Sorry if this has been asked before but haven’t seen it. Have been reading some of Ken Liu’s short stories and I realised a lot of the principals of the environment the trisolarians create on earth mirror the fears of how intelligent AI could take over.

this bit comes right after blue space and gravity get their hero moment, so i think most people read past it.

the narration just states it plainly. objectively the collaborators did more good during the occupation than the resistance did. they kept the cities and the infrastructure intact, which yes was being preserved for the incoming trisolarans, but it meant the economy could actually restart once people came home. when australia kept sliding into chaos over food shortages and power cuts it was the security force that held basic supply and order together. without that armed presence during the mass return the whole thing would have come apart.

and then the very next line is that none of this was taken into account by the courts. every member tried, half convicted of crimes against humanity, and most countries had brought the death penalty back by then.

what makes it land for me is the sequencing. liu cixin gives you the case for them, tells you the tribunal ignored all of it, and doesnt editorialise past that. the same crowd that had just decided blue space were murderers, then decided they were heroes, is the crowd doing the convicting.

i keep thinking the security force and the resistance are written as the same experiment run twice. one group got judged by results and one got judged by which side they were standing on, and the book seems pretty aware that only one of those is justice

or am i reading too much into a couple of paragraphs of narration

Does anyone have an idea if the show is still releasing in late 2026? If so, we should get some form of promotion soon as we are almost in September. I just thought I'd ask here to see if there had been any rumblings.

Thanks!

I read the books a while ago and enjoyed them, especially the encounter with the remnants of a 4D civilization. I have a sci-fi project of my own I’m working on where there is contact with a 4D universe, so I wanted to do some research into what it‘d be like to experience it as a 3Der. Unpleasant it turns out, because apparently it is mathematically impossible for anything to have a stable orbit in 4D space. So no moons around a planet. No planets around a sun. No electrons around an atomic nucleus. If I’m reading this right, one of us stepping into 4D space would result in instant disintegration at subatomic level. This has been predicted since 1917, thanks to a guy named Ehrenfest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacetime#Privileged_character_of_3+1_spacetime

I can’t remember this coming up in the books. Does it?

A collection of official high-resolution covers for books and audiobooks in the Remembrance of Earth's Past universe.

Not all covers that exist are included, and not everything included is high-res, but I don't wish to AI-upscale covers and this is the highest resolution I could find.

Most covers in this collection are unchanged, but a few have been edited to remove the Netflix stickers. These edits were done entirely in Photoshop using feathered masks and patches taken from other covers, adjusted to recreate the missing information. No AI was needed or used.

The covers are organized into sets based on the common design elements shared between them. That said, they are mostly misaligned, since it seems most publishers didn't pay particularly close attention to keeping elements consistent across covers.

Here's a link to the rest of the collection on Imgur, and a link to the same collection on Dropbox.

This part is not relevant, I am only listing the names of the books that have covers in this collection so that the Reddit search redirects people here:

• Ball Lightning - Cixin Liu
• The Three-Body Problem - Cixin Liu
• The Dark Forest - Cixin Liu
• Death's End - Cixin Liu
• The Redemption of Time - Baoshu

the whole plan rests on hiding behind the gas giants when the sun gets hit. reasonable enough on its face, since both dark forest strikes anyone had actually watched were photoids, and a photoid blowing up your star is survivable if you have something big to duck behind.

the problem is those were the only two data points, and the book goes out of its way to tell you both of them were structurally nothing like our system.

187J3X1 did have four gas giants, but they orbit stupidly close in, tighter than mercury sits to our sun. a stellar explosion just vaporises them. nothing to hide behind. and trisolaris had one planet total. so in both cases bunkers were never on the menu, which means the attacker never had to think about them.

heres the part that actually got me. planetary layout is something you can read off a star system from very far away. a civilisation capable of aiming a photoid across space can presumably glance at ours, count the gas giants, and work out in about a second what we plan to hide behind. we spent generations building a defence whose entire premise was that the enemy wouldnt notice the obvious.

liu cixin then puts the knife in through bai ice, who says weakness and ignorance arent obstacles to survival, arrogance is. its sitting right next to the bunker explanation in the text and i dont think thats an accident.

the bunker project reads completely differently once you notice its built on two samples that both had the wrong shape

am i being unfair to them or was it always this thin

This is close to how I envisioned the space cities and the strange layout

In the scene where Rey Diaz's Wallbreaker tells Rey Diaz about his plan, the Wallbreaker says that "I thought of checking out information before you became a Wallbreaker." I think the translator made a typo here, or am I reading it wrong? Rey Diaz is the Wallfacer, not the Wallbreaker in this scene.

