The Three-Body Problem and the Anthropocene

O Problema dos Três Corpos e o Antropoceno

Abstract

The so-called Anthropocene is a new epoch characterized by deep biophysical changes that threaten the continuity of life on Earth for millions of species, including humans. This instability scenario challenges International Relations (IR) to rethink itself. As a narrative of our fears and imaginative efforts about the future, science fiction provides thought experiments on potential and indeterminate paths for humanity. In ‘The Problem of 3 Bodies’ trilogy, Cixin Liu builds a dystopian reality, suggesting insights into the Anthropocene. Through this narrative, we can explore the limits of positivist epistemology, challenge the conventional understanding of the international system as a closed anarchical structure, and reflect on some of the consequences of anthropocentrism. This article aims to illustrate how SciFi can be a portal to reflect on a planet full of instabilities by drawing a parallel between Liu’s trilogy and the impacts of the Anthropocene in IR. Thus, we dialogue with dilemmas and solutions designed by the author to speculate about time, technology, institutions, the indeterminacy of the future, and the fragility of human existence, themes still underexplored in International Relations studies but common in the Anthropocene scholarship. However, the solutions envisaged by Liu bet on scientific-technological development, leaving aside relevant issues such as inequalities, injustices, and other ways of knowing.

Keywords Anthropocene; International Relations; science fiction; Global South; The Three-Body Problem

Resumo

O chamado Antropoceno é uma nova época caracterizada por profundas mudanças biofísicas que ameaçam a continuidade da vida na Terra para milhões de espécies, incluindo os seres humanos. Esse cenário de instabilidade desafia os estudos de Relações Internacionais (RI) a se repensarem. Como uma narrativa de nossos medos e esforços imaginativos sobre o futuro, a ficção científica fornece experimentos de pensamento sobre caminhos potenciais e indeterminados para a humanidade. Na trilogia “The Problem of 3 Bodies”, Cixin Liu constrói uma realidade distópica, sugerindo percepções sobre o Antropoceno. Por meio dessa narrativa, podemos explorar os limites da epistemologia positivista, desafiar o entendimento convencional do sistema internacional como uma estrutura anárquica fechada e refletir sobre algumas das consequências do antropocentrismo. Este artigo tem como objetivo ilustrar como a ficção científica pode ser um portal para refletir sobre um planeta cheio de instabilidades, traçando um paralelo entre a trilogia de Liu e os impactos do Antropoceno nas RI. Dessa forma, dialogamos com os dilemas e soluções concebidos pela autora para especular sobre o tempo, a tecnologia, as instituições, a indeterminação do futuro e a fragilidade da existência humana, temas ainda pouco explorados nos estudos de Relações Internacionais, mas comuns nos estudos sobre o Antropoceno. No entanto, as soluções previstas por Liu apostam no desenvolvimento científico-tecnológico, deixando de lado questões relevantes como desigualdades, injustiças e outras formas de conhecimento.

Palavras-chave Antropoceno; Relações Internacionais; Ficção Científica; Sul Global; Problema dos Três Corpos

Introduction

As a literary genre that encompasses possible futures, science fiction (SF) invites us to reflect on contemporary fears and dilemmas and provides tools to imagine how to live in a world of drastic changes. The Anthropocene, the new geological epoch we live in, is the epoch in which human activities are the main drivers of change in Earth systems (Steffen et al. 2015a: 12), transgressing planetary boundaries and turning the ‘doomsday’ a more recurring theme in social sciences. By bringing instability and catastrophic scenarios, the Anthropocene leads us to question IR epistemic and ontological grounds, as well as world structure(s) and institutions.

Imagine that Earth is not the only inhabited planet in the universe. In a galaxy far away, Trisolar is a planet where civilizations undergo alternate periods of either stability and flourishing or instability and destruction. SF has the power to make us go beyond an anthropocentric and Earth-centred perspective to grasp the vastitude and complexity of the pluri-universe. Likewise, the Anthropocene challenges social scientists to exercise our imagination beyond ‘indulging an intense anthropocentric narcissism’ (Liu 2013: 22) to enlarge the ethical considerations spectrum to encompass non-human worlds. The Anthropocene compels us to exercise macro-thinking and long-term scenarios in International Relations.

Suppose that the ‘most basic task of science fiction is world-building – that is, establishing the fundamental framework, laws, and rules of a story’s imaginary world’ (Liu 2013: 29). In this case, SF may lead us to reflect on the limits of our fundamental framework and on the implication of our relationship with science and technology, and also of our ability to promote changes in the world. In this sense,

the tools of SF, its speculative drive and its ability to subvert language and situation, are among the most powerful weapons available to those who want to “[make] it possible to think about new ways of doing things.” (Mehan, cited in Sawyer 2010: 1)

This article uses SF as a door to reflect on the impacts of the Anthropocene in IR. It proposes that, given the deep social and biophysical planetary-scale changes ahead of us, IR needs to go beyond the behaviouralist notion of science that has prevailed since the 1950s/1960s based on the idea of knowledge accumulation, empirical and verifiable hypotheses, and prediction, addressing a world that is out there, departed from his/her normative positions (Jackson 2011).

