After raving about The Three-Body Problem in my recommendation on Duozhuayu, I felt there was still more to say, so here's a brief write-up. I believe The Three-Body Problem is a robust bestseller with a tough, self-consistent worldview. What do I mean by a tough worldview? It means shouldering the burden of your own survival. Ordinary people live with social support systems — family, partners, friends, employers, and an entire social safety net. It may be of varying quality, but it exists. When we think about problems, we easily overlook these "advantages" we possess (as the famous opening line of The Great Gatsby reminds us), taking survival for granted and feeling aggrieved when survival is threatened. For an individual, having these supports is a good thing — a mark of civilizational progress. But for an organization, a society, a nation, a species, this assumption doesn't hold. Survival has never been a given; you must exhaust every ounce of wit and strength to earn the right to survive — just as Wade and Zhang Beihai did. We live in an era of boundlessly expanding individualist legitimacy. I don't mean that individualism holds absolute dominance in public discourse; rather, as a lived reality, it is deeply rooted, embedded in the modern subconscious, and has become a virtually irrefutable premise. This individualism, combined with the survival-entitlement mentality described above, produces a fragile social culture. The Three-Body Problem addresses this too — the notion of "giving civilization to time, rather than time to civilization" — but the Trisolarans couldn't care less about your civilization or your time.
Of course, we're unlikely to face an imminent alien threat. But facing existential threats as a collective is a fact so obvious it gets overlooked. For example, as humans we face the threat of epidemics. To this day, huge numbers of people die every year — fewer in well-governed countries, but in poorly governed ones, deaths occur on a scale resembling slaughter. I can't say I personally feel great empathy about this, but on this matter, humanity as a collective genuinely exists. Whether you're an individualist, a socialist, a liberal, or nothing at all, you can't avoid the threat of epidemics. What ultimately protects you is the system humanity has built — a system that includes authority and cruelty, and the irreversible impersonality of institutions. Such a system both protects and harms people, and to a large extent, these two sides are two faces of the same coin. During SARS, for instance, some people's freedom was restricted. Freedom and the threat of epidemic were caught in a dilemma — decisions had to be made, trade-offs had to be weighed, you had to shoulder your own survival. Blaming heaven and earth was useless. This is the tough worldview I admire. I don't like weak works, self-pitying works. I like people fighting for something — defying the law, bursting through the net. That's what I admire.
The Three-Body Problem is extraordinarily legendary. Its author was an engineer at the Niangziguan Power Plant and still posts on the Shuimu BBS forum under the handle "nzg." I first read the serialization of The Three-Body Problem in Science Fiction World when I was in high school. Later, through the internet, it reached more readers, generated more discussion, and ultimately became a work of global influence. There are remarkable people hidden in the dust of everyday life — and that's no accident. It is the product of an enormous base of talent. Consider another science fiction writer, Wang Jinkang, also an electrical engineer. The key point is that neither of them is a professional writer. Their writing, publishing, and dissemination were largely something entirely new. This is contemporary China's new cultural movement. Beyond science fiction, another flourishing genre is historical time-travel fiction. Representative works include Stealing the Ming Dynasty and Approaching Lingao, which, as historical novels, surpass the Mao Dun Literary Prize-winning Li Zicheng in quality, and absolutely demolish writers like Er Yuehe and Xiong Zhaozheng. The success of these "new cultural movement" works is built on this foundation: a large number of non-professional writers with deep (if non-standard) knowledge of science, society, culture, and history, who use new modes of literary production to harness collective power and produce high-quality work. For example, Approaching Lingao's research into late-Ming history is so meticulous and thorough that even professional historical works can hardly surpass it (its research into Hainan's military defenses goes down to the county and township level). Isolated research has no value by itself, of course — my main point here is about the technical standard these "new cultural movement" masterworks achieve. These works certainly have rough edges, but their strengths are more than sufficient. And what is all this built upon? First, you need a large cohort of professionals with considerable literary ability who have deep understanding of some aspect of society (especially those in science and technology). Second, you need a great many complex, sufficiently leisurely work opportunities — reflecting the level of productive development. And finally, you need a relatively pluralistic cultural marketplace, so that these literary activities — which start as nothing more than "catching the wind" — have room to grow and flourish. These are my reasons for admiring The Three-Body Problem.
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