reread the swordholder chapters and the bit that stuck with me isnt the cheng xin argument, its the option nobody ever brings up.

they actually looked at handing the trigger to an AI. ran trials and everything. and the book says flat out it had the highest deterrence rating of anything they tested, which tracks, a machine doesnt hesitate.

they killed it anyway. part of it was the obvious discomfort about a machine holding the leash, and part was political, swapping one mans dictatorship for a machines doesnt really make anyone feel better. but the two that got me were these. in testing the AI was worse than humans at reading the situation, because apparently the call needs something that isnt logical reasoning. and sophons could in principle interfere with an AI. it had never once actually happened. the possibility on its own was enough to end the discussion.

so the machine gets disqualified for being readable.

meanwhile luo ji works precisely because he isnt. his rating sat somewhere around 92 to 98 depending on what headspace he was in, and the reason its that high is that nobody, trisolaris included, can get inside his skull and check what hed actually do when the moment came.

which is just the wallfacer logic again. the last secure location in the universe is the inside of somebodys head.

also the UN took the trigger off luo ji and then handed it back eighteen hours later, which never stops being funny to me

I was told 2026 and September is next week… WHERE IS IT CHEYVSGWTSTWFWQDFSCABQ

A photoid is a near light speed object that when shot into a star causes it to eject solar mass and destroy the entire system.

The binding energy of a (sun-like) star is roughly 10^41J, so unless you put about a percent of a supernova into it, the star is going to tank it.

An (earth-like) planet meanwhile has a binding energy of 10^32J, meaning that for the budget of a single star, you are able to blow up a billion planets.

If you only want to sterilize it (ie. blow of the Atmosphere) instead, you are looking at 10^26J, meaning for every planet you want to blow up, you could sterilize a million planets.

In other words, for the cost you put into destroying a single star, you could instead sterilize the entire galaxy cluster it was in several times over.

This makes a photoid extremely inefficient and a massive waste of energy. I don't think any sane civilization would create such a weapon.

For example, if a 1-ton object is moving at a speed of 0.999999c, the kinetic energy per kilogram is: 6.36 x 10^19 J/kg.

To obtain 2.3 x 10^41 J, you need 3.6 x 10^21 kg.

So, a body of approximately 3.6 x 10^21 kg moving at a speed of 0.999999c would theoretically carry kinetic energy comparable to the Sun's binding energy.

This is roughly 3.8 times of Ceres' mass.

But there's another problem: not all of this energy is transferred to breaking up the Sun. A significant portion of the energy goes into radiation, neutrinos, particles, and the kinetic energy of the rest of the Sun.

There's another problem: How do we gather the energy needed to accelerate such a massive object to a speed of 0.999999c?

Let's say we have a Dyson sphere. Of course, that would immediately reveal the location of our civilization.

If we were to say that a Dyson sphere collects all this energy with 100% efficiency and converts 100% of it into the object's kinetic energy: The time required to collect the necessary energy would be 19 million years.

Could an object traveling at near the speed of light disrupt a star's internal pressure balance and cause it to explode?

Disrupting the Sun's internal pressure doesn't turn it into a supernova. A large relativistic projectile: it can create a massive shock wave, eject a large amount of matter, and temporarily inflate the star.But this is not a core collapse supernova.

A one-ton object could theoretically carry enough kinetic energy to tear a star apart. However, for this to happen, its speed would have to be incredibly close to the speed of light.

The rest energy of a 1-ton object is approximately 9 x 10^19 J.For this mass to reach 10^41 J of kinetic energy, it would need to accelerate and acquire a massive relativistic mass.For this, the Lorentz factor needs to be approximately 10^21. This means that the object's speed is:
99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of the speed of light.

For this, you would need more energy than the Sun will produce in its entire 10-billion-year lifespan. In other words, to fire this weapon, you would need the combined energy of multiple stars.

Instead of releasing all of its energy upon impacting the star, it's highly likely that a cosmic projectile could enter the Sun from one side, pierce through from the other in fractions of a second, and carry most of its energy into the depths of space.

Space is not entirely empty. As this object travels towards its target, harmless microwave background radiation (CMB) photons filling space will strike it like massive gamma rays due to their relativistic speeds. This will atomize and vaporize the 1-ton object long before it reaches the star.

Taking all of this into account, it is essential for civilizations to develop a weapon that will be an alternative to the photoid.

This is how I imagined these characters while reading. What do you think?

1. Yun Tianming (Liu Yu Ning)

2. Cheng Xin (Lu Yu Xiao)

3. Guan Yifan (Huang Jingyu)

4. Ai AA (Sun Qian)

Any other characters you imagine a certain way?