We present a ‘thought experiment’ about ‘new ways of doing things’ inspired by a powerful, creative, non-Earth-centred trilogy: Cixin Liu’s novel The Three-Body Problem (officially named Remembrance of Earth’s Past). The first book, The Three-Body Problem, was originally published in China in 2008. Its sequel, The Dark Forest, was also published in 2008, and the third book, Death’s End, in 2010. The trilogy is one of the most successful non-English novels worldwide.

In Liu’s imaginary world, an alien threat is a background to reflect on worries that are well-known – and recurrent in science fiction: the difficulties in making collective decisions, the fear of scarcity, the fear of the future, the desire for immortality, the aspiration to transcend the constraints imposed by the material world, striving to breathe, nourish, and hydrate the body, while upholding its physical integrity. In addition to explaining such constraints (laws of physics, chemistry, etc.), the books invite us to imagine science as an instrument to overcome them and to reflect on the ethical and practical consequences of humanity’s choices and actions.

The Three-Body novels can lead to an interesting parallel with Kenneth Waltz’s model of explanation of the International System (Dyson 2019), considering that, in both, the structure constraints actors’ actions, and the logic of survival is a determinant of States’ behaviour (or a similar state structure). Dyson also points out the centrality of conflict in both narratives but argues that Liu, in the end, leaves the door open to individual agency having a systemic impact (Dyson 2019: 15). If science fiction is a way of ‘representing, constructing and critiquing’ international politics and telling a story about the world (Dyson 2019: 3-4), the Three-Body trilogy is an invitation to ask what kind of representation we make of the current state of the world and what kind of image of the future is based on our current position.

In this paper, we chose a different path for a parallel. The article uses Liu’s trilogy to highlight the Anthropocene’s provocation to the IR discipline, pointing out the limits of a positivist epistemology, a perception of the international system as a closed system, and of anthropocentrism. We are interested in discovering how a Chinese science fiction novel imagines the future, and how it relates to the Anthropocene literature in IR. The trilogy was written from outside the traditional strands of Western science fiction, it has non-Western main characters and non-Western historical and sociological references, and it reimagines Chinese people and their world. Will the current problems – inequality, environmental threats, etc. – have a similar framing? Could it provide traces of imagining transitions to sustainable futures from the South? If the Anthropocene demands us to modify our traditional ways of thinking about the future, what does Liu’s novel offer us as future scenarios?

The article starts by interrogating how the IR field engages with the Anthropocene. Based on some challenges that this new geological epoch presents, we dialogue with the trilogy in three sections – one for each book – engaging with specific themes brought up by Liu, such as a positivist epistemology and its implications to society in allowing the formulation of different problems and, consequently, innovative solutions; the trilogy depiction of the international system’s structure and its categories (like Dyson’s [2019] argument); and, finally, a non-anthropocentric perspective about survival and hope. Next, we present some scenarios about humanity’s survival within both contexts – Trisolaran’s invasion and the Anthropocene – and finish with a final remarks section with some provocative questions.

The Anthropocene and IR

Steffen et al. (2015a: 3) assessed significant human pressures on Earth systems from 1750 on, based on socio-economic trends for population, economic growth, resource use, urbanization, globalization, transport and communication, and on Earth system’s structure and functioning – atmospheric composition, stratospheric ozone, the climate system, water and nitrogen cycles, marine and land ecosystems, tropical forests, and terrestrial biosphere degradation. They characterized the second half of the 20th century as the ‘Great Acceleration,’ based on evidence of significant changes that depart from Holocene patterns with unprecedented rates and magnitude. While contested by some scholars (Lewis and Maslin 2015), who consider other historical markers, e.g. the colonization of the Americas, many scholars concur with the Great Acceleration as the beginning of the new geological epoch (Harrington 2016, Veiga 2019). It is important to note that responsibility for and vulnerability to the destabilization of critical Earth function is highly unequal. Thus, this period can simultaneously be called the Great Inequality (Rammelt et al. 2023).

Simangan’s (2020: 215-217) literature review about the Anthropocene highlights how little reimagination and reconfiguration is taking place in IR scholarship. Her findings indicate that conventional research subjects (security, politics, conflict, geopolitics, law, and governance) dominate the literature, with statist and economic priorities. Most of the authors who published about the Anthropocene are in Western institutions, with an underrepresentation of Global South perspectives (Simangan 2020). Therefore, the discipline needs interdisciplinary dialogues and broader analytical frameworks to problematize the Anthropocene.

For Pereira (2017), the Anthropocene challenges more traditional perspectives in International Relations based on linear narratives, closed system approaches, an atomist definition of actors, predictability, and a positivist methodology that emulates physics working with independent and dependent variables. Pereira (2017, 2021) also argues that acknowledging the limits of positivist linear narratives and predictability has epistemological and methodological consequences in the discipline. In her assessment of the Anthropocene’s impacts on International Relations scholarship, she considers four main challenges: state-centrism, positivist and rationalist paradigms, nature-society dichotomy, and anthropocentrism.

Therefore, the Anthropocene invites us to search for new research lenses and presents an alternative contextual condition to examine conventional and contemporary International Relations issues. Firstly, positivist narratives, foundational to IR, are no longer tenable in the Anthropocene era. This challenges a traditional positivist notion of science in IR (King, Keohane and Verba 1994), questioning the belief in cumulative knowledge and the predictive power of empirical propositions. Consequently, a linear perspective on dependent and independent variables, for example, becomes insufficient since our capacity to understand current dynamics is limited by co-occurrences, feedback loops, and instability. The Anthropocene calls for complex systems thinking (Bai 2016).

This debate presents an opportunity to reshape the landscape of International Relations (IR) scholarship through alternative ontological, epistemological, and methodological positions. It prompts a reassessment of the implications for the IR canon, inviting reflection on the profound shifts caused by the absence of Holocene stability. It challenges the established nature-society divide and advocates for foregrounding non-human elements in the discourse. It also presents new questions, such as: how does the absence of Holocene stability redefine the meaning of IR? What are the repercussions of dismantling the nature-society dichotomy and emphasizing the role of non-human actors? These are critical questions that this discourse encourages us to explore by dialoguing with SF and freeing our imaginations. In our view, this paves the way for a more comprehensive understanding of the evolving dynamics within the field of International Relations.

The Anthropocene also offers ground for a critical examination of the traditional representation of the International System as a closed entity characterized by predictability and linearity. This depiction, centred on the states as the primary actors constrained by the logic of anarchy (Waltz 1979), fails to adequately encompass the intricacies and uncertainties inherent in a planet undergoing profound changes. Conventional notions of an anarchical international system and rational states that are driven by competition for power either to survive or to maximize their positions (Waltz 1979; Mearsheimer 2001) do not hold in a scenario of high instability. Even perspectives based on cooperation carried out by rational actors trying to overcome collective action dilemmas (Keohane 1984; Victor and Keohane 2011) like climate change are hard to hold as they are still premised on the Holocene stability (Dryzek and Pickering 2018). In this context, we need nuanced understandings of international politics that consider the evolving complexities of the Anthropocene.

From a liberal institutionalist thinking, for example, global institutions can foster Earth stewardship and governance, help to coordinate policies, integrate scientific assessment, and would bring humanity back to Holocene stable patterns (Steffen et al. 2015b; Lövebrand, Mobjörk and Söder 2020). Franchini, Viola, and Barros-Platiau (2017), however, point out that although environmental policy brought environmental issues to the international agenda, the regimes and global governance that emerged (especially the climate change international regime, centred on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – UNFCCC) have not been able to address climate change adequately because, as a core planetary boundary, climate change is an intersectional, non-traditional collective action problem. However, the institutions established to tackle this problem were designed within the framework of the Holocene, focusing primarily on state-centric and issue-specific approaches. Consequently, they fail to encompass cross-cutting issues and multiple actors. Although liberal institutionalists pay attention to complexity and global environmental change, it is hard to go beyond notions of institutions crafted in the Holocene.

Finally, the Anthropocene sheds light on the need for a paradigm shift in understanding global relations that incorporates the intricate dynamics of human-environment interactions. A relational perspective about the Anthropocene, rooted in decolonial and post-modernist/post-humanist literature (Lövebrand, Mobjörk and Söder 2020), questions IR concepts and organizing categories. Reflecting on the meaning of the end of the world-as-nature, Harrington (2016: 5) considers the new reality imaged by the Anthropocene in which ‘humans, non-humans, things, and materials co-exist in complex relations of life and non-life.’ Such a view ruptures with human’s mastery over ‘nature,’ highlights the intertwinement of human and non-human forces, and points to the ‘co-production of nature and social life,’ or a deep entanglement that goes beyond coexistence on a planet threatened by existential risk for most living things (Harrington 2016: 17, 21).

Pereira (2021) also calls for an interspecies conception of politics. The Anthropocene presents an opportunity for understanding the interconnectedness of human activities and nature and the agency of non-human actors, which Pereira (2021: 32) calls a ‘post-anthropocentric turn in both scholarship and politics.’ It is noteworthy that acknowledging a new geological epoch, human-centred, was necessary to propose a turn toward a post-human agenda in which justice and equity matter, including epistemic justice (Rodriguez 2021).

For Bai (2016), the Anthropocene can guide attitudes, choices, policies, and actions to influence the future since it is an opportunity to reconceptualize human individual and collective agency, its relationship with systems and structures, and review empirical, philosophical, and normative questions. However, the Anthropocene reminds us of human cognitive limitations in understanding complex systems. Harrington (2016: 12-13) also points to the complexity that results from the breakdown of categorical barriers of human and non-human realms, cumulative, overlapping, and intersecting interactions of Earth systems, which marks material and post-humanity turns in IR scholarship. Kavalski (2007: 442-444) describes what a complex international relations theory could look like: a depiction of world politics as contingent, whereas the coexistence of order and disorder has implications for the study of agency and structure, turning the focus to interactions, not exclusively on constituent parts. Furthermore, Young (2017) points to another relevant characteristic of complex systems: they do not return to the point of departure but reach a new state of equilibrium.

