Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - The Three Body Problem

Episode Date: October 15, 2023

 Aliens, math, and the utter failure of the Cultural Revolution are the main points of discussion in this episode about The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin. Liberal reforms and the fate of humanity are intertwined in a way that made Asha say, "I don't give a shit about computers, where the fuck are the aliens?" patreon.com/swordsandsocialismEmail: [e-mail] The Show: @SwordsNSocPodAsha: @Herbo_AnarchistKetho: @MusicalPuma69

🎵 bro are you fucking real man come on hello everyone and welcome back to sword sorcery and socialism a podcast about the politics and themes hiding in our genre of fiction. As always, I'm Asha, and I'm joined by Ketho. How's it going? Howdy. We are back with our first new book for a little while, and we are talking about The Three-Body Problem, a novel by Chinese author... I don't know how to say his name. I'm sorry. We're just going to collectively apologize for the butchering we are going to do

of every Chinese name under the sun. Yes. The names I am pronouncing solely based on how I heard them pronounced on my audiobook. And I had no reference whatsoever. It does make sense, though. The author, Liu, before he was an author, was a computer engineer, which makes more sense. That is very...

That's something we probably should have seen coming. Should have seen that coming. We're talking about his sort of what I call breakout novel the three-body problem the novel that was received received sort of universal acclaim from all sorts of famous authors it's apparently being adapted into a dramatic series on netflix by the two guys that ran game of thrones which does not instill me with confidence. Hmm. I did not know that. I'd be curious to see this adapted. I feel like, well. But I don't know if those two are the option.

I'd say how I'd feel about the adaption, but we're going to get to how I feel about this book. this is a rare instance in which the audience will find that the two of us are not wholly one mind on this no we over the two years we've been doing this podcast we do generally have a pretty solid consensus about how we feel about a book you know obviously we know that i'm usually the hot take one when it comes to the book, but, and you're more reasonable, but when it comes to like overall, how do we feel about it? We're usually pretty much on the same page. And this might be one of the few where I, I don't think so generally, but before we get into it, as I said, it's the three body problem. But before we get into it, as I said, it's the three body problem.

It is was sort of a breakout for this author, and it was sort of helped popularize a lot of Chinese fiction in the West. Particularly notable about it is that the English translation by Ken Liu, the brother of the author, the brother of the author. The brother of the author. The English translation is noted for being like incredibly well done, which I think is or probably was one of the major hurdles to a lot of Chinese fiction being popularized in the U.S. and in the West generally is getting a good translation. Because, again, as Westerners and being sort of Western-focused, it's very easy to get a solid translation of something written in French or German, right? And typically those authors speak English themselves.

But for something like this one, I think being fluent in English, it wouldn't be as common. And also, translating something this technical, I think would be a significant challenge uh it'd probably be a bitch i can't imagine trying to translate sofons and the mathematics of the three body problem if you're a person that likes math you probably knew going into this the three body problem is like a mathematical thing if're me, you had no idea what that meant. It is a theoretical question in physics about the calculable probability of, not probability, but the…

The movement. The modelable movement of three stars with unstable gravitational forces, essentially. Or planets or whatever. It's three objects with essentially equal gravity in orbit around each other. And the fact that there's apparently no good mathematical model that works to predict the way in which these bodies will orbit each other. Right? Yes. Yeah, that's about it. to predict the way in which these bodies will orbit each other. Right? Yes.

Yeah, that's about it. And it's been a longstanding problem to try and figure that out through mathematical modeling and theoretical physics and computer work without anyone having come to a satisfactory conclusion. And it just so happens that, at least according to this novel, and we can probably double-check it right now, our closest star system to us, Alpha Centauri, is a three-body system. Is a triple star system in the southern constellation of Centaurus. So it is a three-body system.

That's pretty wild. The more you know. Bum, bum, bum, bum. Starlight across the sky. So it is based on the fact that Alpha Centauri is a three-star system. And so I think at base, the thought process here was, I think at base, the thought process here was what would life be like in the system of Alpha Centauri for sentient creatures living on a planet in that system? Right. Like that's to me, that's like in sci fi.

We talk about how it's a thought experiment. And then you sort of you play that thought experiment out and to me the base level thought experiment here is what would sentient life or civilization be like if it had developed on a planet in that three body system and liu's answer to that is chaos. Pure chaos and the ability to dehydrate yourself. Yeah. I do appreciate the fact that even when you get towards the end of the book, he doesn't, the aliens do not provide a description of themselves. So like appearance wise.

So you're left thinking, what the hell do these fuckers look like? They can dehydrate themselves. They, you can only imagine them humanoidoid but there's no way to know he even says in the book that the the people of earth imagine them as vaguely humanoid but they are not described in any capacity and to be fair through the through like the the frame narrative there would be no way for us to know. Because the most description we get is like one of those last chapters. Oh, yeah. And because of the situation

in like the meetings, you're like listening to them meet. They wouldn't be describing themselves to each other. So there's no like sort of, you know, way within the story to describe them without him just being like, by the way you know, way within the story to describe them

without him just being like, by the way, they look like this. Which clearly he's not interested in doing. Oh, no. And I feel like that might happen in the sequel novels. I feel like you'd have to eventually, right? You gotta know what they look like eventually. I get the feeling that they are fucking horrifying. Oh, yeah oh yeah they're gonna be like amoebas or some shit they're they're gonna be like i don't know if uh yay really or yeah yeah really realizes what she's done

no well i think she does realize it right before the end. Yeah. And it's like, once, once she gets the transcripts that were on judgment day and she's like, damn, I fucked up. I think I might've fucked up.

I think it might've doomed all of humanity. Yeah. Because I was bitter about the cultural revolution. And to be fair, who wouldn't be? The upshot of the whole book is that the cultural revolution possibly doomed humanity as a species. Which is ironic because they often talk about human society and human culture and the cultural revolution was the first domino and the final domino was earth being destroyed by dehydrated amoeba creatures yeah that's it that should just be a big uh meme like that with this it's the domino meme small

domino small domino is like the beginning of the Chinese Revolution. Or like Mao Zedong born in... Mao Zedong. And then Big Domino, human civilization wiped out by tricelerons. Via Yawen Zia's father being killed in a struggle session and Yaw becoming so disenfranchised with humanity that she decides on her own to send a message to aliens that says come kill us we deserve it yeah after um after a pacifist sends you a message saying do not respond you will be all killed you

will all be killed do not respond and she's no, I want us all to be killed. I'm a nihilist now or something. That feels like a commentary about the cultural revolution, don't you think? Yeah, I feel like it does. I think my first big takeaway from this book as I was reading it was way, way less about any of the sci-fi of the book and more man this book sure has a lot to say about the cultural revolution and china's development afterwards it does not have a favorable outlook on the cultural revolution and to be fair i don't think many do i don't think it has i don't think it has

even that positive look of the communist revolution um i don't know if it i don't it doesn't go out of its way to make to at least necessary it doesn't i don't at least when i was reading it didn't come across as like there's a there's a lot of like uh i think the right word would be terminology in this book that still strikes me as fairly marxist yeah i don't know but for me particularly at the beginning when it's talking about like the different cadres and the civil wars and all these other things to me it comes across very much like the communist revolution was a thing that happened oh yeah the the maybe maybe my favorite line in the book but i'm saying i'm saying that in like a very flat way not like the not like the communist revolution happened and i'm happy about it or not the communist revolution happened

and i'm sad about it it's just to me it seems like a to me it screams of a very moderated, it is a thing that happened. Yeah, and that actually is repeated almost verbatim in what might be my favorite line in the book. When the three Red Guards come back to talk to, yeah, and they're like commiserating over how the revolution kind of abandoned them. And she said there was a movie called Maple recently recently i don't know if you've seen it at the end an adult and a child stand in front of the grave of a red guard who had died during the faction civil wars the child asks the adult are they heroes the adult says no the child asks are they? The adult again says no. The child asks, then who are they? The adult says history. That is this book's view of revolutionaries and the revolutions in China, I think generally. Generally, yes. It doesn't take a very positive view of them. It definitely, but it's definitely critical of the way the revolutions treated those who believed in them.

