The formal name of the trilogy is “Remembrance of Earth’s past”. While brilliantly imaginative, there is a nagging issue for those who read AC Clarke: the plasma from the cannon would need to be travelling at earth escape velocity, more than 11 km a second. His imagination is fleshed out with the precision of a power engineer, which was his first profession. “The Wandering Earth”, for example, involves the world government using enormous plasma cannons to propel the planet out of range of the sun, which is about to become a red giant. Readers are invariably startled by his imaginative scope. Clarke as a major influence, so many of the themes in his novels could equally well be written by this Brit or an American. Liú Cíxīn is a nine-time winner of the Galaxy Award, China’s most prestigious literary science fiction prize. Their surveillance devices are already here and their fleet will arrive in 400 years’ time. They are looking for a new planet and have chosen Earth. Their evolution has forced them to be extremely resilient because of the planet’s erratic orbit, but now they realise the planet will be drawn into one of the suns. Very intelligent aliens originate on a planet in an unstable three-star system, so they are called the Trisolarians. The actual problem for all people of Earth is even more challenging. The ‘Three-Body Problem’ is a difficult to solve mathematical puzzle left for us by Isaac Newton.
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