Think of a fiction novel that you thought felt real while reading it.
Write a blog post and write below:
Title a (short) fiction novel:
Short summary of novel:
In your own opinion, explain what elements of the novel made you feel immersed in the narrative to a point of trust and belief.
Title: The Three Body Problem
Summary:
The Three Body Problem is the most famous science fiction novel of China, written by Cixin Liu. The story is about the clash of civilization between the earth and the the planet Trisolaris. The story of The Three Body Problem starts from the Cultural Revolution. During the Cultural Revolution, a top-secret project to explore the existence of aliens (Red Bank Project), directly under the leadership of the CPC Central Committee. Ye Wenjie, a female astrophysicist who witnessed her father’s death by red guards as a physics professor at Tsinghua University, entered the top-secret base by chance. After accidentally discovering the sun’s gain reflection, she privately used the principle to send out twice radio waves containing earth’s message into space. The message was received by the inhabitants of the nearest star system, the Trisolarans, and from then on the communication between the Trisolarns and earth was established. There are three suns in the galaxy of Trisolaris, which makes the climate and living codition on the planet Trisolaris unpreditcable and almost impossible for the continuation of civilization. The people of Trisolaris tried to calculate stellar movment but failed. They pinned their hopes on interplanetary migration. After receiving the signal and information of earth, they choose to conquer earth and set off from 4 light years away. After basic science is locked away by the Trisolaran civilization’s technology Sophon, humanity begins to fight the trisolaran advanced civilization with the “Face the Wall Project”, and discovers the Dark Forest law, winning and maintaining a fragile and short-lived peace. With the help of other super civilizations hidden in the dark cosmic background, human beings lead other civilizations to destroy trisolaran civilization by launching gravitational waves, but they also lay hidden dangers for their own road ahead.
Why Immersive?
I feel pretty immersive while reading for many reasons. Since it is a full-length novel with a bunch of background setting that needs a long paragraph to explain, I only want to cover several simple settings which bring me into this ‘authentic’ world. The first reason is the author’s application of real history. I’ve always thought that if a fictional thing wants to look very real, it must be real in some way, or look very close to the real. The story begins in the Cultural Revolution. Ye despaired of mankind after witnessing his father being beaten to death by red Guards led by his mother, and sent a signal into outer space. That’s how the story unfolds. Apart from the actual history of the Cultural Revolution, sending something into outer space is what humans have been doing since the 1960s. The “Red Bank project” in the novel reminds me of China’s signal transmitter in Guizhou province. Because China experienced the Cultural Revolution, because many astrophysicists saw despair in the disaster of that year, and because China actually had astrosignal transmitters, which were actually used to look for signs of aliens, I even wondered if this was really an unknown history while reading.
The second reason is the setting of “Sophon”, the invisible particle supercomputer created by the Trisolarans to spy on and lock down the earth, which can draw energy from a vacuum, fly at extremely close to the speed of light, communicate instantaneously using quantum entanglement, and use microscopic high-dimensional space to go anywhere and switch dimensions freely. Because it would take a long time to get from Trisolaran to Earth, it is highly likely that in the process, human technology will make a breakthrough and no longer be afraid of Trisolarans. In order to stop human technological progress, especially in the field of high energy physics, the trisolarans use this technology to interfere with human scientific experiments and monitor human beings at all times. Sophon makes me crazy because it is intangible, it could be anywhere. Many of the experiments in high energy physics that are carried out every day in the world are failing, and human progress in the field of high energy physics is not smooth. Could there really be sophons interfering with the scientific process of human beings, could there really be these invisible particles watching us?
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