Yes. And kind of shows, it also goes into honestly pretty grotesque detail at the very beginning as to the sorts of horrible shit that did happen. Oh, it doesn't pull any punches about what happened to academics or just about anybody during the Cultural Revolution. Yeah, just like counter Red Guard factions. Yeah, how there are different factions fighting each other. Yaz's sister just gets like murked in one of these fights between different revolutionary factions. Like she's the one in the opening that like waves the flag and gets shot.

Yeah. And like falls off the thing. That's, yeah, whence he has younger sister oof and that's probably the most disturbing scene in the entire book is the first scene in the book well i would say the two most disturbing scenes i would and actually where i think the the authors to me his like authorship is the strongest. If that makes sense, like effect the story is like gripping and somewhat disturbing is that opening chapter about the different factions fighting each other and about this young girl waving the flag and being killed.

And then the soldiers like gloating over her dead body. And then the other one I thought was like at least viscerally descriptive and i felt good um authorship or good writing uh was when they destroyed judgment day and you watch the guy at the back of the boat get his hands sliced off and his body sliced in half by the razor wire the nanotech and he described him like holding a hose that gets sliced and then his he turns to look at the hose and then he gets sliced. And then his hands get sliced off. So you have these the upper half of his torso with handsless stumps for arms trying to pull himself across the deck. Yeesh.

And you're like, holy fuck fuck you can write like that because two chapters ago i was listening to you to describe in excruciating detail how a computer works by making a human motherboard out of people out of chinese soldiers by making a motherboard out of chinese soldiers then describing to me in detail how many different kind of gateways there are. This is a positive gateway. This is a negative gate. This is a yes gate. This is a no gate. But then like, I can listen to him give me this viscerally terrifying description of a man being sliced in half by invisible razor wire, which to me is good writing. And I'm like, why don't you do more of this in this book? Why isn't there more of this writing in this novel I just read? But I guess, so to finish the background, it's the cultural

revolution. We start after that little vignette about the fighting. We watch this professor be murdered, this murder during a struggle session. His daughter is there watching it happen. The daughter becomes one of our main characters. That is the aforementioned Yaa Wintseya. So she becomes Dr. Yaa. We learn about how she got sent to a labor camp for a while.

She gets framed for doing anti-revolutionary thought by reading Silent Spring. Yeah, that's pretty crazy. She reads Silent Spring and then they have accused her of you know i don't know revisionism or something marxist leninist and stupid like revisionist counter revolutionaryism or something um you know one of the things i've variously been accused of on the internet by people by people with too many flags in their in their like handles um she then gets like

essentially saved from this labor camp by some scientists because they read one of her college papers and they need her to help at red coast base doing things like monitoring the monitoring the stars to look for aliens. That is how she ends up at this base where she then has the capacity to interact with aliens and doom the entire human race. Oopsies. Whoopsie daisies. She also murders her husband because he just kind of gets in the way when she's trying

to murder her boss. And she does it without a second thought. Without even a hesitation. She also inadvert to murder her boss. And she does it without a second thought. Without even a hesitation. She also inadvertently murders her child because her contact with the aliens and the programs they helped set up with the, what are the little ball things called again? The SOFONs.

The SOFONs, because the SOFONs are driving scientists crazy. so it also causes her daughter to commit suicide which is interesting her her daughter yet her daughter yang dong to kill herself along with all the other scientists who commit suicide who are committing suicide because science doesn't make sense anymore which i'm sorry i don't quite get. So scientists across the world are realizing that they're like scientific like trials are showing that the base laws of physics don't work properly anymore. And it leads them to such despair that they just kill themselves because physics doesn't work right. I think even yeah, kind of like leans into explaining why she thinks that's happening. I mean, you find out at the end of the book, it's because the, the cell phones are causing scientific experiments to go bad.

But I'm thinking of the, um, the bit where she explains how she raised, uh, like Dong. Young Dong. raised yeah uh like dong young dong and her being like i raised her with this much too much as the baseline for her like existence essentially this child lived and breathed physics since she was an infant so she said she kind of made physics her religion and then when it didn't work anymore she just killed herself. Yeah. Okay. It still doesn't explain to me why so many other scientists just committed suicide when physics doesn't work properly anymore. Because I'll be honest, you could make physics experiments not work properly right now, and I don't think I'd ever know the difference. I think if someone in a similar way to if a say an extremely devout Catholic, like you're saying with like a religion, if they learned that God was fake in like a completely irrefutable way.

Yes, they'd be like that. That can be shat. That can be earth shattering. That can be earth shattering. I don't necessarily know if it would lead to mass suicide, but would certainly break someone's heart. True. I think the comparison of science to religion is... Apt?

Yeah. I might be controversial among my communalist peers to believe that to a degree. Well, I do think that's kind of the message of this book is that an uninhibited belief in the necessity of the progress of science is not an unambiguous good oh yeah because that's like the main thesis of yeah like her core motivation is that she thinks mankind can no longer progress. She thinks that mankind can no longer solve its own problems and that we essentially need, dare I say, a great leap forward in technology in order to be able to solve the issues.

And the only way she sees us having this leap forward in technology is by receiving it from aliens. And it, it all, it all kind of spawns from this belief in that this technologically more advanced species must be more morally advanced as well. Yeah. So yeah,

yeah. Yeah. So yeah, yeah. Yeah. Central belief is that moral advancement walks hand in hand with scientific advancement, which to me is so on its face, untrue that it's hard to believe of a character that would think such things. But then I remember that liberals exist. I mean, not just liberals marxist yeah well but like to me just on its face the idea that scientific advancement equates to moral advancement is insane completely nuts nuts. Nuts. It's completely nuts.

