The Three Body Problem and The Fairy Tales of Yun Tianming

The Straussian Tale of Our Century

I’m taking a break from the Girardian Isekai Series because … I have changed my conclusions. A bit disappointing in the middle of the essay for sure, but I’ve changed them quite drastically. But you can expect those ideas to be revisited in the future. In the meantime, I’ll start publishing the next series on the Three Body Problem Trilogy.

Do you like hidden knowledge? Let’s find some hidden knowledge. Philosopher Leo Strauss believed that great writers hid an esoteric message in their writing — a secret message only accessible to those who spent time with the text, or were more generally knowledgeable and competent. 

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Joseph Walker asked what the best Straussian work of the last two centuries is. My answer is the three fairy tales halfway through Death’s End, the third book of Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem Trilogy (Akshually, the Rememberance of Earth’s Past Trilogy). It functions as an allegorical tale both for the in-universe scientific discoveries in the second half of the book and for a striking narrative about the decline of civilizations. 

These tales are an example of in-universe Straussianism. They are used to communicate a secret message between characters in the story. However, even a cursory glance at these tales reveal extremely prescient critiques of modern Chinese culture and governance, if you’re not occupied with looking for clues about alien physics. 

The whole book has broad themes around complacency and feminization. I think Liu Cixin hides his most specific and important critiques in characteristic Straussian form. I recommend reading all three fairy tales. They’re only 38 pages in total and read well even out of context.

The Fairy Tales of Yun Tianming

The third book, Death’s End, shows a cycle of hope and despair in which humanity is repeatedly saved by individual geniuses and doomed by social consensus. Early on in this cycle, Yun Tianming, on his deathbed, was chosen to have his brain transported to an alien civilization. These aliens regenerated his body and took him in as an ambassador of sorts. He was allowed to communicate a single time with his college friend and main protagonist of the story, Cheng Xin, on the condition that he did not disclose any technological or political secrets. The aliens monitored and carefully filtered this communication. Of course, Yun’s goal was precisely to share these technological secrets. 

It is in this communication that he tells the three fairy tales of Yun Tianming. So already, the in-story purpose of these tales are a Straussian allegory. The interpretation the in-universe characters have is that the Fairy Tales are allegories to technologies the survival of humanity depends on, ultimately revealed to be the following:

1. two-dimensional foils, a form of alien weapon of mass destruction capable of unstoppable destruction of solar systems

2. curvature propulsion, the way of achieving faster-than-light travel

3. “slow fog”, or the trails of reduced lightspeed caused by curvature propulsion, also used by aliens to signal benevolence to other alien species

We should expect that for us, the most important revelations are political, rather than technological. If you have a truly unhinged interpretation, it’s possible to argue that this is even true in-universe, despite the technological clues.

Now that I’ve told you what the technological allegories are, go and re-read the fairy tales again with an eye for something similar in the political. 

The Evil of Character Assassination

The fairy tale takes place in the Storyless Kingdom, with a few characters and many objects from  He’ershingenmosiken. Let’s call them China and America for short. This parallel is made even more glaring in the second tale, so just trust me for now.

Yun’s first fairy tale tells the story of the royal painter. In China, there’s a succession problem. There are three successors: the gentle Princess Dewdrop, the Cunning Prince Ice Sand, and the mysterious Prince Deep Water, who is trapped in an island until the third tale. 

Ice Sand brings a new royal painter from America, Needle-Eye. When Needle-Eye paints a picture of someone on a special paper imported from America, that person disappears from the real world. In-universe, this is an allegory to the two-dimensional foil, a weapon of mass destruction which uses the laws of physics itself to collapse an area of space into lower-dimensional space, which almost all three-dimensional species cannot survive in. The painting represents the reduction in dimensions. 

Step back from this interpretation and parse this fairy tale from the perspective of our modern day. Needle-Eyes paints a portrait of someone from just a single look, leading to their destruction. What could that be an allegory for? 

In reality, the special type of painting coming from America likely represents the American style of character assassination. It’s a very straightforward analogy, one that would not even need a second thought if we weren’t looking for someone else. Hold this thought until the third tale.

Chinese Reliance on America

The second fairy tale is the only one with a sense of the past.