen bombs armed with oil films that humanity had placed in the Oort Cloud as part of the Snow Project. Once it left the L1 point, it could no longer prevent humanity from using solar amplification technology to broadcast the coordinates of the Trisolaran system to the universe. That is why, when Luo Ji confronted the Trisolarans and demanded that the droplet not block the Sun, they readily agreed. But when Luo Ji demanded that the following nine droplets stay away from the solar system, the Trisolarans hesitated slightly, because that would completely remove any obstacle to the Snow Project's broadcast and would give up their last chance to turn the tables. At that time, those droplets were probably very close to being able to destroy the Snow Project's hydrogen bombs. Humanity had not yet made preparations for a solar‑gain broadcast, but Luo Ji could control the Snow Project's broadcast at any time. The Trisolarans said to Luo Ji: "We lost. We lost at strategy. We didn't anticipate the purpose of the Snow Project." This may well have been a lie. Was abandoning the ETO a failure? Not necessarily. The sophons, after prolonged contact with humanity, might have long since learned human cunning and no longer needed the ETO's assistance. Abandoning the ETO could also lull humanity into complacency, thereby causing them to completely abandon escapism in the new century.
Note: In the novel, the droplet is a highly advanced probe, but its energy reserves are limited, especially after long‑distance travel and sustained operations. Humans discovered that the droplet entered the solar system from the ecliptic plane, used a gravitational slingshot around Jupiter, and refrained from attacking civilian installations such as the fuel bases on Jupiter's moons—all of which may suggest that the droplet had limited energy. The sophon said that before the negotiations with Luo Ji, the Trisolaran fleet had already been decelerating at maximum power, which likely means the Trisolarans had begun preparing for negotiations much earlier—right after the Snow Project was completed. After all, they wouldn't want to wait until the talks to brake, only to have their fleet veer off course and get lost.
The Trisolarans' behavioral pattern: they are known for being highly rational and strategic, but they are also skilled at deception and concealing the truth. The Snow Project's hydrogen bombs were deployed in the Oort Cloud (about 0.5 to 1 light‑year from the Sun). Flying there from L1 would require additional energy and time. The novel mentions that the droplet's speed approaches the speed of light, but both acceleration and deceleration consume enormous amounts of energy. The droplet's movement and destructive capabilities depend on an unknown propulsion system, but we can estimate using classical physics. Assuming a droplet mass of *m* (described in the novel as a "perfect droplet" with extremely high density), the journey from the Trisolaran system to the solar system consumed a great deal of energy. After arrival, it needed to maintain its position at the Sun‑Earth L1 point to block solar‑gain reflection, which required continuous orbital corrections to avoid being pulled away by the Sun's gravity. The Trisolaran civilization repeatedly uses deception in the novel (e.g., misleading humanity through the sophons). Admitting "strategic miscalculation" may have been psychological warfare—intended to make humanity underestimate their threat, or to pave the way for future negotiations. If they had honestly answered that they had insufficient energy, it would have exposed a weakness and provoked more aggressive action from humanity.
An international organization issues a ban, and that's enough to outlaw escapism—and to ban the development of curvature drives? And everyone actually abides by it? You've got to be kidding.
They say that if only a few escape while most can't, it would lead to civil war. But if no one can escape, then conversely—if the rich and powerful want to flee and ordinary people oppose it—wouldn't that also trigger civil war? Would the wealthy just sit there and obediently wait for death? Does that match reality or human nature?
At the beginning of the second book, there's a discussion of escapism. The book gives an example: in a flooded city, if you can't survive, then no one gets to survive. That kind of thinking applies only when you yourself are facing an immediate threat to your life. But the reality is that ordinary people won't live for another 400 years to be wiped out by the Trisolarans. And the supposed "rich people buying expensive tickets" doesn't make sense either—they aren't facing any immediate life‑threatening danger. Why would they choose to suffer aboard a spaceship when they could simply enjoy their lives to the fullest until they die? Ordinary people also wouldn't empathize with their descendants 400 years from now, nor would they oppose escapism just for the sake of continuing their bloodline.
Public opinion would never have boiled over to the point of banning escapism.
Anyway, I think he's no better than Cheng Xin—zero wins in the whole book. Every one of his plans failed both in theory and in practice.
Let's go in chronological order.
The Staircase Program: digging out Vadim's brain failed, and the scheme was so transparent that even Cheng Xin could see through it. Wouldn't the old hands at PIA have had their suspicions? The book never says why he gave up his perfectly good director position and went into hibernation. I'm not exactly charitable here—my guess is that after killing his deputy, he couldn't keep his act together in the 21st century and was effectively exiled.