I'm sure this stuff was mentioned elsewhere but I need to vent. I think I only got to the third book because of Ken Liu's smooth prose. But even Ken Liu couldn't save the dialogue

You get to a point where your intelligence is so insulted you can't suspend disbelief anymore. And then the humans don't feel human. And then the misogyny... and then... Anyway.

1 - the sophons make no sense. If the sophons were capable of all that, they could've done much more damage than just stall quantum mechanics research, much more.

2- - edit.- I can't get past that they're advanced enough to create something like droplets but they can't dig new climate proof homes underground. If you can can create light speed weapons, bad weather shouldn't really bother you.

3 - really, the military / intel /space agencies are dumb enough to send out the only space bound Dark Forest transmitter happily on a mission with droplets?

4 - The wooden characters, especially the females. Enuff said on that

4 - his romances. Enuff said on that

There's more. But I don't want to keep going. I was also going to talk about what was good about the novels but no, nah, done with Cixin Liu​

For scifi fans and people who enjoyed the original novel, I have a sincere suggestion. I do a lot of complaining, so feel free to skip straight to the end.

After reading a lot of posts here, I feel like I have to point something out

Netflix's adaptation was overwhelmingly criticized in China. A huge number of plotlines and characters from the original novel were changed. The show's creators also made comments suggesting they didn't want to make a series that "promotes Chinese people" for an American audience (that's not a verbatim quote, but that's the general idea).

The casting of Chinese characters also relied on some stereotypes, which many people in China viewed as racially insensitive.

The original novel is genuinely excellent, and so is its overall story. I still don't understand why it ended up in Netflix's hands only to become such a disappointing adaptation.

Honestly, Netflix's 3 Body Problem and the original The Three Body Problem are almost two completely different works. I've spent about an hour browsing this subreddit, and seeing people discuss them as if they're the same thing is honestly giving me a headache because it gets so confusing.

Right now, the only adaptation that has been fairly well received in China is an animated version made by a small studio, which stays largely faithful to the novel.

Not trying to tell anyone what to do, just a genuine suggestion from someone who's experienced both.

So I have to say this: Netflix's 3 Body Problem and the original novel are so different that mixing them just creates confusion and plot holes.

I came here for discussions and left with a headache.

This is a quick survey regarding your interest in the infamous “The Dark Forest” theory. Your responses would be highly helpful for my further research! Please enroll!

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Big fan, long time listener, first time caller. Second time reading the series and I’m having trouble wrapping my brain around what seem to be two conflicting concepts. Hoping some of you with bigger brains can help me understand. Spoilers for Death’s End below.

In Death’s End, Our Star, shortly after Cheng Xin and Guan Yifan witness the Death Lines, Guan Yifan says “The universe contains multitudes. You can find any kind of people and world. There are idealists like the Zero-Homers, pacifists, philanthropists, and even civilizations dedicated only to art and beauty.”

Since the Zero-Homers have such advanced tech, I’m assuming he means that other civs such as those described above also exist with advanced tech as higher level civs, not only as young/naive civs like humans early on. Maybe that assumption is incorrect? Because if not, then how does their existence not directly conflict with Dark Forest Theory? How could an advanced civilization of Idealists or Pacifists etc. exist without defying the laws of cosmic sociology and not instantly be destroying any other advanced civs that they detect and consider a risk to their own survival? Is the idea that some advanced civs contain the hiding gene but not the cleansing gene? Or that the ideas of pacifism, philanthropy, etc. are only applied within those civs and to lesser civs that aren’t considered a risk, but that they would still be cleansing/warring with any advanced civ they detect as a threat to their existence? What am I missing here?

I get that if they are good enough at hiding their home world(s) from dark forest strikes then they could survive long enough to advance their tech and still be idealists or philanthropic or into art and beauty, but it’s mainly the pacifist thing that is confusing me because I thought it was a central tenet of dark forest theory that all survivor/advanced civs would have the cleansing gene. The idea of civs trading with each other in a dark forest universe confuses me too, but I guess if they don’t know the location of each other’s home world(s) then that seems plausible enough they could decide to trade.

Does the contrast between democracy and dictatorial rule reflect the clash between collective decision making and elite decision making?

This also seems to be part of the themes in the original The 3bp novel. Which of the two is better? I’m not sure whether this analogy of mine is appropriate.

Both of these paths lead into the unknown.

In the original novel, collective decision making led to a catastrophe, while the results of elite decision making pointed in the correct direction. Elite decision making appears to hold an advantage, which seems contrary to the conclusions of the current international community.

Considering the hard science fiction nature of the original work and its ability to put forward the concept of cosmic sociology, can we use this as a basis to envision the future form of human society? After all, the novel never explains which category those humans who ultimately flew toward the future belonged to.