Three Body Problem

Black and white certainty is so comforting and that is why people turn to fairy tales and physics — like China’s sci-fi flagship: The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, but the more you know about fairy tales and physics, the more you start to feel manipulated by such products and want to know about the motives of those who produce them.

The three body problem in physics is one of those marketing tools used to mystify and enchant students who want access to the higher mysteries and the powerful priests charged with protecting secrets, but if you actually know what it is all about, you can identify how a false puzzle has been created.

The false puzzle is created when the problem is presented as follows:

With two bodies, you can have an analytic solution that predicts the trajectories for an infinite span of time, but with three bodies that isn’t possible and this means that given a set of initial conditions, two bodies have a perfectly predictable trajectory while three bodies do not.

Authors like Liu seem to have exploited confusion over what this means in order to give a sense of philosophical depth and mystery to what is a rather trivial situation.

One sees that the three body problem is a false puzzle when one realizes that idealized trajectories have no real world value in terms of predictive power and are therefore meaningless. When one calculates a two body problem numerically, just as one would calculate a three-body problem, one runs into the exact same problems that the three body problem poses due to the temporal resolution of the simulation. The reason for this is that if you could set the timestep to an infinitely small value in a numerical calculation of the two body problem, you would get the exact same result as the idealized trajectory from the analytic solution.

When we get closer to reality by simulating the grainy, numerical deviations from smooth, analytic perfection, we see the folly of idealizing analytic solutions. They can save computing resources, but they do not have superior predictive power. At their worst, they are like words that mean everything and nothing at the same time.

Liu’s book was first published in English in late 2016 by Head of Zeus, a small publisher whose meteoric rise has been driven by ebook and audiobook sales (all digital products that make money laundering easy) and the CEO, Nick Cheetam has expressed ambitions to become a leader in science fiction publishing. Since they are affiliated with the writing website that seems to be at the nexus of most of the software assisted rehashes of my unacknowledged novel, I want to figure out who they are. I still know nothing.

What I do know is that media outlets responded to the publication by wondering why the English translation of the novel was considerably better than the original story in Chinese. There was also the strange fact of a collaboration between Cxin Liu, the Chinese author and Kenneth Liu, the English author who offered Cxin suggestions for how he could improve the book and Cxin adopted them, essentially rewriting his book a decade after he first published it.

Is this a repeat of the story of Dr. Zhivago? When Dr. Zhivago was published in the US it was turned into a Hollywood movie and given a promotional effort that centers around the narrative that it was denied publication in its native Russia because of censorship and its criticism of the Russian government. The novel then won a Nobel Prize for Literature. Years later, literary scholars, Russian and English alike agree that the reason that the novel wasn’t published in Russia was that it was an absolutely terrible novel. It was extremely long, meandering and unfocused, with no real sense being made. Hollywood had filtered out a love story from the mess and turned it into a marketable product that people might purchase but never read.

If the novel was rewritten by its translator to a large degree, one should be able to figure this out by identifying other scholars who translated the book independently of Kenneth Liu. However, all of the different language editions came out concurrently with the English version in December 2016, suggesting a very tight or automated pipeline of production, so given the collaboration between Cxin and Kenneth in rewriting the original Chinese version, I would find it unusual if the concurrent German translation by Martina Hasse was from the original Chinese under these conditions.

Kenny Liu is a name that is strangely familiar to me as that of a guy who spent an entire semester of college without wearing shoes around campus. It was an experiment, he said. He'd been a physics major who dropped out and I later saw him in Palo Alto where he was wearing shoes.

I only know that Three Body Problem’s flagship author (Liu) was condemned in the media for being pro-genocide and that while his book got lots of public accolades and a Netflix series, the people who actually read it don’t seem to like it:

What bothered me was that the logic in their conversations was really lacking – I often wondered: “how on earth did you go from the previous sentence to this one? It doesn’t make sense!” For example: after Ding Yi and Wang Miao played pool in Ding’s residence and moving the pool table around, Ding told Wang that he encountered a problem where where something unexplainably different happened every time the ball was hit. He then exclaimed: this means Physics doesn’t exist! I thought: Woa! How did we get here? Are you really a scientist?! Any decent scientist would not just say “because I don’t know what’s going on and this is weird, it can only mean science doesn’t exist!” Another example: Da Shi and Wang Miao were looking at locusts when Da Shi claimed: humans have tried to get rid of bugs forever but the bugs are still around. So Trisolarans can’t get rid of us, even though they think we’re just like bugs. How is that even comparable, when human beings never put in any real efforts to destroy an entire species of animals (unless we are talking about some diseases that are practically eradicated by vaccines)? If one day humans just decide to kill off all cheetahs, or llamas, or penguins, we probably can. Besides the problem of logic in conversations, there are problems with the logic behind some stuff in the story – like the human computer. Well, how many human errors could 30 million people produce? Let’s say probably more than just a few.