Then the Staircase Program made a dark joke out of Yun Tianming, with zero expected return, and successfully transformed Cheng Xin—who had been trying to be ruthless—into Saint Cheng Xin.
During the Swordholder election, he tried to assassinate Cheng Xin. That would inevitably tank his own support and disqualify him, while simultaneously boosting Cheng Xin's popularity. And even if he had killed her, the doves could still have put up a modern-era candidate—just not as effective.
Then the Starsky City incident—the pinnacle of Wade's brain‑dead moves. First, he broke his promise. Don't tell me he never considered that building bullet‑makers and amassing an army could harm humans. He only remembered that space cities are allergic to antimatter after broadcasting his declaration of independence across the entire solar system. Cheng Xin was still alive—couldn't he have asked her in advance? He was just using lightspeed ships as leverage to force Cheng Xin to back his war. And his brilliant strategy? Using rifles to manually aim at spaceships. Yes, line‑of‑sight engagement with no guidance capability—even Napoleon would have found it outdated. The antimatter bullets he treasured so much were already no threat to the human fleet by the end of the Crisis Era—see The Dark Forest for details. Considering that Starsky Industries had such a good reputation that declaring independence was met with "just be more careful next time," and with Cheng Xin as his ultra‑high‑limit credit card, Wade casually squandered his ace in the hole.
Just from the way the game is described, you can tell Liu Cixin has never really played online games. The game is supposedly multiplayer, but it actually feels more like a single‑player experience—or at best, something like a shared‑world game. And it's even more absurd that Wang Miao always happens to stumble upon something fortunate every time he logs in. Plus, the NPCs inside are either ETO members played by real people, or Trisolaran‑supplied super‑AIs.
If you were Ye Wenjie, would you reply to the Trisolarans?
Or, by now, do you think humanity is capable of solving its own civilizational problems—such as wealth inequality, conflicts of interest, and so on?
First, of course Ye Wenjie bears some responsibility. But what was the place where she worked—the Red Coast Base? It was a facility for searching for extraterrestrials. Was it really such a grave error for Ye Wenjie to use the Sun as an amplifier in order to fulfill that very mission objective—finding extraterrestrial life?
Second, from the moment Ye Wenjie sent that message via the Sun, Earth's fate was already sealed. Do you really take the Trisolarans for fools? Once they knew for certain that another civilization existed, guess what—wouldn't they aim for the nearest star to them, the Sun? Would they even need an exact bearing?
The Doomsday Battle laid bare humanity's arrogance and stupidity, but I believe the Trisolarans were even more foolish and arrogant than humanity.
On the surface, the Trisolarans won a sweeping victory—they wiped out the entire human fleet with just one droplet. But looking at the outcome, they succeeded tactically but failed disastrously strategically. The seven ships that escaped ultimately led to the Trisolaran civilization being struck by the dark forest.
Didn't the Trisolarans consider what would happen if one droplet wasn't enough to annihilate the entire human fleet? What if some ships escaped? They staked their victory on humanity's willingness to cooperate with their own idiocy. What an arrogant and foolish military gamble!
The Trisolarans told Ye Wenjie outright from the very beginning: exposing your location means being invaded. There was never any option of "helping humanity." In other words, the Trisolaran civilization was not highly moral!
Yet Ye Wenjie still chose to reply without hesitation.
(It must be emphasized that, apart from the killed Political Commissar Lei, this warning from the Trisolarans was seen by only Ye Wenjie herself. No one else ever saw or heard about it afterward. That means when later people asked about the content of that reply, Aunt Ye could say whatever she wanted.)
However, during her subsequent interrogation, what did Ye Wenjie say? She spouted that utterly cringeworthy theory of "high tech equals high morality"—and was immediately shot down by the interrogators.
This stark contrast allows only two explanations:
Ye Wenjie, whom everyone thought was a highly perceptive intellectual, was actually an idiot. She couldn't even understand a clear, explicit warning, and instead naïvely believed that the Trisolarans would help reform humanity.
Ye Wenjie had wanted to take revenge on humanity—even to destroy it—from the very beginning. To achieve that goal, she deliberately concealed the truth that the Trisolarans were invaders, not saviors, and tricked a group of social elites into forming the Earth Trisolaran Organization. That's right! Aunt Ye had long been an Adventist all along.
And not only was this old woman an extremist, but she also had no integrity—she lied, played innocent, and pinned the entire crime of intending to destroy humanity on Evans. At the same time, as the supreme commander of the ETO, she had no spine at all; under almost no pressure, she spilled the entire plan she had been scheming for half her life.
It's a collection of sci-fi competition entries, or something like that.