Because, I mean, but even people that think that, you know, from sort of, you say, the Marxist-Leninist or sort of anti-capitalist side should be dissuaded from that immediately by the existence of America. We're the most technologically advanced society

to ever live. And they would happily argue that we are morally degenerate or whatever. So how can you even square the technological advancement and moral advancement go together? Because if you're anti-American, you can't argue that the U.S. isn't the most technologically advanced country. I mean, you could probably argue now that, you know, other countries like China have the equivalent technologies now due to like you know other countries like china have equivalent technologies now due to like international trade but like we're also not morally better than anybody else it's the it

turns out that very often the moral character of humanity doesn't i i think the fundamental basis behind the marxist viewpoint that would be similar is one of advancements in technology allow for a transformation of the material conditions such that moral development is more possible that doesn't necessarily mean we're enacting that or using the technology we have to create the material conditions that would lead to that let tendencies intensify yeah i mean, even communalists, to a degree, have at least a thought process that scarcity brings about these sorts of human behaviors, and that a lot of, that at least to a degree, like, it's a core, not necessarily a lot of leftists would agree with this but

i think it should be or at least it should be recognized as a core leftist tendency to not believe in the existence of human nature as a concrete thing um that can be defined and angles marx etc would argue that human nature is defined by the material conditions in which humans are developing and living. Which, you know, it's a little bit less, I think, a little bit less problematic than liberal progress will always lead to good thing. And I'm like, well, tell that to Raytheon. Right.

I think, does even this book, no, never mind. Sorry, I'm mixing it up with some other things I've been reading. No, so let's focus back on this book here. So we have, yeah, she does the thing, contacts aliens. She gets responded to by a pacifist alien that's like, hey, don't respond or you will all be killed. And she's like, no, we all deserve to be killed. And that eventually leads to the setup of essentially a secret society, which becomes like a rebel organization of people that are like trying to help prepare humanity to be taken over by the aliens. Which is led by, yeah, and this guy named mike evans and can i please

talk about mike evans for a minute yeah so mike evans is the radical environmentalist son of a billionaire oil guy who invents something called pan-species communism which leads to human extinctionism all right katho go to town tell us about mike fucking evans this man i feel like i have absolutely heard the words pan species communism before and from the world's most annoying and prims itims. It's not even just that. This man reeks of, and this is probably just a symptom of me making connections to other things I've been reading at the time. Like, we all do, you know. But I've been reading a lot of Bookchin's stuff on deep ecology. This man reeks of deep deep ecology this man reeks of misanthropism and including the the genocidal that comes along with a lot of it yes um this

fundamental belief in humanity as being equivalent to insects. Like, I can understand being a little bit humano-critical. Sure. But, and maybe criticizing people who are a bit too humanocentrist. As I often do. But. If you follow me on social media at all. But for the love of all that is holy, I think it might be normal, nay, acceptable, to believe that mankind is maybe just as, if not more valuable, than insects. Insects are, of course, required for us to survive. Yep. And they should be protected but i mean i

would not say that humans are more valuable than these other species but i would definitely argue that the strain of thought that leads to actually humans are the virus and everything would be better if humanity was extinguished is an incredibly problematic line of thought. Yes. Incredibly dangerous one. Let me read this because, oh my God, this is, that's so funny. Someone posted this on rdeepecology. Oh God.

That is so funny. Because this is a massive reputation like this is a massive refutation of everything that deep ecology stands for um whenever this is a a pretty widespread meme on social ecology left twitter um and left spaces where murray bookchin is like got his hands on this guy's shoulders. And the guy says, humans are the virus over top of him. And he's like, obviously man could be described as a highly destructive parasite who threatens to destroy his host.

And it's like a leftist memes are too long thing. But what imparts a profoundly critical function to ecology is the question raised by man's destructive abilities. What is the disruption that has turned man into a destructive parasite? Arguing that, like, destructive parasitism is not a natural thing. It's like you don't get parasites like, we'll use for example, the emerald ash borer. I don't know if you know what the emerald ash borer is yeah yeah yeah i do but like they only became introduced to environments they weren't

supposed to be in through human movement activity activity but they became a destructive parasite because they entered an environment that was not for them an environment not situated to them and not prepared for them and not built around them so what is the thing that turns man into a destructive parasite on its environment and it's like it's not just human nature it's not it's not our inherent nature to be a death drive parasite yeah and there's plenty of examples of ancient human cultures that were not universally destructive to their environments you know of course for us the answer to that question would be you know hierarchy yes hierarchy and capitalism yeah a capital capitalism as a specifically destructive type of hierarchy. And like social ecology would call out the growth or die economy specifically as this concept of unlimited growth.

Which ties, I think, back into this book, because the unlimited growth to me is essentially the same as this sort of uninhibited technological advancement. Yes. The idea that this uninhibited technological advancement will inevitably lead to a better world and a better life for the people under it. Or even the idea that there is a strict linear progression. Book 100%, even if he doesn't think that it's good, 100% buys into the linear progression of technology. Because that is the entire setup of the Trisolaran world. Yes. As seen through the three-body game, you literally get achievements for progressing to new eras like you're playing Civilization. Like, it is very much, to me, video game-y in the way strategy games and map painter games are.

Where it's like, wow, you started off, you collected enough wood and fire, and your scientists just got an innovation. So now you've discovered maps. Then society got wiped out and you had to start again. But this time, you remember what maps are. So now you can progress a little bit further. Is Three-Body a roguelike? Oh my... It is. oh my it is it's a roguelike with

what's the actual term but it's a roguelike not where you lose everything it's a roguelike with meta progression it's a roguelite it's a roguelite with meta progression it's like playing Hades where like you have to start again but you've got

upgrades the next time you do but it is very like again video game way of looking at technological progression and tying that technological technological progression in with societal progression because that's the way the three-body game works you start in the the, you know, you're in the whatever emperor era, whatever dynasty era, where they have this sort of technology and they handle things this way. Well, next time he comes back, they're in this new era, which is higher up and has better stuff,

but is still bad for different reasons. And the fact that it is so structurally and painfully linear is just massively ahistorical well it's it's massively unprovable because we have a sample size of one yeah but within our one there are varying examples across space and time within earth itself of societies that either rose or fell and how the people in those areas dealt with technology i'm i just in the in the span of human society looking at making it all the way to the in civilization terms of making all the way to the, in civilization terms, making it all the way to the space age,

the information age. I mean, he literally uses the phrase like the information age. It's. Like, I felt reading this when they're doing the little discussions about what age they made it to in that era of tri-Solarian civilization

felt like I was reading the pop-ups on a video game congrats you made it to the classic age log in again and try harder next time like one of those fucking if you're a people like me that played one of those browser games it was like massively multiplayer where you build your own little base and the server will only last so many hours you you know? Oh, like it was. Yeah. Like you would go.

Yeah. Like, I think I played one called like Travian or something where you would like things happened in real time and you'd have to log in like every 15, 20 minutes to try and like keep up with your shit. And then it was who could build the biggest alliances and empires before the server ended. And then the server would reset and you'd start again it would be like literally a big countdown

and like that's how i feel when i'm reading by him describing trisolarian society this inherently like there is one technological path forward and every time you restart you follow the exact same path you can even label it by era and it's like i i just hate that so much i the the anachronisms um get pointed out multiple times and i think those are the only times in the book where i legitimate they like it legitimately got chuckles out of me i don't know i found a lot of the anachronistic shit extremely funny um well i think the anachronistic shit also gets explained away by being the fact that what what dr uh wang is experiencing is the game as designed by humans yeah but it's still really funny to like picture uh confucius had gone out into a storm to like he'd gone out and so fully predicted like his predictions, he just stood there and suddenly it was a no-sun thing

and he got frozen as a perfect skeleton standing upright. Like, oh, that's Confucius. Or freaking Isaac Newton having a duel with Leibniz over who invented calculus. Calculus. Okay, that did make me chuckle. Yeah, it was Newton and Leibniz arguing about who invented calculus, having a fucking sword fight about it.

