Liu Cixin
The Three-Body Problem
Hardcover, 2019
About this book
The first novel of a trilogy about humanity's contact with an alien civilization, beginning with the choices of Ye Wenjie, a scientist who lost her father in the Cultural Revolution, and a series of deaths among contemporary scientists. It brings scientific scale into collision with politics and belief.
What stayed with me
I finished it while at WeWork in 2022. More than the ideas of quantum mechanics or cosmic civilization, what stayed with me was what people believe and whom they betray in extreme situations. Its account of human beings includes the power to believe fictions, which I also felt in Fahrenheit 451.
The emergence of cosmic sociology remains vivid as a moment when a humanistic hypothesis, not natural science alone, changes a civilization's prospects. It reinforced an intuition I use in thinking about crypto-economics and institutions: technology cannot close the answer; models also need human motives.