THE 3 BODY ANALOGY
I first read The 3-Body Problem 3 years ago, and immediately began to write an Analogyman episode, but the timing was off. I could not release my analogy until the trilogy had made it around the world a few times, until it was assimilated by the public imagination. Cixin Lui’s subject is so BIG and his canvas so wide no single “analogy” could ever hope to do it justice. And certainly I would be dishonoring the writer by essentially stringing together a long litany of “spoilers” to try to make my point.
And what is my point? My point is that if something or somebody purports to represent a plausible explanation for the Universe, the author can’t help but try to express his vision by staying as close to the truth─ as close to the the facts ─ as possible. Cixin Lui is a science fiction writer, and a great one, and so he just had to base his story on as firm a foundation of truth as possible. The author of Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card, was once asked what he thought was the difference between fantasy and science fiction and he replied, “If the story is set in a universe that follows the same rules as ours, it’s science fiction. If it’s set in a universe that doesn’t follow our rules, it’s fantasy.”
Now we are at a junction in human history where we have gone almost as far as the “rules of reality” can take us. As a civilization we’ve just spent the last 200 years identifying and quantifying the “rules” of reality─ and I’m talking here of Copernican and Newtonian and Einsteinian physics── and they’ve led us to discover another realm where these rules don’t seem to apply. I’m talking here of quantum physics. The 3 Body Problem trilogy is full of allusions to quantum phenomenon harnessed in the service of the Trisolarians, our closest neighbors in the Galaxy ─ and as it turns out, our worst enemies.
As you can see, for me to do an analogy of 3 Body I would have to be SURE my audience has seen and understood the story completely. Because that’s how an analogy works. It takes what you, the audience, are familiar with, and then makes a comparison to something that appears at first glance completely different. But once the difference is explored and explained, the “unfamiliar” suddenly makes sense and we understand something we’ve never been able to understand before.
What I’m getting at here is that Cixin Lui’s 3 Body Problem is an accurate analogy of reality as far as it goes, in the sense that it contains a great number of the factors that now perplex and trouble and concern us. What am I talking about? I’m talking about our collective uncertainty. Our realization as a species that we are on the brink of a vast and impersonal ocean of stars. And we are simultaneously so very lucky to be alive (Earth is the only Goldilocks planet within a 4.2 light year radius─ and it takes the Trisolarians 400 years to get here!) And although we seem to have won the Cosmic jackpot, we can’t get away from the feeling that we are incredibly small and vulnerable.
And what 3-BODY has done in a fictional way is to confront us with our collective uncertainty. I’ll not go into detail here, but it should be obvious to any reader of the trilogy that the Axioms of Cosmic Sociology (later to become The Axioms of Cosmic Civilization) lead inexorably to The Dark Forest. And the Dark Forest is the darkest vision of mankind’s future I have read in over 60 years of reading SF.
Now this entire attempt at an analogy would be a hopeless failure if all I did was leave you with that last statement. What I’m trying to do is to use Cixin Lui’s cosmology, and his ideology, as a way of raising issues that have always haunted us all from the dawn of time─ Why are we here? Where are we going? Are we really all alone in the Universe?── and now I can add Cixun Lui’s final issue, ─ is the whole Universe really a dark forest teeming with predators all competing ruthlessly for scarce and dwindling resources? Are we really only now beginning to realize what so shocked us when we first saw Battlestar Galactica back in the 1970’s, that the future of mankind was to be a constant, never-ending fight for survival, eternal Star Wars?
No, that’s not the future.
There’s another cosmology, another ideology, another explanation─ and 3-Body has given us the opportunity to share it. First there’s got to be the NEED. It’s the need that makes us look for an answer. And the answer is out there─ it’s just so extraordinary and BIG and amazing that it’s hard to share that answer in a word, in a sentence── even in a one-time Analogyman Episode.
But of course, you are saying to yourself, who is this guy? This nothing and this nobody who’s suggesting he’s found the answer? I’ll tell you who I am. I’m a kid who just never stopped asking. Who never stopped searching. Who ran into the SF greats like Ray Bradbury and Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle and Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke and Carl Sagan── people with VISION who looked far into the future and searched every nook and cranny for an answer and who were not afraid to conjecture, to speculate. (That’s after all what SF is─ not just Science Fiction, but Speculative Fiction) SF people are people who follow the trail of facts as far as they will lead. And of course, to be honest, their grand visions sometimes led to disappointments and often vast new darknesses. I’m thinking here of Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions and Larry Niven’s Cities in Flight and Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. These left me in a dark, stifling box, like the one Roger Waters left us in, in Pink Floyd’s THE WALL album.
The point I’m trying to make here is graphically illustrated by the drawing at the top of this essay, the drawing that’s come to be known as the Flammarion Engraving. It’s a picture of a traveler putting his head under the edge of the firmament to discover the machinery of the Universe─ the “unseen realm”. Scoffers have said this is an antiquated and Medieval view of the universe before modern science set everything to rights. But that’s not what this picture is all about. The artist is simply saying this: the universe is big, and grand, and scary, and mysterious─ but the very fact that it exists at all tells us it’s here for a reason─ and I aim to find out what that reason is before I die ─ even if it kills me!
Can you for a moment suspend your disbelief, forego your preconceived notions, and join a 72-year old man who’s rejoicing in the fact that 3-Body might just have given us the opportunity─ another chance─ to open up a can of worms that just might wake up a Sleeping Planet? And that I can’t do it with an elaborate collection of essays all prewritten and pre-published…but I may be able to do it with a new medium that allows nothings and nobodies to talk to the whole world: (not Steve McQueen’s THE BLOB)── the BLOG.