Therefore, the many debates around the Anthropocene in IR scholarship present new ways to understand global phenomena, preferably in an interdisciplinary approach: to overcome the human-nature divide, state-centrism, reconceptualize human and non-human agency, and recognize complex systems. Consequently, there is a need to change the focus from the international system made of states to a planetary ecosystem, which can encompass social and natural systems and different ways of being and knowing.

The thought experiment based on Cixin Liu’s trilogy rests heavily on a catastrophic disruption scenario and brings insights from a relational perspective between humanity and the agency of non-human actors. However, the trilogy seems to rest on a positivist conceptualization of the international system and a realist perspective based on survival. As we explore in the article, SF can instigate thought experiments on disruptive scenarios and non-Earth-centric views. However, SF may also reproduce mainstream worldviews or notions of a state-centric world. We acknowledge that it is not an objective of Liu’s trilogy to provide us with different concepts and scenarios to inspire IR. One conclusion that we find in advance is that perhaps other literary genres, or SF based on different assumptions for a future thinking exercise, would offer other paths for imagination.

But the trilogy opens the possibility to imagine a pessimistic future – a scenario where we persistently tread the same path and make similar choices. It portrays a narrative of anarchy, power struggles, and widespread distrust among entities on a cosmic scale. Moreover, the trilogy suggests a tendency to seek a return to a previous state of stability rather than contemplating a more positive future that embraces cooperation among various species. The revelation that Earth is not the sole inhabited planet fails to instigate any significant shift in the conceptualization of the interaction between humans and non humans. While the trilogy may not serve as an inspiration for a brighter future, it does inspire contemplation on the implications of persisting in established patterns of behaviour.

The Three-Body Problem trilogy: remembrance of the Anthropocene?

The first book of the Three-Body trilogy was published in China in 2008. The English version appeared in 2014, and the first book in Portuguese is from 2016. According to Dyson (2019: 2), Western scholarship did not engage with the three-body work until he won the 2015 Hugo Award for the trilogy’s first book. For Imbach (2021: 125), Liu’s work gave leverage to Chinese SF and portrayed China as a new centre in terms of technological modernity. Imbach interprets Chinese SF success as an important alliance between two narratives: technological development and a ‘green future’ to promote ecological civilization.

‘Liu Cixin’s works reflect how environmental issues are increasingly added into this calculus of development and resonate with the Chinese state’s promotion of “ecological civilization” as a tool for the harmonization of environmental protection with GDP growth’ (Imbach 2021). Liu’s work reproduces, in this sense, China’s green rhetoric, which projects a technological future that offers us a specific perspective from a country that claims to be part of the Global South – one in which China can ‘correct’ (green) the development route but does not break it.

Next, we briefly introduce each book’s main idea and present gripping issues from each work to dialogue with the Anthropocene within IR scholarship.

The Three-Body Problem: the limits of positivism

The first book starts in the period of Mao’s revolution. Ye Wenjie is an astrophysicist working on the Red Coast – a secret government project involving sound waves that gathers a small group of astrophysicists, military personnel, and engineers intending to establish contact with extraterrestrial life. Ye secretly sends an interstellar message and receives an answer years later: it was a warning from an alien of the Planet Trisolaris telling Ye not to message back. Otherwise, the inhabitants of Trisolaris would find and invade Earth.

Trisolaris is an alien civilization from a planet with three stars in random motion, resulting in very unstable environmental conditions. The alien seems interested in preserving the Earth – casually, he is as disillusioned as her about his own people. But Ye responds to the message, aiming that the aliens come to change things. The possible alien attack is the starting point for Cixin Liu to develop a scenario in which the characters (and humanity) react to and deal with this existential threat differently during the following centuries. While some characters see the attack (and humanity’s extermination) as a fatality that will happen in four centuries with no opportunity for resistance, others consider it a good opportunity to change current conditions on Earth (for example, the movement that gathers radical environmentalists, including Ye, frustrated with humanity that decides to cooperate with the alien invaders). The ones involved with military forces and scientists want to resist, either to reestablish the previous order (as Luo Ji defence of balance of power between humanity and the Trisolarans) or even to surpass the threat and benefit with technological advances (for example, with cryogenic technology and the possibility to hibernate in periods of crisis and wake up after technological advance).

A virtual-reality video game, the Three Body game, introduces the Trisolarian world to Wang Miao, a nanotechnology professor, and to the readers. The game scenario is a planet with three suns in random orbit that produces a random climate (with extremely hot or cold weather). This instability forms stable and chaotic eras, and the game’s objective is that players discover a way to predict stable eras that could allow the Trisolaran society to flourish. The game shows the Trisolarans’ plan to invade the Earth.

Context becomes more challenging as humanity has to find a way to deal with this threat without being able to boost scientific and technological advances to create forms of resistance because the Trisolarans have sent sophons to the Earth to stop scientific development and allow a Trisolaran invasion without reaction. Sophons are subatomic particles – two hydrogen nuclei (protons) that can unfold in multiple dimensions at the micro level.