All before they went off to a Chinese emperor and built a motherboard out of people. Which, okay. So I've already pointed out one of my big issues with again there's parts i think what i've said at the start i the to me the least interesting of the main story aspects is the fact that there's an aliens coming to earth that's just like whatever the most interesting part of this book is what we've already started doing analyzing the author's politics the way he feels about the cultural revolution the way he feels about science the way he feels about human

progress clearly not a fan of the cultural revolution oh not at all um he tactically is like pro uh dang because he names dang without namingeng in the passage where they talk about the year that people were allowed to go back to college, which we know from the book is good, is considered good. Being able to go to college and study science is good. Liberal reform, good. Liberal reforms are good. If you cross-reference the year which they say this happens with actual Chinese history, that's just when Deng took sort of control of the Chinese Communist Party and began his liberalizing reforms. So the author of this book is Dengist.

This book very much is like liberal reforms are good. Science is good. Scientific progress is good. It only really pulls back at the end when it's like, yeah, but this doesn't mean that science and morality are tied together. Yes, because it does finally make that turn,

which is good. But up to that point, I think the author still does believe that scientific progress is good he just doesn't believe like doc like yeah does that it's always morally positive yeah when you get to trisolaran like perspective when you actually get to the they are fundamentally no better than us um possibly even worse possibly even worse um to be fair uh there was one guy who was like i will sacrifice myself to to say don't respond and then he gets dehydrated and burned no remember he doesn't because the princeps wants him to survive to see earth lose all hope oh yeah but a bunch of other people get

dehydrated and burned but like 600 people above him in the hierarchy of his department all get killed it's funny enough reminiscent of the brutality of the cultural revolution yeah almost like there's a parallel there some kind and pointing out that you can have unmitigated um brutality um even in a non-capitalist setup this book does show an awful lot of cooperation between the chinese government and the u.S. government? Because one of the conceits, I think, is that, weirdly, okay, the author's conceit here of what would happen when presented with an alien invasion is also the exact same idea that Ozymandias has in The Watchmen.

Yes and no. No, it is. But I see what you're but i see what you're because it is the threat of alien invasion will cause all of the ideologically different governments across the world to cooperate but at communication with see i think that to me that was what they thought in the past when red coast base was active okay you know that was the operating principle of like the chinese government or the American government during like the Cold War was that any government that got contact first and had monopoly would ergo use that to dominate the world. But in the modern day section of the book, we all the governments know that there are aliens. And do any of them then try to establish like solid like you know one-way

communication in the modern era no they form a bunch of joint task forces worldwide i think for a lot of people it's it's very difficult to imagine anything different i think we all want to be optimistic um i'm just saying that's also what Ozymandias thinks in Watchmen. I mean, it is. By doing an alien invasion, we will get the governments to set aside their issues and work together. It at least works for a little bit. In this book, they manage to work together to absolutely murder a lot of people on a big old boat. With razor wire.

With invisible razor wire magic sorry i was about to call it magic razor wire nanotech razor razor wire that dr wang just happened to have developed in his lab they don't explicitly say what year it is do they i don't think so it's just roughly the modern era I think um yeah it just says in the present day so I think it's supposed this book was written in the early 2000s yeah 2008 though 2006 at the same time other authors like this who I haven't gotten to the comparison yet but other authors that write these type of books, such as Michael Crichton,

were also writing these sorts of books with like nanotech as like the MacGuffin. And so that makes sense to me that that was sort of the thing in like 2008 when he wrote this book. I'm just saying, it's the idea that an alien invasion would cause us all to like set aside our differences and work together. Because I think you're right.

Earlier in the book, it's like, oh, well, if one country establishes communication first, we'll have dominance. And that's why they set up Red Coast Base in the first place. But when it actually comes to the modern day and this threat is realized, they've all like you have an American like general arguing with a random psychotic policeman from China about like how to murder people on a boat. Oh, man, we haven't even talked about maybe the most interesting character in this book. Possibly. I think. Which is the policeman Daxia otherwise known as big shi big shi uh dasha is a former soldier turned cop whose specialty is like organized crime i think and like other and like heists and that sort of thing. And he is very much the,

like my methods are unorthodox, but I'm effective stereotype. Oh yeah. Like I'm super gruff. I'm abrasive. Nobody likes me. But once I actually speak, everyone realizes I'm secretly super insightful.

That's his whole role in this, in this book is to show up be annoying to the nerds and then like just present the solution through some sort of folksy wisdom the book ends on his folksy wisdom and he's interesting but it's also to me a very blatant just like this is a type of character you know what i mean like this is the regular guy with his folksy wisdom who's gonna show the super smart nerds what they've been missing by just being like i don't know just get drunk or something yeah his his golden rule just drink and sleep it off yeah well his golden rule is that if if you't explain it, there's probably somebody behind it.

Which turns out to be true. Does turn out to be true. Just the somebody is Trisolarans. Yeah. It's like this reeks of people interfering with this. Which was true. Yeah. It turns out that they were interfering with science. But Dasha is at least interesting to me. He's a fun character uh but he's very stereotypical very much like all right you eggheads you're thinking too hard have a drink and go for a drive and you'll feel better and maybe my offhand comment will like cause you some insight to see

the problem in a whole different way so he's fun but he's also again to me not like he's kind of flat as a character he's fun but he's also a cop and not only a cop a psychotically murderous one it is his idea to slice apart a boat full of people with razor wire absolutely brutal um he is the um he is the one that's like, hey, all you military folks. Military folks are talking about like ball lightning and like neutron bombs and all this other stuff. And he's just like, hey, what if we destroyed the Sea Org with razor wire? We destroyed the Sea Org with razor wire. Because the boat that we're talking about, Judgment Day, is just the raft from Snow Crash.

Which is also just the original flotilla of boats that L. Ron Hubbard came up with when he was sailing around the ocean with the Sea Org trying to dig up buried treasure or whatever with the Avon River Enchanter and Royal Scotsman, which he then renamed to Diana, Athena and Apollo. But those are the original three boats of the Sea Org, which L. Ron Hubbard and his servants like sailed around the world on trying to not go to port and trying to not be arrested. They've just redone that in both Snow Crash and this book. Boat. Boat that can communicate with aliens. Yeah, would they just like

rebuild Red Coast base on the boat? They communicate directly with Tricelaris and then to get the information they trap it in the Panama Canal. They just rebuild Red Coast Base on the boat. They communicate directly with Trisolaris. And then to get the information, they trap it in the Panama Canal. They trap it in the Panama Canal and slice it into little pieces. Little pieces.

