Krishna
A science fiction unlike any other. It keeps your interest and even excites in part. Though roughly based on real science, it does take creative license to depart from the truth and examine what-if scenarios. A great fun to read.
The revolutionary red guard is in a battle with imperial forces and a young girl who definantly came atop the fort being defended is killed by an arrow.
Meanwhile, a professor is being accused of being a reactionary and asked to withdraw his belief in the Theory of Relativity by the reactionary and traitorous Einstein on pain of death in front of an angry crowd. (Really? Communists were against Einstein too?) He refuses.
He is killed for his troubles by a crazed group of women for his ‘heresies’ – believing in Einstein’s science and not the ‘true’ ways of revolutionary China. His daughter is crestfallen and tries to reach her teacher who was also hated by the group for her reactionary views. She finds that the teacher, who was her mentor and friend, had taken her own life too.
She is sent to a commune where a fellow journalist, who encourages her to read ‘reactionary’ material like ‘The Silent Spring’ an environmental book by Rachel Carson, betrays her to the authorities and she realizes that she is lost, with a sinking feeling in her stomach.
She is thrown in prison but a former student of her father, who had pragmatically converted and risen in the ranks sends her to a top secret scientific facility to help out. This one is high up on a mountain in China and she understands that if she volunteered for it, it is a one way entry – she will have to stay there for the rest of her life – but she still chooses to join.
Strange things start to happen. Whenever he takes a picture – but not when others in the family take pictures from the same camera – a sequence of decreasing numbers appears on the films. He is puzzled and distrubed. He goes for help with a famous scientist called Shen but her only advice is to stop with his scientific activities before it is too late.
People are going mad because physics stops making sense at quantum level and it is enough to drive anyone mad.
A professor wants to eschew all ‘bad’ progress and keep only ‘good’ progress. All this scientific progress is like cancer which is why the rate of discovery is accelerating (metastasizing). It will surely kill the host (society) at some point.
The story gets interesting nevertheless. The countdown appears in Wang’s dreams and then in front of his eyes every minute. It stops and flickers out the minute he stopped his nanomaterial work (to give time for maintenance to be completed in the lab). Shen agrees to give him a huge signal to convince him to stop work altogether. The entire universe will flicker at a specified time in the future!
As the story proceeds, you get more into it. The universe is seen to really flicker as evidence. He is astounded. He goes to Ye, now an old lady living alone, for advice and she advises him to stop his nanoparticle research.
He then gets a V-suit (A virtual reality outfit that gives realistic experience) and a web address to get into a game called the 3 Body Problem. Initially, it sounds like a pointless exercise. Every time he logs in, he goes into a world where civilization reaches a particular point (with earth like figures – he becomes Copernicus, there is Plato and others) before it gets destroyed by the Sun not appearing at all, or becoming too big etc. People can dehydrate and stay inside pyramids with just one or two looking after them and rehydrating them (by putting them in water) when the right time arrives.
Each civilization lasts unpredictable times (some reach ancient times, some medieval). Copernicus finds what is wrong with the world. This is due to the planet (a distant and alien planet and not earth) having three suns. The gravitational interplay creates a cycle of motion among them and also with the planets that are not predictable by any calculation. Only when they finally reach sophistication, they decide to flee the planet to find another planet to avoid this unpredictable cycle of destruction.
Meanwhile, the society which inspires such fanaticism and has drawn in Wang calls him to a meeting where he learns that the leader of this is Ye herself. When she was working in the observatory, she has found a way to send a message to an alien planet through the Sun.
When her captain found out about it, she murders him and also her husband (with no option) to ensure their silence and has been working tirelessly to get the aliens to visit as ‘the human race has lost the right to govern itself’. She is incensed by the Cultural revolution, the nuclear arms race and generally the tendency of the human race to self destruct.
It is amazing that the author being of Chinese Origin was able to write about the Cultural Revolution and the devastation it wrought.
The story has an amazing gamut of interesting thoughts. They do an experiment to spread a proton to multiple dimensions with different results and there are interesting concepts (no, not all of them scientific) as to how, whenever you destroy a subatomic particle like a proton, say, in a particle accelerator, you may be destroying untold number of intelligent life in a micro level.
The ending is slightly disappointing. You now know about my disapproval of stories with no fully resolved ends in the hope that the second volume will be read by the readers. However, in this case, you can look at it as a kind of ending that makes sense in a way, given the issues and problems.
In spite of the flat ending, I think this is an excellent read and takes you to places (fictionally) that you have never been to before.
The translation is excellent and looks like it has not detracted from the full import of the original text.
9/10
= = Krishna