This is the Trisolaris world - an interchange between stable and chaotic eras. They cannot predict how long each era will endure and identify some patterns of the three suns’ alignment and their consequences. Interestingly, the absence of stability was not a barrier to technological development and accumulation in Trisolaris. Liu depicts Trisolarans as beings who master crio-engineering, nano-technology and can control subatomic particles, but are tired of having to be revived after chaotic eras. Therefore, they plan to move away to another planet.

Liu draws a picture, both in empirical and epistemological terms, illustrating the limits of the positivist paradigms. A group of Chinese scientists, organized under the title ‘Frontiers of Science,’ discusses the stagnation of scientific development worldwide. They question whether concepts like order, equilibrium, stability, and the accumulation of scientific knowledge are truly permanent. This leads them to consider that the fundamental nature of matter might actually be characterized by a lack of general laws, suggesting that order and stability are only temporary states. They realize that increasing complexity challenges the ability to establish new general laws in clear and straightforward formulations within an ever more complex world.

Liu uses a positivist perspective of science to depict the world and its survival challenge in the Three-body Problem trilogy. In the novels, science development rests on ‘law-like generalizations’ (Jackson 2011: 3-7), and the characters rely solely on scientific and technological solutions. The interactions between humans and Trisolarans reflect a perspective rooted mainly in hard science regarding the social world, aligning with the argument of King, Keohane, and Verba (1994), for example. These scholars contend that certain methodologies from the ‘hard’ sciences can be successfully applied to the study of social sciences. As the debate in IR that succeeded, and Pereira (2017 and 2021) now summarizes, IR is heavily based on rationalist thinking that assesses reality under closed-system premises.

Science on Earth is depicted as based on permanent laws that explain reality. We come to understand that the fundamental assumption of scientific development is questioned as a consequence of the sophons sent to Earth. The answer to the external enemy remains scientific development through a concert of the most powerful national states¹. There is a collective effort to develop a space fleet, innovative military strategy, and weapons to face the alien invasion through a new cosmology, called cosmic sociology. On an epistemological account, the debate around science that Cixin Liu presents misses the opportunity to think about humanity’s survival through a different perspective from the Anthropocene. Stability and knowledge accumulation refer to society’s development and survival. In Liu’s picture of the world, humanity’s survival is conditioned to scientific development and the role of Western great powers plus China.

Based on an anthropocentric perspective, the trilogy does not address more than superficially how humanity was already in danger due to current living patterns and environmental degradation. The main character, Ye Wenjie, read Rachel Carlson’s Silent Spring, and environmental degradation was one of the sources of her pessimistic account of humanity (Dyson 2019). Also, Pan Han, one member of the Frontier of Science, is a sceptical representative of technological progress. For him, there are harmful and good technologies. The former (fossil fuels and nuclear energy) are equivalent to a social disease and results in society’s demise. Good technology (solar and hydroelectric energy) in smaller scale use would lead to a new concept of society (Liu 2016: 72). Mike Evans is a stiff environmentalist with an optimistic perspective about the contact with Trisolarans to reform human civilization and reestablish Earth as a pure, prosperous and harmonious world (Liu 2016: 255). Nevertheless, environmental issues are no more than a background.

As Western readers of a translation, we must acknowledge that some allusions to Chinese history – Mo Zi, King Wen de Zhou, Shang dynasty – are not fully understood in this context. However, we note that scientific development in the three-body game is closely related to Western references, bringing Western characters and reproducing a positivist perspective of the world.

The relational perspective put forward by the Anthropocene does not find a place in Liu’s imagination of the world’s future. Firstly, the narrative is based on well-known concepts and categories, like scientific and technological fixes, great powers, enemies, balance of power, and war. This results in a mainstream account of threats and destruction, reproducing a zero-sum game logic that misses current complexities. One of the missing complexities is the possibility of a relational account of humans and Trisolarans. This is unsurprising, considering our current limitation regarding entanglements between humans and non-human species. Another example is the notion of the new ‘cosmic sociology’ developed in the story, which reproduces an anthropocentric perspective based on a limited cognition about the universe, its history, and its structure.

Both civilizations – humans and Trisolarans – face a similar challenge: survival. However, the source of the threat is different. The catastrophic scenario for humanity differs from Trisolaris in that the chaotic dynamic is not due to stars’ (non-)alignment but to a complex interaction of degraded Earth systems, for which current scientific knowledge cannot completely model and explain. Knowledge co-production, the dialogue between multiple knowledges, and transdisciplinarity are still sidelined as possible solutions for Earth’s catastrophic scenario.

The Dark Forest: the limits of cooperative action

The trilogy’s second book (Liu 2017) deals with the alien attack as a threat to humanity, and China is positioned as a central actor to lead the battle and develop technological solutions, as the United Nations Planetary Defense Council faces well-known governance difficulties and power disputes. The author develops the dark forest theory, according to which the universe is a battlefield. Considering that resources are limited and that every group in the universe seeks self-preservation and eliminates potential rivals, we humans were safe until now because we were small, quiet, and inoffensive. And it is the threat of ‘exposure’ that humans use to dissuade – at least for a while – the Trisolarans from invading Earth. The mutually assured destruction logic is transposed to a ‘universal’ board, and the human factor (will the person in charge of pressing the button make the right decision at the right time?) is decisive to the result.