And so, catch up here. Cultural Revolution, bad. Yes. Scientific progress, not inherently morally positive. Yes. Liberal reforms, good. Yes. Scientific progress, not inherently morally positive. Yes. Liberal reforms, good. Apparently. Scientific progress, good.

Yes. And then the book's final message to me, which is the, like, how do I put this? Belief in ourselves? Oh, you mean with, like, the locusts? With, like, the bugs? Because the idea that the Trisolarians just refer to us as bugs, and they often make the comparison to them, we are like bugs with our level of technology.

But then the message at the end is, you know, Dasha takes them to a field full of locusts, and he's like, hey, see all these bugs? You know how long humans have been trying to wipe out bugs? They're still here. And the scientists who are immediately before this, like, the world's ending. Nothing matters. Let's descend into hedonism.

And Dao shows, like, the four bugs, those are bugs, and we're still here. Which, sure, that's a positive message, Ihmm. And then the very last chapter is, yeah. So we finish with, yeah, once, yeah, as an old lady. Having heard all the messages from Tricelaris now, having realized that Tricelarian society is more brutal than ours in many ways, and they intend to just completely wipe us out, she, for like what her final act,

wants to go back to where red coast base originally was to see the sunset feel a little bit of humanity looking down at that little village that saved her life uh where she killed her husband and then she just dies that's that's like the final chapter then yeah she says my sunset uh whispered, and sunset for humanity. Oops. She kind of regrets for a moment there the decision that she made. Yeah, to wipe out all humankind, which I suppose regret is the best you can hope for for someone like that.

Listeners, I'll be honest with you. It's time for us to have our little disagreement. I struggled talking about this book because largely I found it very boring. I found it to drag obnoxiously in all the sections that talk about focus on the science, where he in excruciating detail explains every mathematical formula and every theory behind every mathematical formula and every detail behind the theories behind the formula. And my response is, oh my God, get to the point. You don't need to explain to me how every gate in a motherboard works. It's not necessary for the functioning of the story. Anytime he gets into the science-heavy chapters, you can tell that he is a specialist in these

sorts of things because, my God, does he tell you every detail about them. My comparison going into this with Keth that we talked about before we started recording was that I compared him to someone like Michael Crichton, who takes a scientific concept and then builds what is more like a murder mystery political intrigue drama around humans that often just tangentially includes this sort of sci-fi thing that's going on. this sort of sci-fi thing that's going on. My problem was that I feel that compared to Crichton, this three-body problem is way more dry and does not know when to get to the point to move on.

I find it boring. Ketho, you think I'm just a curmudgeon. In certain parts, yeah. I think maybe the only draggy part that I would totally agree with is the motherboard part. I think for me, at the very least, the things that were pulling me through those sections was the anachronistic imagery. I was just liking them vibes. Like I said, Confucius freezing in the snow. like I said, Confucius freezing in the snow. And I think a lot of, a lot of science fiction can hinge on whether or not you find the premise or the idea cool or not. And that, that really

differentiates whether you're gonna nerd out about it or end up getting bored by it and aside from the computer part because i'm gonna be honest i hate coding and just i i hate it i hate it with a burning passion and want to see all of it burn to the ground um i say as i use the power of coding to record my voice and put it out on the internet for everyone to someone else wants to do someone else wants to do it that's fine i like i don't know some of the revelatory moments in my opinion were written well enough to be even though I kind of saw them coming

just because of the fucking name of the book yeah and see I thought some of the revelatory moments like he foreshadows them so heavily to the fact that's not even foreshadowing it's just like i don't know shadowing you know what i mean where like he describes it in such detail that

you know what's coming before it gets there and eventually i was just like come on like let's get to it like when you're like when you're talking about being able to put a lot of information on the inside of a, what is it? A photon or whatever molecular thing that the, the so phones are. Oh yeah. The so phones.

So, but my thing is what I'm talking about before they explain the so phones, you have the chapter where they were like in the meeting. Right. And then Wang and ding, the string theory guy are talking. And ding is like, he like says,

he's like, Oh, you know, you just, you wouldn't understand. And you wouldn't understand it. And Wang is like, understand what?

And he's like, Oh, well, you know, just because a photon is small doesn't mean there's you know he explains the cigarette metaphor he's like you know if you take the filter of a cigarette and you unwrap it and spread it out that makes a lot of like there's a lot of space in there yeah despite it being small there's a lot of space and they've just

told you that only like two photons or whatever made it to Earth. And Ding is like, well, you know, size isn't everything because this is what happens to the cigarette. And Wang is almost like obnoxiously dense about what he's trying to say. He's like, well, what does that mean? He's like, well, you know, something could be small, but there could be a lot inside of it. Yeah, but what does that have to do with photons? What do you think it has to do with photons?

It means they're small, but there's a lot inside of them. That's not a twist. We just explained it to you. But then it takes until like halfway through the next chapter for him to be like, and they unfolded a photon to put a sofa inside of it.

And you're like, you telegraphed it so hard you hit me in the face with it but then you still took half a chapter to tell me about it i um depending on how this adaptation goes i think this is the sort of thing that could benefit immensely from a visual to go his his visual descriptions and the scale of the things he's trying to like explain are kind of enormous like i i think the sofons only interested me really because of the like when they started opening up the photon and they get these fucking like weird shits from different dimensions can't unfold them the wrong number of times yeah they start getting like entire like micro universes start popping out of this damn thing they fucking

horton here's a who some like seven dimensional universe on accident and and then they look at it and it it this is the thing that makes me think they're like that shows how brutal they are is they're like oh yeah we i think we just killed a bunch of civilizations it just happens ah sorry about that uh uh we're gonna start spreading propaganda about that immediately um we're gonna immediately be like well civilizations die all the time attention this is not a command him yelling don't do that don't don't fucking do that but again even this is the sort of thing i imagine being like i think the reason that so many people even in the little splash screens and stuff compare it to dune is i could imagine that sort of image in like a dennis villanueva. This big giant space opening up in front of the unit,

like above a city, just sky splitting open, fucking unfolding proton, giant lens that's fucking about to burn a city. It gets wild. I just don't know how you would adapt the other half of the book yeah that'd be very difficult which is like two people talking about math theorems that's true like the yeah whence yeah episodes would be great you know what i mean like her like all the interstitial like the episode like the chapters where you go

back to her red coast base or like those are those are in my opinion the best chapters in the book yeah because you're getting an insight it's it's like actual like personal drama and you're also getting an insight into like the full-on fear and stuff that was going on in china during the cultural revolution like how carefully you had to tread to like not say the wrong thing. There's a notation in here that explains the sunspots thing, in case you were curious. Because the book mentions they can't say sunspots. Oh, yeah. Because it like, if you call it a, you can't't like you have to call it a sunspot because

it like inferences something that could be seen as negative the so i'm not gonna find the page it's gonna take too long to find i should have bookmarked it but anti-revolutionary science or something it's anti-revolutionary because the the actual symbology for the word sunspots is more like sun, black, like essentially the black parts of the sun in literal translation. And black was seen as the color of counter-revolutionaries. And especially being put on the sun when mao was considered the red sun so you can't have black spots on the red sun because that's counter revolutionary that's counter-revolutionary oh my fucking god no no that they pick black as the counter-revolutionary image uh 100 solely because it's the color for anarchism yes 100 despite the fact that mal started as an

anarchist because much like the russian revolution the people ended up being like the main opponents for the or the main sort of boogeymen for the chinese revolution were the anarchists who were like you guys aren't doing enough it was the the, the five, uh, the five black, is it the five black houses or the five black flags? Something like that. There's, it was like, it was like landlords,

which cool. Get rid of them. Um, uh, now did one thing. Okay. Um, uh,

that and killing, that and killing every sparrow i that was another thing that i'll bring up right after i finish this it was landlords wealthy farmers counter-revolutionaries or reactionaries rightwingers, and I'm forgetting the fifth. Maybe academics. I don't know. Probably academics. Either way, these were like seen as the five big bads of the cultural revolution. And they all had black as their representative color. Yeah.