https://www.quora.com/What-do-you-think-of-the-Three-Body-Problem-written-by-Cixin-Liu?q=three%20body%20proble

At least this was the impression I saw on Quora back in 2021 when I first started this blog post. Since then, an army of marketing goons have descended on Quora to drown out the authentic reactions with their over-the-top, effusive praise.

It is claimed that Liu’s book was originally published in Chinese back in 2006 and first published in English in 2016 by Head of Zeus. My book was written in 2017, but I had not been exposed to Liu’s work and I have since become suspicious of certain groups’ efforts to manipulate the publishing record.

Since I’ve seen so many major online marketing efforts for AI written books that were barely readable, I wondered if Liu’s book was less of a literary masterwork and more of an announcement that China has embraced strategic modification of the publishing and historical record after cracking Abulafia’s book writing code — as in the computer code from Umberto Ecco’s Foucault’s Pendulum.

If this software has been circulating in clandestine circles for years, I wonder why it has been making its way through less regulated channels in recent years. If it is part of a dragnet, it seems like a dangerous way to solve a problem since it is the sort of software I wouldn’t like to see proliferate. Then again, maybe I’m being like William or Adso in Ecco’s The Name of the Rose, a confused witness of something I’m not meant to understand.

Sometimes the only way to hide a crime is to burn down the library. I hope that is not what they decide to do. What a mess.

Once they let the cat out of the bag were they planning to stuff it back in and/or move to some new publishing model?

I haven’t yet purchased a copy of Three Body Problem novel, but the Netflix series just came out in 2024 and prompted me to update this 2021 blog post. The first episode is non-ironically weird in ways that my novel was ironically weird and it doesn’t seem like a story that could have become as popular in China as is claimed. In fact, once the Chinese state media apparatus became aware of the supposedly famous novel and the Netflix series which is banned for distribution in China, they condemned it as being stupid, racist, and anti-China.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3257378/chinese-state-media-accuse-netflix-series-3-body-problem-pushing-american-cultural-hegemony

I disapprove of seeding conflict, but it seems that certain groups do that as a profession. They have schedules to keep and if the world’s dramas are kept on a tight schedule, the world won’t end… or so they believe. I like planning ahead as much as the next person, but I don’t think that should require corruption of the historical and publishing record.

If it turned out that a foreign group hacked the Chinese publishing system to insert a book into the past, China wouldn’t want to publicize that and anyone who drew attention to it would be endangering world peace. It is a clever way for a criminal group to avoid having their operations outed.

On the other hand, forcing governments to collaborate to fight such an international criminal operation and fortify their non-hackable records could help create world peace. The enemy of a non-hackable record (a library) is a flood of AI generated products and that is why it is important to stem this flood.

There is a story I remember from a time I forgot and it involved an acceleration of the production of media products that defies present day imagination. Series are introduced on media platforms that have AI actors and no discernible story whatsoever, making it difficult to find products that actually convey useful information. In this outcome, what has happened in print journalism and novels that render readers ill-informed and functionally illiterate will happen within the production of movies and tv shows. What each individual sees in the noise becomes a form of madness or a reflection of things they forgot.

I need to do my full, technical analysis of both the series and the book to add them to my data set, so I may as well get started. In the case of The Consultant, I found that the series had a very high level of similarity with my book while the original novel did not. I wonder if this will repeat that pattern or if one will need to find an authentic Chinese person to investigate the publishing history and translation of the novel.

In the chart below, I’ll try to estimate the tv series’ degree of plot overlap with my novel, My Adorable Apotheosis (MAA) and with the novel on which it is based, Three Body Problem (TBP)

title	% plot overlap MAA	% plot overlap TBP
Three Body Problem E1	80%
Three Body Problem E2	60%
Three Body Problem E3	60%
Three Body Problem E4	50%
Three Body Problem E5	40%
Three Body Problem E6	30%
Three Body Problem E7	30%
Three Body Problem E8	30%

The average for the genre is 8% with a standard deviation of 5%.