After the failure of the deterrence strategy, the Trisolarans invaded Earth for colonization and planned a human settlement in Australia (Liu 2019). The concentration camp is described as very precarious, leading to starvation and the drastic reduction of the human population. The Trisolaran’s colonization is interrupted by the destruction of one of their three suns – which would indicate that other aliens are near, and they decide to leave Earth. Humans also leave the planet and move to recently built spaceship cities. Living in space, humanity discovers that the Dark Forest is a constant challenge to survival.

The second book allows us to consider how the political and institutional structures imagined by Liu impacted the characters’ reactions and the story’s outcomes. As stressed above, the author’s perspective seems inspired by a neorealist explanation of the international system (Waltz 1979; Dyson 2019), in which anarchy plays a central role in determining actors’ behaviour, leaving very little space for change. The international order is a scenario ruled by structural forces that subscribe political practices.

In Waltz’s theory, three images are used to represent international relations. The first image – the individual level – refers to the selfish and aggressive human nature; the second image refers to the internal political-economic structure of States, and the third image relates to the uncontainable anarchical characteristic of the international system (Dyson 2019: 7) as the permissive cause of wars. The influence of the anarchical environment (the third image) defines rational actors’ behaviour:

[A] self-help system is one in which those who do not help themselves, or who do less effectively than others, will fail to prosper, will lay themselves open to dangers, will suffer. Fear of such unintended consequences stimulates states to behave in what is called ‘balances of power.’ (Waltz 1979: 118)

To Waltz, the international system’s anarchy defines States’ self-help behaviour for survival and expansion. Cooperation efforts (treaties, institutions) are fragile and illogical in a long-term perspective. This comprehension of the international system as anarchical is relevant at different moments of Liu’s narrative, presenting a specific perspective of the role of institutions.

One is when humanity first contacts aliens (Liu 2016). Ye Wenjie contact only occurs because the Chinese government was involved in a scientific race with other countries to guarantee which country would lead spatial science. The Chinese government created the Red Coast secret base and invested in this technology, allowing the country to lead, at least at first, in inter-spatial relations. In the narrative, China is a powerful State, and technology is a central element for power projection. The consequences of the contact could mean human annihilation, but the rational logic of State competition resulted in investing in non-cooperative efforts of technology development. Furthermore, when humanity became aware of the Trisolaran menace of invasion, States had difficulty trusting each other to cooperate and find common solutions. The United Nations’ efforts and measures are fragile and depend on the States’ interests (Liu 2016, 2017).

In the same non-cooperative way nation-states are currently facing the challenges of the Anthropocene and the threats to the continuity of life on Earth for several species, including humans, Liu presents a first contact with non-Earth beings as a threat to humanity’s survival. Similarly to how we are (not) reacting to Earth System changes, international institutions forged in the Holocene limited possibilities of alternative answers (Pereira 2017). Furthermore, lack of trust and competition were the predominant patterns when dealing with Trisolarian’s invasion. Perhaps, the depiction of rational States moved by competition in Liu’s SF reflects a limitation of the genre, whereas fables, for example, Ling’s Sihar and Shenya Daoist tale (Ling 2014), inspire to think beyond dichotomies, focusing on pairing and mutual transformation.

The perspective of the anarchical system is also evident in the trilogy when the ‘cosmic sociology’ is presented – “a theory of the interstellar system legible to IR scholars as the transfer of neorealist thought to outer space” (Dyson 2019: 11). According to cosmic sociology, the universe is inhabited by numerous civilizations that have to compete for limited resources since matter remains constant. Thus, competition (a zero-sum game) is a central element in the face of a typical challenge (survival), and the rational behaviour is to hide from or destroy other civilizations.

Following that logic, humans’ defensive strategy is to establish a ‘mutually assured destruction’ deterrence system. Again, Liu offers us a picture of the universe primarily like traditional IR explains international politics. The universe and its numerous civilizations behave egotistically, competitively, and seek for power as mainstream realist IR ‘describes’ relations among States. But the alien invasion could not only be something to fight against or to deal with by increasing power or by technological fixes to control it. It could also alter the contours of human life, our comprehension of the meaning of life, and our place in the universe. In this sense, as the Anthropocene (Simangan 2020), the alien contact challenges our closed-systemic thinking pattern, forcing us to face the complexity of humans and nature, and human-non-human interactions.

Death’s End: the limits of anthropocentrism

In Liu’s trilogy, the laws of physics are challenged sophisticatedly: the universe is going through different phases of more extensive and reduced dimensions. In this sense, the three-dimensional perspective (and their physical consequences, including the speed of light) results from a sequence of dimension reductions, as developed in the trilogy’s third book. The universe moves in eternal cycles of expansion, collapse, and rebirth – the last is the Garden of Eden (Liu 2019), which has multiple dimensions. In this sense, the end of the universe may be imagined as a booster to another, more beautiful and complex, new possibility.