But speaking on the sparrows thing, note that the type of creature that, what's his name name is trying to save mike evans is trying to say evans is trying to save is a sparrow it is a sparrow that was almost made extinct so he also is like man humanity sucks because look at this destruction you're doing this is a surprisingly i don't know where it falls on the environmentalist scale because it simultaneously is like here's silent spring and here's the horrible things during the cultural revolution that it definitely is like environmentalist in that like you shouldn't cut down forests. Like cutting down forests for the sake of progress is bad. All these animals dying for the sake of industry is bad. Like it definitely falls on that.

But then it also has Mike Evans who like goes too far. You know what I mean? Yeah. Who ends up in the misanthropic deep ecology spectrum. Yeah. misanthropic deep ecology spectrum yeah like it's very like it agrees that deforestation for the sake of deforestation and industry is bad which is the correct take but it also like can be like but you can go too far mr son of a billionaire it is it is kind of liberal in that sense. Yeah.

It's surprising how liberal this is coming from someone from supposedly communist China. Yeah, I think that might be the hottest take is that like, so again, we're not experts on how the Chinese government runs. runs. However, it's pretty standard that like in order for a book like this to have gained the popularity it did in China and then into the West, this book would have had to have at least been not massively offensive to the Chinese government. Right. I believe so. Yes. It wouldn't, it would have to have been one that the Chinese government did not feel was inherently subversive because it was popular within China before it came to the West. And so it is interesting that a book with such a patently liberal bent was that popular and accepted within china and i think that says something about

what a lot of the politics in china actually are like they're liberal yeah what a shocker what a shock again it points to china getting back to normal after dang It points to China getting back to normal after Deng. Liberal reform. I find it so funny given the, I know the historical context, but it still makes me laugh my ass off that Stalin and Mao hated each other so much. I mean, you hear them refer to the Russians as like... Soviet revisionists. Soviet revisionists.viet revisionists and

american imperialists yeah there's american imperialists and soviet revisionists and it's like ah yes the two kinds of people the two kinds of enemies revisionists and imperialists i find it especially funny because nominally china was effectively on the side of the u.s in that conflict like just yes like sort of yeah i mean they were more anti-russian than they were anti-american mind-boggling maybe because maybe because america blew up the japanese uh a little bit of positive feelings left over from that yeah and also because i think because the russians are literally on their doorstep that too they're right next door i mean they they make reference to the fact that like they get the other revolutionaries like the the red guards that you meet at one point got sent to like the chinese frontier near the border with russia because they were all convinced that russia

was going to invade china like literally any day. There's even a there's even a brief mention from yeah about how when she was a naive child she might have thought that it would be good for China to become a member state of the USSR. No no that wasn't her that was the lady that comes to give her like the document. She's just supposed to sign. You're right. That lady said that lady, that lady goes,

Hey, we all made mistakes when I was younger. I thought we should join the USSR. That was stupid. Right. But I got over it. We all have counter-revolutionary thoughts. Interesting sentiment.

We all have counter-revolutionary thoughts but you have to you have to have a struggle session and overcome them um also speaking of like referencing real conflicts uh our resident psychotic cop dasha i don't know if you caught this you know in the scene where he's explaining his kill everyone with razor wire plan he says what his specialty is and what stuff he's done in the past he mentions doing war crimes because he says he and his team did some special ops into vietnam to stop them from blowing up to stop them from blowing up a dam during the Chinese-Vietnam War. He was doing like dark ops stuff against the Vietnamese in the Chinese, in the Sino-Vietnamese War. And he tries to be like, I won against the people you lost to, to the Americans.

Yeah, he says to the American, I defeated the people you lost to, which is objectively not true. Vietnam beat China in that war. Vietnam still standing here undefeated. Vietnam won that war, Dasha. I'm sorry. You did not win. You may have stopped them doing one thing, but the Vietnamese beat the French, the Americans,

the Chinese, and the Cambodians, all within like 20 years. I'd call that mildly successful. That's a win. That's a win. Yeah, sorry, Dasha. You didn't actually win, despite your weird black ops behind the lines

blowing up a dam or whatever like it's i just thought he said that in passing and i was like what about excuse me excuse me you want to run that past me again i want to read that one more time the shit no okay sure again like this would i recommend this book to someone only if you are a massive math nerd do you like physics and sure probably read this book if you don't if if you don't i i would say if you don't you're going to be bored yeah for like half of the book yeah i would you know what i i would agree that if you weren't interested in physics then yeah i would have i liked this book but i probably would have liked it a lot more when i was in like high school i would like this book a lot more if it was like one third less long

if there was that would have meant i would have been able to read less of it in one day. Yeah. But I just, I think despite his strengths in certain areas, I feel like the author, I'm sorry. I just keep saying the author. So I don't butcher his name.

Liu Chisholm. I think maybe I think despite his strengths, I feel like a lot of this book is boring and unnecessary. The conversations are too, like, they're too just straightforward, like, and then there's this science, and then this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens, and then that's how you have mathematics. I'm like, I don't need all of that. You could cut that bit out. You could just say you have this fundamental principle that makes this theory work and move forward from there and spend more time like with the characters doing things and less time with the characters explaining to each other how math works that is my big my problem with this book is that it just spends too it's too preoccupied with making sure you understand the fundamental math behind all of

the stuff. And as a reader, I don't care about the fundamental math. I think my example, when I talked to you before was again, I've compared him to Michael Crichton and like the style of book he's writing. And we talked about Jurassic park before and in Jurassic park, they just say, oh, we take the DNA from a bug that's stuck in amber and we try to reconstruct it and if we're missing some pieces, we take it from frogs. They don't go through and then be like, so DNA is made up of strands of RNA and mRNA and those strands have the four nucleotides. You've got A and T and G and C. And then the G's can only match with the C's and the A's can only match with the T's.

And so when you put them together, like, you know what I mean? You don't, Michael Crichton doesn't bother to tell you all that because it actually doesn't matter. And like explaining all of like the deep parts behind the math, I think is unnecessary and makes the story slower than it needs to be. It takes away from the drama of the pacing. Also, maybe you shouldn't explain the aliens on the liner notes because that takes away from the whole entire twist of there being aliens. That is my biggest gripe with the book.