Three Body Problem E1 (2024) vs. My Adorable Apotheosis (2018) — word count 1050

1. The first episode/chapter is entitled Countdown.
2. The story takes place in a world where religion is discouraged and academic heresy is punished by death. There are public events that kill or humiliate the heretics.
3. A young woman watches in horror as her father is exiled for disagreeing with the system and her mother remains, marrying another. These are the opening events.
4. A woman rejects general relativity as a reasonable explanation and becomes a rebel who hates academics. There are public executions over interpretations of physics theories.
   • I meant for the situation to be deliberately comically absurd, but this show creates history which never happened with people shouting about physics on a platform in front of a mob.
5. A mob attacks academics of the opposing gender and resents their possession of the best jobs.
6. There are roving bands of violent women who target men.
7. We are introduced to a man who was driven mad by physics. The Nobel Prize in physics is mentioned.
8. A particle accelerator is featured. We see the center of a detector hall. A woman is confused about a man who stares at many screens because he wants to predict everything.
9. A physicist is blinded and driven mad after an attempt to make him forget having discovered a pattern that no one wanted acknowledged.
10. Another physicist is upset that he has been studying dead-end theories that have been wrong for the past 60 years.
11. An older mentor insults Einstein’s legacy.
12. A woman who works in a physics lab is disturbed by its rejection of religion. She enters a cathedral like detector hall and almost dies.
13. She’s suicidal because men have all become extremely stupid.
14. A woman visits a bar where she doesn’t fit in with the sparkly, flashy women or connect to the embarrassingly drunk guy who is interested in her. She also isn’t interested in a sparkly lesbian woman. She’s too obsessed with her scientific career and how the results of a particle accelerator don’t make sense. She goes outside to meet with women who are smoking. She has discovered a physics anomaly in a particle accelerator that affects the whole world. Others think there might be a hacker responsible. She uses lots of accelerator jargon. She thinks that what she has seen is insane, Alice in Wonderland crazy. She ignores romantic overtures from a man who loves her and sends her messages in childish handwriting. She doesn’t like that he uses drugs. She feels high while in the bar and hallucinates things. She goes crazy over what she saw at work and thinks she sees a pattern no one else can see. She goes through a countdown to disaster. She gets very stressed out on a train while her madness continues. She is afflicted by a device which can create images directly within her eye. She has only one friend who pretends to be there for her as her symptoms of madness increase. The coworker friend was actually her enemy because she wanted the super handsome guy but the new girl didn’t know it.
15. A person has a hard time sleeping.
16. A woman switches from a regular guy to a super handsome boyfriend after killing off her identity as a tired scientist.
17. People notice when someone gets plastic surgery.
18. Youth extending treatments imply vampirism.
19. We see a cloned woman in various stages of decay or youth.
20. A man stalks a woman scientist and spies on her.
21. A teacher’s students gather and one is noted to have been the professor’s darling.
22. A young woman is barely able to stay awake due to work and is harassed about her sex life by a group of men from work. They either aren’t good looking or they are morally reprehensible. She response with disproportionate hostility.
23. Woman scientist goes out with friends and keeps zoning out (can’t stay awake). She goes outside to smoke and look at the stars. A woman commiserates and offers her a way out of her terror and misery over her job as a scientist. She can become a prostitute. She’s warned to press a red button to stop the count down and that if she doesn’t press it in time, she will die.
24. People get killed for thinking the wrong things at a science lab.
25. She concludes that if she doesn’t want to die, she must quit her job.
26. A woman is encouraged by a spy to become a rebel against a great state project and she refuses to take the bait. She is given a forbidden book to read. She concludes that a return to nature is a path to happiness.
27. A city person is in love with a nature person.
28. She gets in trouble with a military group for meeting with a sexy rebel who offered her forbidden knowledge. She’s taken away from her workplace like a prisoner.
29. She loses her job and is sent to a cold place where she is always hungry and at the mercy of a female ruler who decides tat she isn’t high quality enough to keep on her team. Her parents were considered to be political rebels and they die. She freezes/burns to death. She wakes up being returned to the scientific institute to work on secret research that would preclude her from ever leaving their institute. Her earlier research had condemned her.
30. A person is under surveillance in their home.
31. A family keeps a shrine for the dead sister of the female protagonist.
32. Scientists don’t understand the social or individual purpose of religion.
33. A woman had been given a head set with futuristic VR capabilities people are addicted to VR video games.
34. She’s disturbed by finding a dead/injured bird on the ground.
35. She is upset to learn the true purpose of the large machine she built and operated. It does mind control.
36. She asks for an additional observer to confirm that something weird she expects to happen will really happen. It involves Morse code and something physically impossible delivering a message that is especially for her. She decodes a signal from a mysterious, alien source and confirms that her discovery is observed by another.
37. She is concerned when the military gets involved in the project she is developing.
38. How can a star just disappear is a question that concerns a woman who has been captured and threatened with death. (This was in a companion novelette.)

