They call him Da Liu: Big Liu. A looser translation might be “the big kahuna,” the one who needs no introduction. Many American viewers of Netflix’s new interstellar drama, 3 Body Problem, are unfamiliar with the trilogy of books it’s based on (collectively titled Remembrance of Earth’s Past) and their author, Liu Cixin. But in his native country, he is a literary sensation, the kingpin of Chinese science fiction. Science fiction, in turn, is no escapist diversion in China. It is an imaginative exercise pursued in deadly earnest, an expression of national aspirations to technological supremacy.

Before Liu wrote novels, he was a computer engineer in the hydropower industry; once he became a bestselling author, China’s aerospace agency invited him to give a talk about how “sci-fi thinking” can help with brainstorming solutions to physics problems. Once, Chinese Communists put his parents to work in the coal mines of Yangquan after his family’s political loyalties came into question. Now, the magnates of a far more powerful China want Liu to help them picture the future.

That’s one reason why the first scene of 3 Body Problem, as it appears onscreen, is so shocking. Instead of sunny CCP propaganda, the story opens with as scathing a depiction as could be imagined of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution and its famous pidou dahui—“denunciation rallies,” or “struggle sessions.” A lone physics professor, Ye Zhetai, is hauled onstage to suffer violent abuse by a mob of jeering Red Guards. Many of his tormentors are former students, and one—in the bitterest blow of all—is his wife, Shao Lin. Zhetai’s crime is teaching relativity theory.

This much is based on truth. The big-bang cosmology that arose from Einstein’s equations offended then-current Marxist sensibilities. It suggested that time, because it had a beginning, might have an author. “The theory leaves open a place to be filled by God,” says Shao Lin with utmost contempt. Unrepentant, Ye Zhetai is bludgeoned to death. It’s unbearable to watch. 

It’s also the defining trauma that sets the story in motion. Zhetai’s daughter, Ye Wenjie, is held back from intervening as her father dies. The steely rage of that moment hardens within her until one day, working at a clandestine mountain base where Mao’s scientists are trying to contact extraterrestrials, she once again becomes a silent witness to the unthinkable. In secret even from her superiors, Ye Wenjie receives humanity’s first message from an alien civilization. It begins with one sentence, repeated three times: “Do not respond.”

She has stumbled on a murderous race. It happens that she’s reached one of its few members compassionate enough to warn her that if news of humanity’s existence travels any further, the result will be a mission of conquest. In the show, we see a lonely girl in the dark, suddenly master of her planet’s fate. Zine Tseng, transfixing in her breakout role as young Wenjie, shows us everything we need to see in the set of her jaw: she is remembering what humanity can do. It was in the name of “humanity” and its glorious future that Wenjie’s father was left bleeding on that wooden floor. She types out a response: “Come. We cannot save ourselves. I will help you conquer this world.”

That’s the end of episode 2. The rest of the season collapses the trilogy’s first book—almost 400 pages in Ken Liu’s English translation—into 5 episodes. The remaining three episodes set up the plots of books 2 and 3 in parallel, making it possible that all 18.9 million years of Liu’s saga will fill up no more than three or four seasons. Creators David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, best known for HBO’s Game of Thrones, can’t take the same expansive approach afforded them by the undisputed market dominance of George R. R. Martin’s IP. Even their unprecedented starting budget of $20 million an episode felt tight in this first season, some of which featured noticeably slapdash CGI. The requirements of the material are enough to chew through a small country’s GDP, and now—with season 2 in progress, but yet to be officially greenlit—the team is jockeying with hits like Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen for streaming views and the funding they bring. But Benioff and Weiss have been clever about economizing plot points.

Cosmic Keep-Away

Liu’s books send readers careening into the future as a disorienting parade of cultural epochs flits by. Some main characters “hibernate” in suspended animation and wake up centuries later, while others are trotted out or dispensed with era by era as the situation demands. But Benioff and Weiss have rearranged the cast so that most big players are introduced from the start, presumably to be carried forward via hibernation through the entire storyline. We get to connect with the principals early and stick with them.