Is the splash thing, is the jacket copy, it gives it away. It gives away everything. I think you said before we started recording, it's like if the jacket for Dune was like, the jacket for Dune was like, and when Paul Atreides becomes the Kwisatz Haderach and rides a worm, we'll see what he does to the Harkonnens. And you're like, that's the whole twist.

That's the book. It's over now. And then, and then... When Paul Atreides awakens latent psychic abilities, it's like, come on like it just it gives you the twist outright and it's like what because then like you said i spend the whole book going where the fuck are the aliens when this is essentially a prequel to actually being a fight with aliens and because i know they're coming and then he spends so long getting to even talking to the aliens,

I'm reading it going, where the fuck are the aliens? I thought we were going to meet aliens and you don't talk to him until like two thirds of the way through the book. Sorry. I'm being a hater. No, you're good.

This is, this is your brand. Yeah. My brand is I am the hater. No, you're good. You're good. This is your brand. Yeah, my brand is I am the hater. Actually, so all that, that's just stylistic choices aside. If I'm going to be a hater about an actual story content thing, let's talk about Dr. Lang's wife. Oh, yeah. So our main character has a wife and a child child his name is like dong dong

and his wife you meet them in like the first chapter where he's like fucking around with his camera yeah and she gets mentioned in like you know she's worried about him because he's like sweaty and upset and he's like acting erratically she's concerned about him and like he has them help him with the photography and then they both just straight up fucking vanish from the rest of the novel despite the doctor now like going out at three o'clock in the morning to like meet with cops or go to an observatory or get drunk in the middle of the day, and all these other things that he's doing. After like that, you know, third chapter with, with like Dr. Wang, his wife and child vanish. They're simply gone. It's not convenient to talk about them anymore. And I feel like that's a real,

real drop in the ball there to be like, he has a wife who's worried about him. She doesn't have a personality, though. We don't know what she does, and you're never going to see her again. I mean, to be fair, that's probably why he didn't tell you what she does. Yeah, but then why introduce her at all?

Why have him have a wife and kid um i do think that would have worked better if he had just used the neighbor that he got the digital camera from in place of them you have the neighbor you have the neighbor be like man you're acting weird you feeling okay and have him take your pictures and have him yeah like can have you help me take some pictures or like you seem to be leaving your apartment at really weird hours of the night and you're coming home drunk at like 10 a.m are you good dude like you could have displaced that onto the neighbor the retired professor it skipped him having a family altogether because then you don't have this weird he has a family but then they simply don't matter enough to ever mention again like why have them exist at the beginning and take the time to tell us that she's concerned i'm curious and then have him go even more off the

rails and have her just not exist anymore i am curious to see if this has any bearing on, I mean, his wife and kids obviously wouldn't have any bearing on the sequels, but I, I want to know if Wang is in the sequels. Well, it depends if the sequels take, I'm going to look it up.

I would, I would say from a reader's perspective, I would want the sequel to happen around the time the aliens are invading which would necessarily mean that wang is not around because that's in like 400 years yeah let's spoil it for ourselves let's go to the second novel called the dark forest nope it's it takes place at the same time because it says in the present day the un is trying to figure out what to do when the fleet arrives in 400 years so it takes place essentially immediately after the one we just finished reading and i feel like huh it's it's following a different character

yeah it follows loji loji but he does meet Yawincea. Oh, shit. As a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox. I do want to, like, I feel like the seeds for Fermi Paradox shit are laid in this book. And I have an issue with the Fermi Paradox. Hmm, okay. That we've already kind of mentioned, but the Fermi Paradox also kind of suffers from the same.

For our listeners, the Fermi Paradox is the idea that the universe should, for all intents and purposes, be teeming with advanced life. But it isn't. It's just quiet as hell. But this feeds back into something we mentioned earlier about scientific progress being linear. And this idea that life in the universe would necessarily progress along the same paths of development. That we have.

That like any sentient life on any other planet would inherently strive to reach a level with which they could project their thoughts or themselves into space. Perhaps these other beings just simply do not have the ego of man. Simply do not wish to be projected into space maybe they don't use radio communications at all maybe they don't need to maybe that is not an adaptation they needed to come up with um maybe they have no desire to put themselves out beyond their planet onto any other place maybe their whole civilization is in the water you You know, there's, it has, it's a very,

but I do think that the sea, again, it comes from the, it comes from the same place of imagining that every alien will be humanoid. Yes. You know, shaped and not amorphous blobs or made out of silicone crystal or, you know,

balls of gas or whatever. Balls of sentient gas. Yeah. That like are just synapses firing through electrical. Who knows? Maybe a star out there is alive. Maybe there's a planet like Ego. Sure. Could be.

But the Fermi Paradox doesn't account for any of that. None of those things. I do think it's funny that you mention it because the other thing that often goes with the Fermi paradox is, was it some kind of the great filter? Oh, that is, yeah. The filter being like, why, if there are all these other lives, why haven't we heard of them? Well, in this scenario, the filter is the trisolarians. Or they're attempting to be the filter is the trisolarians or they're attempting to be the filter right because they're being they're the ones that are like oh we've heard another we've heard another

civilization broadcast their thoughts we must destroy them i feel like in this in this circumstance the great filter yeah would be destruction by other but because the filter has like the things that would stop you from being spacefaring. And one of the things is a more advanced beings that destroy anyone else that reaches into their space, which in this instance would be the trisolarians. I think I've posited my own what the fuck about that before. um, about how the mitochondria even existing as a concept, allowing for the existence of multicellular organisms seems like a crazy ass great filter to me because a cell ate another cell and was like, I'm not going to digest you. I'm going to use you to make energy for me. Yeah. And that was the first, and that literally set off multicellular organisms as a concept. The actual great filter is just simply reaching multicellular stages.

Yeah. I unironically feel this way. Just so everyone who's listening knows. Well, also, like, this book does, like, you can tell he's, this, the author is into this sort of thing because he also directly talks about the like what he called like civilization types like a type one civilization or a type two civilization that's type three civilization that's straight up great filter for me paradox stuff for me paradox stuff where you're talking about like the amount of power that can be harnessed by said civilization i also just at like a i don't know what we call it sociological level don't like

i don't know if don't like is the right word i'm comfortable with i'm against the idea of typecasting human civilization as human civilization as a single thing yeah which this book inherently has to do when you're doing humans versus aliens. But he talks about it so much being like, well, human civilization has advanced to this state. Has it? Or has scientific progress in very specific windows and specific places been allowed to do certain things that are not available to the human populace? I agree with that sentiment. to the human populace i agree with that sentiment and i also want to point out that it also comes with it like an implication of if technology like the type 1 type 2 type 3 type 4 civilization thing

comes with it with this implication that a a society must consume more in order to progress you must like eventually learn how to consume the power of the sun yeah um it's it's like defining growth as again this is this is extremely it's an extremely capitalistic mindset a consumerist mindset it is that like in order for a civilization to grow and advance it must find a ways to harness and extract more power um i don't eventually to the point where you are encapsulating and harnessing a sun or a star you're doing what the fuck is that thing where you like Dyson sphere or whatever. The Dyson sphere right where you like encircle a star with like things and the harness it's

nuclear energy or whatever. I we can't talk too much about this because I'm going to make again a number of my friends upset with one of my other specific takes which is that exploring space is stupid

and we're wasting our time by doing it I think we got a lot of problems we got to figure out here before we start going somewhere else my main issue is that they're like oh well we can get more

resources from mining asteroids or something and I'm like there's no way for us to get to the point where we can mine asteroids without completely destroying the planet we currently live on. That's very much like, is the juice worth the squeeze? Where like, is it worth all the extractive destruction we have to do to build spaceships and do space exploration to get to these asteroids worth it. When we could simply learn to live better on the planet we're on. But I know a lot of my,

I know a lot of my personal friends would hear that take and would disagree with me, but I am anti-space space is like the bottom of the ocean. We shouldn't be there. We don't belong there and we should leave it alone. There's a lot you can learn about space just with light. So... Just look at it.