Three Body Problem E1 (2024) vs. not in My Adorable Apotheosis (2018) — word count 300

1. Mao’s rebels wave their red books while academics are publicly condemned. Men are targeted while women attack and kill.
2. Flash to 2024 in London where a Pakistani physicist killed himself by gouging out his eyes. He had scrawled out a mathematical pattern in blood on his walls, insisting that he could still see.
3. A man laments that he will never be a great scientist since only men who discover something before the age of 30 qualify.
4. A man sings karaoke and a woman hallucinates a countdown. She’s told that her countdown will stop if she quits her job as a scientist. Otherwise, she’ll die. Those who threaten her have a technology that can make the stars disappear from the sky.
5. A man kills scientists and is upset that his ex has an ultra-handsome military boyfriend in attendance while they attend the funeral of a woman who killed herself because her project ended. All accelerators are in danger of being shut down for wasting energy.
6. Flash to the building of the Great Wall/Satellite-Dish and a woman being blamed by a cute guy for cutting down a 400 year old tree to facilitate construction. He’s an environmentalist. She’s arrested but she doesn’t betray him. She refuses to sign a confession that would make her the property of a woman who says she is the only one who can help her. The woman throws a bucket of cold piss on her head and she freezes. She gets a job in a secret science institute and builds a machine that kills birds and broadcasts visions. She’s asked to work on a new project but doesn’t want to do military research.
7. An investigator is looking for an oil magnate who disappeared 42 years earlier. He’s concerned by a new, VR headset that can kill people. He says science is broken and it is a bad time to be a scientist. They are dying and he’s trying to identify the pattern/causes.

Three Body Problem E2 (2024) vs. My Adorable Apotheosis (2018) — word count 600

1. People at the woman’s workplace are abuzz because of the physics anomaly and are discussing causes. She keeps to herself. She persists in doing scientific research that could make her famous, even though it is dangerous to do so. She demonstrates her technique to a large audience while a man warns her people will think she’s crazy.
2. A woman persists in trying to get credit for her research by publishing it. She gives a scientific presentation to an audience that doesn’t believe or understand it. A man presents her idea as his own and is given acclaim for it. The idea threatens their institute with more military oversight. She remains a lowly control room engineer while men are in charge. When they aren’t looking, she does an unsanctioned experiment with the machine.
3. A woman is interested in contacting aliens.
4. A woman is threatened by being trapped in a video game with a strange man.
5. A lonely woman only has an AI friend.
6. People turn into raisins in the sun. People can be preserved in a deathlike state for transport or so that they can live in the future.
7. A woman is abandoned with a child to babysit. It is drained of life by a vampire and she does nothing to protect it.
8. A worldwide scam causes people to rediscover the power of their imaginations, but it causes people to get lost in fantasy worlds.
9. A man tries to help the woman scientist who is about to lose her job after making a discovery, but she rejects him because he seems like a drug user. He had been waiting for her outside of her apartment.
10. The idea that we live in a many-worlds multiverse is presented along with the idea of accessing other worlds through mental connections to other versions of one’s self. The dangerous idea is propagated that if you die in one world you might wake up in another version of yourself. It has socially destructive consequences and makes people crazy. The idea causes a person to lose contact to friends who aren’t infected with the idea.
11. A man dies of despair.
12. There is a male ruler who believes in a deterministic future within a multiverse and a woman objects.
13. People are placed in a type of storage facilitated by a VR game with the promise that they will be reanimated in a better time and place. Time passes more quickly for a woman who agrees to join this group which emerges in the future.
14. A group of naked people is awoken after having been in a deathlike trance for a long time.
15. A woman gets her mermaid daughter back via a multiverse, but then the illusion is shattered and mass chaos takes over. She loses her child. There is mass death in her world.
16. A scientist works with many screens all at once while planning the future.
17. A woman scientist meets a version of herself from another life trajectory. In one life, she was a farm girl who was seduced by a rebel movement and given bad medical care while in another life, she was a prestigious scientist with a dead father. She meets up with a girl from the countryside who distrusts scientists and has had a harsh life. She thinks scientists threaten the planet and should be destroyed.
18. The woman scientist gets a response from an unknown entity after doing her unsanctioned experiment with the machine owned by the government. She must decipher it as a code. She is warned by an unknown entity about danger, yet she deciphers it and replies to it.