In some ways, this is an improvement. For all the riches of his high-tech fantasy vision, Liu suffers from the common sci-fi affliction of tending to use characters as stock figurines in extended thought experiments, rather than fictional souls unto themselves. Readers learn to just let it happen, focusing on one or two more finely rendered individuals while civilizations rise and fall around them in a time-lapse blur.

The screen version is written and acted with subtler wit than Liu can muster. But those who enjoy what’s called “hard sci-fi” for its fine-grained details about speculative physics will prefer the books. Whatever the relative merits and flaws of each version, though, The Three-Body Problem is electrifying in any format thanks to the grim power of Liu’s central question: if another world came bringing death to ours instead of fellowship, how many of us would welcome our own doom? 

Ye Wenjie’s correspondents are the san ti, the “Three-Body-People” (Latinized in Ken Liu’s English as “Trisolarans”). Their world suffers from the famous problem in orbital mechanics that lends the book its title: given three celestial bodies—say, three stars in one cluster—no general equation can reliably tell you how gravity will direct their motion. Trisolaris, the san ti’s planet, is tossed unceasingly between three suns without any stable pattern, like a basketball in a sadistic game of cosmic keep-away. Sometimes whole generations are consumed without warning in the blaze of an approaching star. 

The orderly rules that seem to hold steady in our primary corner of the galaxy have allowed us the fond illusion that the contours of the universe run smoothly everywhere. The surrealist nightmare of the san ti’s history allows for no such quaint fictions; they know that the few patches of spacetime where nature can be understood are precious rarities. They will go to any lengths to colonize the nearest one, which means clearing out the fumbling infant species that currently occupy it.

Ye Wenjie is ready to let them have it. By reading Rachel Carson’s manifesto of 1960s environmentalism, Silent Spring, she learns to condemn humanity for ravaging its home world. Haunted by the thought of a cancerous evil in the pit of the human heart, she concludes it is “impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it [is] impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair.” Help must come from the stars.

I Will Lift Up My Eyes

“I know they’re coming to save us from ourselves,” says Rosalind Chao as a hollow-eyed and elderly Ye Wenjie on Netflix. She has molded her resentment of her own species into a twisted faith in the san ti—though it seems unclear even to her whether she expects them to bring benevolent rule or summary annihilation. In the show, especially, she wavers by the hour between messianic hope and eliminationist despair. There’s an eerie realism to this: Ye Wenjie may be fictional, but her psychological profile is not. Plenty of people living today share her uncertainty about whether humanity should survive, and under what conditions. 

“Look what we did to this planet,” said Les Knight, founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction movement, to the New York Times in 2022. “We’re not a good species.” Back in 2006, when Liu first published The Three-Body Problem, he zeroed in presciently on a nihilist sentiment that would later gain startling real-world currency. Like Christianity, environmental catastrophism begins from the premise that we are too sinful to rescue ourselves; unlike Christianity, it offers no guarantee that anyone else can. Ye Wenjie and her followers represent an increasingly widespread suspicion that robots, or aliens—or even animals—would make better stewards of the planet than we do.

As birth rates fall below replacement levels in the East and West alike, Ye Wenjie’s declarations of existential surrender start to feel more and more topical. The infamous one-child policy accelerated China’s population decline with extreme prejudice, and its knock-on effects are still being felt. But America’s numbers are drooping too. If infertility isn’t a matter of state coercion with us, it’s certainly a matter of cultural listlessness and self-doubt. It may be we are catching up, in a bleak sort of way—heading toward a spiritual precipice that Chinese thinkers like Liu have been staring over for some time. Perhaps that’s why 3 Body Problem has gained a sizeable US audience on Netflix: all over the world, there are people wondering whether human life is worth sustaining.