Death’s End is certainly the book of the trilogy in which a non-anthropocentric view is more elaborated and has more consequences to the narrative. Though humans are the main characters, things do not always happen in relation to them. Actually, time is reframed in the novel: people can hibernate and wake up centuries later. Entire worlds and solar systems can collapse, while people can travel at extraordinary speeds, altering their relationship to time. As pointed out by Liu,

We know that there is no absolute space or time, that the space-time continuum, matter, and motion are but taken from the same lump of cosmic clay. We also know that on the microscopic scale, causality does not exist in the everyday sense, leaving us with quantum probability and throwing causality in the macro-world into doubt. In mainstream literature, however, little has changed; its world remains pre-Newtonian, perhaps even pre-Copernican or pre-Ptolemaic. (2013)

Liu’s critique is directed at literature. But it works as an important challenge for imagining the consequences of the Anthropocene and reflecting on how we relate to time when planning reactions and responses to the earth system changes we face.

This focus shifts from us to others – to the universe – and can relate to the debate on morality versus immorality. The neorealist explanation of IR rests on the assumption that rational actors should not have their actions judged by a moral perspective. The international system, by consequence, cannot be interpreted from a moral perspective. The anarchical functioning of the international system is immoral. As previously mentioned, the Dark Forest and cosmic sociology result from an immoral universe that constrains the Earth and alien civilizations’ behaviour until the end.

In Death’s End, the author tells us that the universe initially had eleven dimensions (it was a timeless and endless paradise!), but it was lowered down until it got to three dimensions (our solar system) because of cosmic wars. In this regard, the trilogy reproduces the same structural constraints to collective action to preserve common goods and puts those who try to act morally as naive and powerless. For example, the Trisolarian who intercepted the first contact and tried to warn about the danger of communicating the Earth’s location differed from others of his species, as he seemed to care about others. But his action did not change the course of things.

In the end, morality rested with very few characters – giving hope that altruism, sensibility, and the disposition to avoid doing harm can be expected – even in the coldest moments. Cheng Xin, in two very important moments, shows a strong sense of morality. She ends up becoming the Swordholder – responsible for activating the MAD system. When the time comes, and the Trisolarian invasion is confirmed, she is responsible for pressing the button to ensure they would also be destroyed. But she didn’t, and the Earth is condemned.

The other moment is when Cheng Xin and Guan Yifan, the two only living humans in the universe, decide to leave their shelter and throw themselves to the mass universe to allow it to reset and maybe start over again in a cyclical movement. They are unsure if other beings in other shelters will also do it. The reset movement will only occur if all the mass returns to the universe. They make a moral choice. A choice that represents hope.

In the trilogy, we come to discover that the universe’s current state is a result of warlike dynamics. Why has an entangled/relational perspective never found a place within all species? Liu’s denouement rests on a fresh start. However, as a complex system, the universe would not reach the same previous state of equilibrium. A more chaotic state of things could ensue. Within this new state of the matter, could civilizations – either humans or Trisolarans – escape positivists and individual-centred accounts of reality? Could an entangled perspective surpass an endangered one, fostering order within the anarchic universe through more equitable living conditions for all?

If not an inspirational future, are there lessons for the present?

Trisolarans will arrive hundreds of years ahead. Less than a century after the first contact, humanity’s survival conditions in ‘spaceship Earth’ are already under threat. Then, one question ensues, considering that Trisolarans expect Holocene conditions on Earth, but they will arrive in the Anthropocene epoch: so when they do, what will be the conditions for survival on Earth? Why cannot humans and Trisolarans cooperate to save ‘spaceship Earth’ for both civilizations?

In Liu’s depiction of humanity’s scientific development stagnation, followed by Anthropocene’s challenges, future imagination is the proposition of a restart through collective action in the face of imminent doom for human civilization. In our account, the conjunction of science fiction and the Anthropocene drivers offers relevant insights, scenarios, and lessons for innovative imagination and anticipation within the Anthropocene reality.

Firstly, the future of humanity in the Anthropocene is necessarily a collective effort. Even though there is scholarship that indicates the action of ‘climate clubs’ with a concert of the most powerful and impactful, the current situation of dangerous climate change and the inequality of its impacts reaffirms the necessity of collective action.

Secondly, governance elements, either formal or informal, need critical scrutiny. Normative considerations, usually unassessed, need to overcome the shadow of technocratic fixes. The human and non-human elements (meaning all living species) must come first. In this matter, efforts for epistemic justice gain leverage. There is a growing work around non-human agency, interdisciplinary efforts, and the co-production of scientific, traditional, and indigenous knowledges to face the Anthropocene (Inoue, Ribeiro and Resende 2020).

If our current survival conditions were an issue in the trilogy, how would the problem of survival be framed? Making a parallel with the Anthropocene, we can think of some possible scenarios: the first is that since humanity is doomed, no action is needed to face the invasion. Perhaps that is our current status on Earth. In the face of doom in the Anthropocene and an alien invasion, humans need two major technological breakthroughs: one to face environmental catastrophe – an action from within – and the other to face an outside threat. It can be too much for humanity.