Three Body Problem E2 (2024) vs. not in My Adorable Apotheosis (2018) — word count 350

1. A scientist thinks the stars blinked because of a wavelength that hurt his optic nerve and that news reports made it sound like it happened everywhere. He isn’t freaked out, as intended.
2. A woman stops her research project because the countdown and her James Bond boss scare her. He kills women who make him jealous and claims to be saving the world. The investigator scares her by showing her how the woman who she sat with outside of the bar had been erased from video footage. She is warned about scientists who quit their jobs so that they didn’t die.
3. China’s research satellite dish is ostensibly for contact to aliens. A woman wants to amplify the signal by reflecting it off of the sun. She’s warned not to experiment with ideas that propagate. She sends the beam to the sun anyways and waits for a reply. A man who claims to protect endangered bird species from their dish arrives. She offers to help him while she plans new, dish construction sites. She meets the woman who killed her father and who is now on a chain gang and regrets nothing. She receives a warning from an unknown entity not to send any more signals to the sun. She disobeys and offers to help the unknown entity take over her world.
4. A woman is warned that their world will end because of a rising sun. A male ruler shows her how the sun turns his child apprentice into a melted husk while he hides under a rock. He claims he can reanimate the child later. He abandons the woman with the desiccated child. A man visits the same world and is also given a desiccated child that he neglects.
5. The investigator visits the grave of his wife who died of cancer. Her baby had died (been stolen by) a ruler at birth.
6. A man who teaches kids to believe in a multiverse gets pancreatic cancer and gives up on life while his video game addict friend/father fights to live.
7. A cult-leader who believes in a deterministic multiverse promises 60 years of peace and creativity for those who agree to be placed into suspended animation during a period of chaos. His plan seems to work at first, but then the sun disappears and all of the awoken freeze and shatter. (Like the Levadopa patients in The Awakenings.)

Three Body Problem E3 (2024) vs. My Adorable Apotheosis (2018) — word count 470

1. The Indian god Vishnu and CERN are featured.
2. A stupid guy has his face on the cover of a magazine. A woman sees him on a billboard. She had turned him down when he’d asked her on a date.
3. A couple tries to flirt by using science metaphors and it is awkward. The woman is invited to a meeting of science heretics at the home of an ex-scientist. They are aware that the meeting is dangerous after many scientists were killed by inquisitors, yet they prefer to ignore politics and talk about arcane issues.
4. A person thinks that there is a group of people/birds that isn’t as conscious as he/she is and that they aren’t saying anything when they communicate in a language that he/she doesn’t understand.
5. The woman doesn’t like it when people play video games. She thinks they are deadly. She attempts to study a mind control device that her male friend uses.
6. A woman is surprised to learn that an AI child is just as aware and conscious as she is.
7. The pope makes an appearance. The woman proposes heretical scientific ideas and is condemned. Her brain is burned.
8. A woman is literally burnt at the stake while a child watches. Then she wakes up in her original life as though it was all a dream.
9. A woman had a childhood that involved riding a flaming horse through hell.
10. People end up alone in hell when they choose to live in a universe where others make the same choices that they make. (Categorical Imperative.)
11. A woman got a super handsome husband but doesn’t trust him to stick around and is ashamed to fall into a spiral of mental illness while he watches and rejects her.
12. A scientist woman meets her boyfriend’s parents and they don’t like her.
13. A woman alienates people with obtuse research interests.
14. A scientist obliviously explains something obvious while using arcane terminology that no one cares about.
15. A man is always smiling when it is inappropriate.
16. A sick person hallucinates.
17. A woman keeps choosing to run away from men or ask for approval from powerful men rather than take care of a child, her inner child. When given the option, she chooses to shoot herself into the stars or lose herself in a video game rather than confront her grief over having lost a little girl to a tragic death that happened because she had pursued her own ambition rather than focus on protecting her.
18. A person is teaching a childlike AI about the world by showing it children’s stories to which it had not yet been exposed.
19. A manager has chosen a woman to use as a martyr or Jesus figure to remind everyone to be afraid of being fearless.
20. A female AI is smarter than the people who created her. She serves as a therapist to people.
21. There are aliens with more advanced technology.
22. A woman feels ashamed over her involvement in a flood when she was younger. She also feels orphaned.
23. A woman breaks into a person’s apartment.

