While there, she conducts some research, and ends up testing a way to amplify a radio signal to beam into the cosmos. She’s sent first to a labor camp and then to an isolated scientific facility, where she’s able to put some of her astrophysics training to work. The Three-Body Problem begins in the midst of China’s Cultural Revolution: a woman named Ye Wenjie watches as her father is killed during a riot.

Reviews and blurbs for the series teased that it spanned the entire future: from the 1970s all the way to the heat death of the universe, and he manages to do that, in a really interesting way. The most impressive thing that I found with the trilogy as a whole was the scale that Liu was writing at. I blew through each of the three books in the trilogy, and I’m kicking myself for not reading them earlier. So, after I reviewed Liu’s novel Ball Lightning for The Verge, they were books that I picked up right away, to revisit that world. I’ve begun work on a new project for The Verge, and along with the stories that I had been listening to, I decided to go back to The Three-Body Problem and its sequels, which had been sitting on a shelf for a couple of years, books that kept telling myself that I’d pick up eventually. (In particular, “ The Wings of Earth” by Jiang Bo, “ Farewell Doraemon” by A Que, “ Your Multicolored Life” by Xing He, and “ To Fly like a Fallen Angel,” by Qi Yue) I’ve read stories from the China before: I wrote a post for Barnes and Noble about the history of Chinese science fiction, and through Ken Liu’s anthology, Invisible Planets, and of course, Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem (which I reviewed for Lightspeed Magazine a couple of years ago.) To keep myself on track and entertained, I began listening to a string of Clarkesworld Magazine’s podcasts - their fantastic translations from China. I dipped my toe into the world of Chinese science fiction over the course of this summer, as i did a bit work on my home.

The dark forest problem