Liu Cixin does not seem to be one of them. He both predicted and depicted the rise of anti-humanism with remarkable precision. But Ye Wenjie is not the hero of his story: ideally, Liu would like us to keep on living in our treacherous digital age. It’s true that he’s not impressed with most proposals for how we can do so. Remembrance of Earth’s Past attracted the interest of internationalist technocrats like Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg. But part of Liu’s appeal as an author is his unsparing refusal to settle, as Obama and Zuckerberg do, for breezy optimism about the possibility of saving the world with better technology or slicker politics.

No Exit

Still, Liu is just as impatient with resignation as he is with unserious plans for survival. Ye Wenjie’s hopes for a Trisolaran invasion turn out to be just another kind of childish idealism: the san ti are as cruel, scared, and violent as we are. The game-theoretical laws of aggression in Liu’s universe are as cruelly absolute as the laws of physics.

That makes his allegiances difficult to parse. Only English-language readers and viewers got to experience that riveting first scene at the beginning of the story, where Liu says he wanted it all along. He had to bury the struggle session in the middle of the Chinese version so it would escape the notice of CCP censors. This gives the trilogy a flavor of dissident literature, and China hawks eagerly shared clips of the opening scene in that spirit.

But Party authorities seem to hope Liu’s criticism can be domesticated and folded into a larger narrative about their own rise out of revolutionary excess into greatness. An excerpt from one of Liu’s stories once appeared on the gao kao, the national college entrance exam. It’s not too difficult to read the battle against Trisolaris as an arms and technology race between China and America, where China features as Earth in defiant opposition to advanced but vicious outsiders. Netflix would love it if this allegory didn’t occur to too many people; the CCP would love it if it did.

Liu’s own feelings can best be described as painfully ambivalent. He objects stubbornly to political interpretations of his books: “The whole point is to escape the real world!” he told the New Yorker’s Jiayang Fan. But in the same interview, he defended China’s most grotesque acts of repression without so much as blinking. While the show was in production, five Republican senators sent a letter to Netflix denouncing Liu’s apparent support for the one-child policy and Uighur oppression. Executives responded that Liu’s views “are not reflective of the views of Netflix or of the show’s creators, nor are they part of the plot or themes of the show.”

That both is and isn’t true. No one could honestly read Remembrance of Earth’s Past as an unqualified endorsement of China’s regime, or anyone else’s. But one of Liu’s persistent themes is the diabolical savagery that he thinks lurks just beneath the surface of civilization—and fear of that savagery also explains his professed support for the CCP. “If you were to loosen up the country a bit, the consequences would be terrifying,” he said to Fan. If the core principle of the universe is chaos, then the only order is the one imposed through sheer force of will. 

The adjective most often applied to this gloomy attitude, of course, is “Hobbesian.” But Liu clearly gets no pleasure out of his war-torn universe, and he never quite insists there’s no hope for deeper peace. He’s just acerbically skeptical of most efforts to foster one. If there’s a character in The Three-Body Problem that stands in for him, it’s the detective Shi Qiang, called “Clarence” in the show and played world-wearily by Benedict Wong. In the books, Shi has the same nickname as Liu: Da Shi, or “big Shi.” Like Liu, Shi drinks heavily and watches as one bright-eyed do-gooder after another makes a mess of things.

It’s not spoiling too much to say that Remembrance of Earth’s Past ends in the hope of a truly great reset, a Year Zero that would restore all things to their original Edenic conditions: “a brand-new universe, and a brand-new life.” One gets the impression that Liu would like to slip away into that clean and open space himself: away from impossible choices among terribly flawed options, away from the ruling class that once persecuted his family and now eyes him hungrily as a cultural asset, away from the political operatives that want to claim his art as pro- or anti-China.

But that’s its own kind of escapism, and it won’t save him or us any more than the Trisolarans will. The shortcomings of Liu’s fiction are the bold and instructive shortcomings of an ambitious, tortured artist. He sees with punishing clarity that even the vastest universe is a hellscape without a source of hope beyond its borders. His failure to locate one is a tragic failure, and it should compel us to look elsewhere if we want to stave off despair. It’s not aliens or machines that will rescue China, or us. Salvation can’t come from the stars. It has to come from above.