sorry por copiar pegar, pero no tengo tiempo de traducir:
During the
Cultural Revolution in China, Ye Wenjie, an astrophysics alumna from
Tsinghua University, witnesses her father being beaten to death by
Red Guards from
Tsinghua High School, while the beating was supported by Ye's mother and younger sister. Ye is officially branded a traitor and is forced to join a labor brigade in
Inner Mongolia, where she befriends a government journalist who recently read
Silent Spring, and who wishes to write a letter to the central government containing policy suggestions based on the book. When the central government responds, viewing the letter as an act of sedition, the journalist betrays Ye, who helped to transcribe the draft, and Ye is set to enter prison. However, she is rescued at the last minute by Yang Weining and Lei Zhicheng, two military physicists working under Red Coast (a Chinese initiative for alien communication similar to
SETI) who require Ye's skills in physics. Ye discovers the possibility of amplifying outgoing radio messages by bouncing them off the sun and sends a message. Eight years later, by now in a loveless marriage with Yang, Ye receives a message from a concerned alien pacifist from the planet Trisolaris, warning her not to respond or else the inhabitants of Trisolaris will locate and invade Earth. The alien proceeds to describe Trisolaris's environmental conditions and societal history. Ye, who has come to despise humankind, responds anyway, inviting them to come to Earth to settle its problems. Ye murders her husband, Yang, along with Lei to keep the alien message a secret.
Some time later, with the closing of the Cultural Revolution and Ye's return to Tsinghua as a professor, Ye encounters Mike Evans, the son of the CEO of the world's largest oil company, who is also a rabid environmentalist and a believer in the idea that
all species are equal. Seeing that Evans is also direly angry at humanity, Ye confides to him the events at Red Coast. Evans uses his fortune to hire men and to purchase a giant ship, which he converts into a mobile colony and listening post. Upon receiving messages from Trisolaris, thereby validating Ye's story, Evans announces the creation of the militant and semisecret Earth-Trisolaris Organization (ETO) as a
fifth column for Trisolaris and appoints Ye as the leader. According to the messages, the Trisolaran invasion force has departed, but will not reach Earth for 450 years, as they are traveling at 1/100-th of
lightspeed. The society attracts numerous scientists, minor government officials, and other educated people who are disappointed with world affairs. They go on to assemble a private army and even to build
small nuclear weapons. However, Evans retains control of most resources and starts to alter and withhold alien messages from Ye and others. Furthermore, the society splits into factions, with the Adventists, led by Evans, seeking complete destruction of humanity by the Trisolarans, and the Redemptionists, led by Shen, seeking to help the Trisolarans to find a computational solution to the
three-body problem, which plagues their home planet. A third, smaller faction, the Survivors, consisting mostly of Chinese people, intend to help the Trisolarans in exchange for their own descendants' lives while the rest of humanity dies.
In the present day, Wang Miao, a nanotechnology professor, is asked to work with Shi Qiang, a cunning detective, to investigate the mysterious deaths of several scientists. The two of them notice that the world's governments are communicating closely with each other, and seem to be gearing up for war. Over the next few days, Wang experiences strange hallucinatory effects. Wang sees people playing a sophisticated
virtual-reality video game called Three Body (which was created by the ETO as a recruitment tool) and begins to play himself. The video game portrays a planet whose climate randomly flips between Orderly and Chaotic Eras. During Chaotic Eras, the weather oscillates unpredictably between extreme cold and extreme heat, sometimes within minutes. Once in a while, the heat rises so much that a
firestorm occurs and all civilization is reduced to ashes, or the climate becomes too cold for civilization to continue developing, as heralded by the presence of "three flying stars." The inhabitants (who are represented as having human bodies) struggle to develop their society and find means to predict the climate. Unlike humans, they have evolved the special ability to drain themselves of water, turning into a roll of canvas, in order to lie dormant when the Chaotic Eras occur. Characters resembling
Aristotle,
Mozi,
Newton, and others try and fail to model the climate. Wang wins acclaim by figuring out how the climate works: (1) the planet Trisolaris has three suns, (2) the suns have different kinds of atmospheres, and when they are far away from the planet's surface, they no longer function as sources of heat and appear in the sky as stars, (3) Orderly Eras occur when two suns are far away, and Trisolaris orbits the third, (4) Chaotic Eras occur when Trisolaris is pulled by more than one sun, (5) firestorms happen when two or three suns are close to the planet's surface, (6) seeing three flying stars causes intense cold because it means all three suns are far away, and (7) if the three suns ever line up, Trisolaris will plunge into the nearest one and be consumed.
Wang is inducted into the ETO, and informs Shi, leading to a battle between the
PLA and the society's soldiers, and the arrest of Ye. The PLA works with the Americans, led by Colonel Stanton, to ambush Evans's ship, following Shi's suggestion of cutting apart the ship and massacring the entire crew using nano-material blades, to stop them from burning their data. From the data, some new revelations emerge. For one, the aliens have extremely advanced picotechnology which allows them to create eleven-dimensional supercomputers called sophons which, when viewed in three dimensions, only occupy the volume of a
proton. For another, two of these sophons have been laboriously manufactured and sent to Earth, having the power to cause hallucinations, spy on any corner of the Earth, transmit the information gathered to Trisolaris using
quantum entanglement, and disrupt all of Earth's
particle accelerators. The Trisolarans reason that, with particle physics being the bottleneck of science, shutting down the accelerators will paralyze Earth's technological advancement for the next 400 or more years before the Trisolarans arrive. Ye, now in custody, is allowed to visit the old Red Coast base, and reflects upon her past choices, noting that humanity from now on will never be the same.
... Me gusó más el argumento de Musk.