Just... Look at it. Just slap a couple fucking... I don't know. Build your own red coast base and stare at the sky with a radar or something. You don't got to go there. Listen to this podcast. Don't go to space.

It's stupid. And full of trisolarians who want to dehydrate you. Every time I hear trisolarians, I think of the Trifalmadorians from fucking Slaughterhouse-Five. And I keep imagining, like, I unironically keep imagining them as the Trafalmadoreans, but that look like a plunger with a stick and a hand on top with, like, an eyeball in the middle. So, like, I'm imagining these, like, Trafalmadorean-like things, like, hanging around going, oh, we're going to unfold a particle. Space opens. And see, I keep hearing them talking about dehydrating themselves

and i my mind was really first like oh we have to hurry up and dehydrate and my first thought was yeah your water belongs to your tribe not to you you don't need your water anymore. It belongs to the tribe. The Frank Herbert comparisons continue. Continue. The Trisolarans are simply super hardcore Fremen. Man. You survive the desert by dehydrating yourself until you can reach an oasis. And sticking themselves in a freezer.

You dehydrate yourself until you make it to one of the sea etches. And then you can be rehydrated with the worm water. What did we learn? I think I just said it, right? Don't go to space. Don't go to space. It's a bad idea. Don't tell aliens

that human society is irreparably damaged and we need to be wiped out probably not a good sentiment to hold wouldn't encourage it personally no you know i can get the vibe if you're like totally hopeless about capitalism and you're like wow is this the best we can do ah interesting that yeah when she i had that exact same opinion but she was totally hopeless about communism yeah she was like is this the best we can do uh this is terrible just so wild this book has such a negative opinion of like the cultural revolution and like chinese i think most people in china have a negative view of the chinese of the not the chinese revolution but the the cultural revolution cultural revolution interesting

i'm pretty sure even xi jinping is like i don't care if you shit poo poo on on mao on mao just don't shit poo poo on poo bear me personally it's in i guess i guess it's an interestingly different view of like your revolutionary history. Because I think in a lot of these other, in a number of other societies, specifically communist revolutionary ones, you have this sort of untouchability of the founder, where you're not supposed to criticize them. Where it seems like in China, they're just like,

yeah, no no bringing capitalism back somewhat was good actually yeah and we're gonna and we're gonna sit here and try and pretend like xi jinping gives a rat's ass about communist revolution jesus christ that is the funniest thing i've heard all week. Xi Jinping, upholder of Mao thought. Just kidding. Upholder of any sort of Marxist thought at all. Don't worry, bro. 2050.

We'll move socialism by 2050. Or dang, we no longer know what socialism is or how to obtain it. We simply will kind of just chug along. Dang, the unnamed hero of the three-body problem. Letting people from... But also villain because it let Yao and Xia have access to a radio telescope to doom humanity. Forever. Maybe.

We haven't read the sequels. This is very Mass Effect vibes. The Reapers are coming. Yeah, it kind of is. But they're going to be here in 450 years and not 450 450 years and then i think the second book it seems that like from the brief thing here that like the main problem they're attempting to overcome is the fact uh that the sofans can hear and report every single thing. Every human says pretty much like instantaneously. So we can't formulate plans against them because they can report all of them

immediately. I will get a brief, I guess, spoiler warning. Cause I've read ahead to see like what was going on in this new book. I'm just by like the Wikipedia. So skip ahead. I don just by like the Wikipedia. So skip ahead, I don't know, a minute or two. If you don't want a spoiler warning for the Dark Forest, the sequel book,

it looks like the solution they come up with is that because the Sofans all communicate essentially directly and like telepathically or whatever, they don't understand misdirection and subterfuge. So they just train people to like lie. That unironically would, I mean, you could just trick them like a normal person. Like you just treat them and be like, we were definitely not building a space elevator.

Definitely not doing that. This is sounding more and more like Mass we're definitely not building a space elevator definitely not doing that this is sounding more and more like mass effect by the minute where they're like we're building the crucible we're not building we're not building the crucible where's the crucible mass effect three in a nutshell where it's like the the reapers just be like yeah let them build this weapon that's just gonna blow us all to smithereens let's do it oh yeah let's not get into the problems with mass effect 3 and that will save that for especially since i'm a mass effect 3 apologist i wouldn't go that far but well tune into the bonus episodes maybe on a bonus episodes you can subscribe to the patreon and maybe on a bonus episode soon we'll talk about the politics

of mass effect that would be fucking crazy that's liberal as we'll talk about the politics of Mass Effect. That would be fucking crazy. That's liberal as hell. I'm in the middle of going through and replaying a bunch of RPGs so maybe I'll replay through the Mass Effect games real soon and we can talk about the politics of Mass Effect. The trilogy is pretty fun. It's pretty fun. Go play it.

Maybe that's what I'll do next. I think that's it. Thank you everyone for joining us i hope that was somewhat enlightening as you're going we talked a lot about china and like chinese politics and a lot of they man they work together with the with nato to saw a ship into multiple parts they work together with nato and the cia the c CIA and the American general talks about all the fuck that he was at multiple wars in Panama. Interesting. You know, if you're a big math nerd or big science nerd, you'll probably enjoy this book.

Yeah. If you're like me and, you know, a herbo with a small brain might not be your favorite. If there, yeah, I guarantee there's a trailer out now on YouTube that you can watch for the D&D. By that, I mean, you know, the Benioff and Weiss Netflix adaption of this, which I'm terrified about. But I'm going to watch that trailer now. Anyway, thanks for listening. We love you all. Subscribe to the Patreon for bonus episodes.

Anyway, thanks for listening. We love you all. Subscribe to the Patreon for bonus episodes. We would have just released a bonus episode, one of our album analysis episodes, where we talk about the album that changed your mind about an entire genre of music. And before that, we had a Patreon episode about the sort of racial politics

and other politics of D&D. Ooh, yeah. Fifth edition specifically, but some older ones too. Thank you all for listening, and we'll be back in a couple weeks with something else to be decided something else something else we don't know what's coming next week but we know what's coming the episodes after that it's weird don't worry about it love you bye bro bro are you fucking real man come on Thank you.