Now even more baffled, Wang logs on to the Three-Body website. Shen correctly informs Wang that if he stops working on nanomaterials, the countdown will cease.

At Shen’s house, Wang meets her husband Wei Cheng he also notices that Shen is playing a virtual reality game called Three-Body. In search of answers, Wang visits Shen Yufei, the physicist who introduced him to the Frontiers of Science. At first, Wang believes he is hallucinating, but gradually he realizes that the numbers he is seeing really do exist-he just has no clue what happens at the end of the countdown. The next day, Wang begins to see an inexplicable countdown behind his eyelids. After being pushed by a rude police officer named Shi Qiang-and after learning that a respected physicist called Yang Dong has taken her own life-Wang agrees to join the Frontiers as a spy. Though the nature of the danger remains unclear, it has something to do with a rash of recent suicides in the scientific community. To his surprise, he learns that all of the nations of the world are working together to fend off some outside threat. Soon after, Wang is summoned to China’s Battle Command Center. Wang Miao, an expert in a brand-new technology known as nanomaterial, has recently received an invitation to join a secretive group called the Frontiers of Science. Yang explains that if Ye works as a researcher on Radar Peak, she will be spared punishment-but once she enters the military base, she can never leave it. At Red Coast, scientist Yang Weining, one of Ye’s father’s former students, greets her. The peak, named for the giant antenna on top of it, is home to the Red Coast military base. Ye expects to be tortured for the letter, but to her surprise, she instead is brought to a mysterious mountain called Radar Peak. However, the letter backfires, drawing the government’s ire, and a panicked Bai frames Ye for the entire thing. Bai wants to write to the Chinese government and urge them to slow the rate of their deforestation, and Ye offers to transcribe the letter for him. When she befriends reporter Bai Mulin, Ye learns that humans are rapidly destroying Earth’s environment. Her father, a theoretical physics professor named Ye Zhetai, has been tortured to death for his allegedly anti-Communist beliefs, and her mother, Shao Lin, was among his torturers.Ī few years later, Ye Wenjie has been sent to a Mongolian labor camp, where she spends her days cutting down trees. It’s the height of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and for college student Ye Wenjie, the world is falling apart.

The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin