Many of the most beloved science fiction films and TV shows feature humans and intelligent aliens coming together to form a larger interstellar society. The “Star Trek” stories have their United Federation of Planets, while the “Star Wars” stories feature a galaxy-spanning civilization far, far away that goes by lofty names such as “The Republic” or “The Galactic Empire.” But a Chinese science fiction trilogy coming to the big screen in 2016 takes a far darker view on how humans and other intelligent life in the universe might behave toward one another.
The “Three-Body” trilogy of books by Liu Cixin represents China’s best-selling foray into traditionally Western-dominated science fiction. An English translation of the first book earned Liu “best novel” for science fiction or fantasy in the 2015 Hugo Awards and landed on the reading list of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Chinese filmmakers have already scheduled the first “Three-Body” film for debut in July 2016. But don’t expect humans and aliens to be rubbing shoulders in a shared space adventure similar to the recent “Star Wars” and “Star Trek” films.
“There’s a strange contradiction revealed by the naivete and kindness demonstrated by humanity when faced with the universe: On Earth, humankind can step onto another continent, and without a thought, destroy the kindred civilizations found there through warfare and disease,” Liu writes in a postscript for the U.S. edition of “The Three-Body Problem.” “But when they gaze up at the stars, they turn sentimental and believe that if extraterrestrial intelligences exist, they must be civilizations bound by universal, noble, moral constraints, as if cherishing and loving different forms of life are parts of a self-evident universal code of conduct.”
(MAJOR SPOILERS for “The Three-Body Problem” and “The Dark Forest” will follow in this post. If you haven’t read at least the first two books in the “Three-Body” trilogy and wish to check them out for yourself, stop here.)
