The Three-Body Problem

THEME: SCI-FI / CHINESE EXPERIENCE OF RANDOMNESS OF LIFE ON EARTH EXTENDED TO EVERYTHING

WALKING THE DOG: That's right - 14 hours and 37 minutes of listening! I listened to it in the car on various solo journeys over the last 2 months or so. I have now found out that there are 2 more books in the (usual) trilogy. The second (The Dark Forest) is 23 hours and 11 minutes, and Audible haven't (not surprisingly) got round to the last (Death's End) yet. I was mighty glad to come across & mightily impressed by The Three-Body-Problem for (was going to be 3, turned into 7!) reasons:

1. the main theme of the book is the same as my 3S10: The Saving Remnant http://3s10.uk/, namely: as we humans are so fucking stupid and behave in such a bizarre (and often horrible) way what would happen if we got taken over by a 'superior' intelligence (in his case, by the Trisolarians, in my case, by AI)
2. you can see the Chinese experience of The Cultural Revolution permeating the whole book: one day you're a revered intellectual investigating the nature of matter and the cosmos - the next you're a class enemy being beaten to death by ideologically drunk cute teenage girl Red Guard revolutionaries. Where to stand in this world? He then moves the action to another world (clever, we didn't know it was real until 2/3 through the book) in order to investigate the same theme there: a very sci-fi-ish gambit: you want to look at some aspect of life on earth? Move it to another planet. Frees you up to really get your claws into it.
3. I couldn't predict where he was going with the book. As a writer I play a game called 'guess where he/she's going next?' Mostly I can correctly guess where the writer/scriptwriter is going with a plot. With Three-Body I couldn't. That really hooked me in.
4. As far as I can tell (not being a quantum physicist myself) his science was genuine cutting edge. Re-spect that man!
5. He obviously has no truck with 'your novel is supposed to be between 80-100000 wds long; no-one will publish or read it otherwise': you just knew, when he started on some explanation of string theory and 11-dimensionality, for example, that he was not going to stop till he was going to stop. You got that? No. Well here's another 12 pages...
6. I came away with a huge appreciation of the depth of Chinese culture and science
7. How Trisolaris became a religion (The Trisolarian Religion), how it grows, develops, splits into factions etc etc reminded me of how anything becomes a religion, and especially of Buddhism.
8. (never could count): You're left with a feeling of unease ... maybe Trisolaris exists and they're on their way here right now... maybe Cixin Liu IS a Trisolarian... and, hey, 'sophons' ....

BOOGIE-WOOGIE:

• The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk guy, Martin Rees, in 'Our Final Century' or https://www.ted.com/talks/martin_rees_asks_is_this_our_final_century lists (among others) the risk of a particle accelerator causing a black hole which sucks up the world: http://www.einstein-online.info/spotlights/accelerators_bh or https://www.livescience.com/53669-can-particle-accelerators-spawn-black-holes-and-global-extinction.html. Cixin Liu cites this.