The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1)

by Liu Cixin

Under the influence of their mutually perturbing gravitational attraction, their movements are unpredictable—the three-body problem. When our planet revolves around one of the suns in a stable orbit, that’s a Stable Era.

“Then, other than the sun that appears during Chaotic Eras and Stable Eras, where are the other two?”

“No, emptiness is not nothingness. Emptiness is a type of existence. You must use this existential emptiness to fill yourself.”

But my evolutionary algorithm has already discovered more than a hundred stable configurations. Drawings of their orbits would fill a gallery with postmodern art, but that’s not my goal. The real solution to the three-body problem is to build a mathematical model so that, given any initial configuration with known vectors, the model can predict all subsequent motion of the three-body system.

The anachronistic mix of historical elements in Three Body no longer surprised him.

“The whole world is going to be under his rule because he has an army of more than thirty million preparing to conquer Europe.

“No, Great Emperor, it’s the vomit from Romans after their binge and purge feasts. When the nobles attend the feasts, stretchers have already been prepared for them under the tables. When they’ve eaten so much that they can no longer move, the servants carry them home.

This was not a normal kind of tri-solar day. By the time the last flying star turned into a sun, the first sun had already swept past the planet at extremely close range. Right after that, the other two suns swept past Trisolaris at even closer ranges, well within the planet’s Roche limit31, such that the tidal forces imposed on Trisolaris by

Does it represent the yearning for order, or the surrender to chaos?

Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains. In science fiction, humanity is often described as a collective.