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

by Liu Cixin

She was now like a Geiger counter that had been subjected to too much radiation, no longer capable of giving any reaction, noiselessly displaying a reading of zero.

If this was so, then how many other acts of humankind that had seemed normal or even righteous were, in reality, evil?

It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible

to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair. To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race.

“The great Trisolaran Fleet has already set sail. Their target is this solar system, and they will

arrive in four hundred and fifty years.”

“I just want to ask the two of you one question: Is the technological gap between humans and

Trisolarans greater than the one between locusts and humans?”

Look at them, the bugs. Humans have used everything in their power to extinguish them: every kind of poison, aerial sprays, introducing and cultivating their natural predators, searching for and

destroying their eggs, using genetic modification to sterilize them, burning with fire, drowning with water. Every family has bug spray, every desk has a flyswatter under it … this long war has been going on for the entire history of human civilization. But the outcome is still in doubt. The bugs have not been eliminated. They still proudly live between the heavens and the earth, and their numbers have not diminished from the time before the appearance of the humans.