The second scenario is that by reporting how bad living conditions actually are on Earth, would Trisolarans look for other places to invade? Through a relational perspective that works on cooperative efforts, instead of establishing zero-sum conditions with humans – only one civilization can survive, humans and Trisolarans could find a solution based on sufficiency for humans and non-humans? This is a utopian perspective, considering that humanity has not yet established such a relationship with non-human entities within the Earth system.

Another possibility would be to invest heavily in the escapist solution: rich people escape a ruined and poor Earth to live in a comfortable spaceship that reproduces previous life on the planet. This is a temporary solution from Liu’s perspective since third parties are out there and could chase either humans or Trisolarans.

Can institutions and solutions crafted on one planet and through one cosmology coordinate actions and actors in an unknown environment toward multiple civilizations’ survival? According to Cixin Liu, the answer is no.

One lesson from the trilogy is that the world’s end from the Global South perspective is not necessarily a disruptive perspective. As researchers from the Global South, our expectations with the trilogy were alternative propositions with ontological and epistemological implications. Nevertheless, the trilogy offers a state-centric, competitive, and warlike picture. It reproduces a Western and anthropocentric image of international society and of human and non-human interactions. Also, current civilizational challenges posed by the Anthropocene are addressed marginally through mainstream arguments (therefore, as non-issues).

Accordingly, the depiction of China as a mainstream power reinforces the underrepresentation of the Global South. From our standpoint, China is detached from the Global South. At the same time, Africa and Latin America, for instance, are absent from the narrative or as part of the global concert for humanity’s protection. The Global South is not part of the solution and remains in the inequality debate, which is presented superficially.

When humanity faces a threat with disruptive consequences, Cixin Liu’s depiction of the world rests still on the concert of a few that decides for the many, not only in the same generation but many generations ahead. The decision to save human civilization also rests in individual decisions in an even more scattered context.

Another lesson involves limits and sufficiency, and the persecution of evolution as a legitimation for the investment in technological advances. For example, Alexander and Rutherford (2020: 232) question the technological optimism to address environmental justice matters. For them, it is not possible to solve major social and environmental problems without changing the ‘nature of the Western-style,’ based on economic growth patterns. Instead, sufficiency could be an alternative paradigm for change. ‘Humanity,’ as portrayed in part of the Anthropocene scholarship, should be problematized. Histories, geographies, race, gender, wealth, and power disparities significantly affect global environmental change’s underlying drivers and consequences (Haraway 2015 and Harrington 2016).

The technological fix argument foresees questions such as: is the search for life outside Earth a position of growth beyond barriers? Can we assume that if the search for an outer world had not happened, the logic of the dark forest would have protected humanity, paralleling a sufficiency argument? Could a sufficiency argument be the base for inter-civilizational cooperation? Could the change of a paradigm result in a different interspecies relationship? This reflection has practical implications for the current state of humans and human and non-human relations on Earth.

Final remarks

Through an intertextual debate around Anthropocene impacts in the IR discipline and insights from Cixin Liu, we presented how each book in the trilogy inspired parallels between challenges of different orders within the Anthropocene debate and how humanity engaged with a civilizational threat from an alien invasion. Our aim was to encourage reflection through more questions instead of directly associating with a specific IR discipline’s scholarship.

The first book in the trilogy invites for reflection about contact with alien intelligence – a contact with the other that is different from oneself. Such a contact is uncertain and can happen at any time. However, this possibility impacts the existing civilization. In the case of humans and Trisolarans, they both think that their society is bad, and that the foreigner is potentially better. As Dyson (2019) puts it, it is a malevolent nature of both civilizations.

How do we depart from Holocene patterns and face the Anthropocene’s changing conditions, with multiple actors (human and non-human) to craft novel solutions? The final solution is collective action without information (a prisoner’s dilemma). What expectations can we have that humanity can work for its own survival without complete information?

The pessimistic anticipation is a direct invitation to think in more critical and normative means about the current path, structure, and references of humanity. The Anthropocene debate within the discipline offers a prolific contextual condition. As such, is stability a permanent condition for humans? What are we doing about it? Do we expect to restore Holocene patterns, or is humanity capable of imagining and working for a new state of things, maybe rooted in instability? What drivers steer us toward this kind of thinking?

Following a known path will lead to a known result. The trilogy’s ending points to the limits of the current perspective, as the world ends after a pessimistic imagination for the future of humanity. It misses the opportunity to address speculation about time, the indeterminacy of the future together with the fragility of human existence, and to incite a profound imagination of the future that departs from current relationship patterns with the ‘other.’

What could have gone differently if the trilogy had been crafted within the Anthropocene framework? Many other questions follow: will there be a safe space for operation to fight for when Trisolarans arrive? Will a focus on security as it is save humanity? Are we doomed by our own terms, problem-framing, and limited solutions? Are the many civilizations out there doomed, and a new fresh start is the only possibility for the universe? Does humanity need a ‘new plan B’ or a new Big-Bang?

Notes

• 1
  1Although we are considering China as part of the Global South, Liu depicts the country as a superpower on equal grounds with European and North American powers (or Global North powers). This is representative of a sometimes ambiguous position of China in the international scenario.

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  16 Dec 2024
• Date of issue
  Sep/Dec 2024

History

• Received
  20 June 2022
• Accepted
  8 May 2024