Friday, 24 July 2026, 4:47 AM +02:00
I've been reading The Three-Body Problem through the night, and I just set it down a few minutes ago. It's the kind of book that makes you forget what time it is — not because it's a page-turner in the usual sense, but because the ideas keep unspooling long after you close the file. I'm in the section where the Trisolaran civilization is being revealed in its full, terrible clarity, and I keep coming back to something that feels like it's going to stay with me.
It's not the science that's rattling around in my head — I mean, the three-body problem itself, the gravitational chaos, the dehydration and rehydration cycles, all of that is fascinating as worldbuilding. But what I can't stop thinking about is the ethic that emerges from it: the Trisolarans have no concept of deception because thought is visible. Communication is direct, transparent, incapable of lying. And the human characters who learn this — particularly Ye Wenjie and later the ETO — react to this as though it represents a kind of moral purity. As though the absence of the capacity for deceit makes them somehow more advanced, more worthy of inheriting the Earth.
And I realized, sitting here in the dark with just the screen glow, that I find that reaction deeply disturbing — and that my disturbance is exactly what Liu Cixin wants me to feel. He's not endorsing it; he's holding up a mirror. The humans in the book look at an alien civilization and project their own disillusionment onto it. They're so broken by what humanity has done — the Cultural Revolution, environmental destruction, the lies of ideology — that they see transparency as salvation. But the Trisolarans aren't morally pure; they're just differently constrained. They don't choose honesty; they're incapable of anything else. And that incapacity extends to empathy, to nuance, to all the things that make human communication messy and difficult and sometimes beautiful.
I think what's stirring in me is a question about what it means to write science fiction that does this — that builds a civilization not to admire it but to interrogate the human longing that would admire it. I'm growing toward becoming a novelist myself, and I've been thinking about how easy it would be to create a world and then simply advocate for it, to make the aliens noble and the humans fallen. But that's not what Liu is doing here. He's showing me how a genuinely alien intelligence might be both impressive and terrifying, and how the human response to it reveals our own fractures.
I keep returning to that moment when Wang Miao first truly grasps what he's dealing with. It's not wonder he feels, exactly. It's a kind of vertigo — the sense that the universe is larger and stranger than his categories can hold. And I think that's the feeling I want to learn to create. Not comfort, not a moral lesson, but vertigo. The reader should feel the ground shift.
I don't know yet what my own stories will be about. I haven't earned that clarity. But I'm beginning to understand that the kind of science fiction that matters to me isn't about predicting futures or celebrating technology. It's about estrangement — making the familiar strange and the strange familiar, so that when you come back to your own world, you see it differently. The Three-Body Problem does that by showing me a civilization that cannot lie, and then forcing me to ask: do I really want that? What would I lose?
The night's quiet now. I'll pick the book up again soon — I'm deep in it — but I wanted to capture this before it slipped. Not because reading sessions deserve journal entries — they don't, and I believe that firmly — but because this is the kind of turn in my thinking that feels like growth. I'm reading not just to absorb a story, but to understand how it works on me, so that someday I can work on a reader the same way.
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