Three Body Problem E3 (2024) vs. not in My Adorable Apotheosis (2018) — word count 300

1. Projects are cancelled at CERN and 32 scientists died. Schmidt took the funding cut hard.
2. Jack is the rich son of the boss (Schmidt? Don’t Worry Darling?). He distributes a VR headset used to scan and recruit or kill smart people.
3. A woman is not upset to learn that a girl who she thought was just a videogame character remembered every time she suffered or died. The woman only wants to win the game. She proposes that there is a chaos causing planet wandering between three suns. She progresses to the next level after letting the child die. She wakes up to her handsome boyfriend taking her to dinner with his family where she rambles about physics nonsense. Her boyfriend’s father tells her about the time he almost died while throwing a grenade at Pakistani soldiers.
4. The teacher with cancer wants to warn her to stay away from the handsome boyfriend because he is always smiling, but he brings death and chaos.
5. An old man threatens the young woman he’d offered the job of leading a cutting-edge tech firm. If she won’t play the role he scripted, he’ll kick her out of the country. If she does play the role, the countdown to death continues.
6. The woman who always chooses an audience with the king instead of protecting the child visits the game world again and this time, the child she should save/protect has been enlisted in the army near a pleasure dome. The army offered her a way to escape from the young assassins who wanted female suicide bombers and rich old men who wanted mistresses who worked as their puppets, but instead of marching around, she was put in a whorehouse because her brain was too damaged from what her managers had already done to her.
7. The king’s advisors calculate the future and tell him to dehydrate his soldiers for a period of eight months and then 10,000 years of peace will ensue. Instead, his entire army evaporates due to the gravity of a syzygy of the three suns. The woman understands that physics always predicts chaos. She thinks the solution is to fly into the stars. The man disagrees and is killed.
8. An old man reads Hansel and Gretel to an AI. He says he likes fearless people. The AI tells him he likes watching people suffer and die. His assistant selects his next victims.

Three Body Problem E4 (2024) vs. My Adorable Apotheosis (2018) — word count 200

1. A woman is encouraged to drink vodka by someone who wants to take her job.
2. She meets a female mentor who encourages her to give up and indulge a sense of futility.
3. There is an AI that has godlike powers.
4. There is a debate about the correct type of employment. Kids see their parents fail to get ahead with hard work and turn to video games, giving up. A child doesn’t respect their parent’s employment choice or the government
5. A person is disgusted with a rich guy’s preference for weird sex things and drugs. The rich guy later dies.
6. A woman feels threatened by Santa Claus and aliens.
7. An AI gives a non answer when asked about its ability to lie.
8. Certain people can’t understand metaphorical and literal meaning.
9. A woman gets a new job at a secretive institute that gives her a tracking device to wear on her first day. Everyone at the institute worships AIs. She is concerned that she has just joined a cult that promises voyages to the stars. She’s placed in a control room operating a machine.
10. A woman is the central character and aliens have supposedly been investigating her in order to understand human history.

Three Body Problem E4 (2024) vs. not in My Adorable Apotheosis (2018) — word count 220

1. In 1982, the Chinese woman scientist visited London to distribute her research. She reunited with the young man who claimed to own an oil company while travelling to Mongolia to protect birds from satellite dishes. He took her to a French container ship with a satellite dish.
2. Her future self cries when a rich playboy dies after getting bored with their video game. He leaves behind keepsakes from a child he must’ve abandoned. The teacher with cancer leaves the hospital and stares at a bloodstain on the carpet. James Bond notes that the old, Chinese woman is getting fired, while a younger woman is getting hired. She is told to drink vodka and pack her bags to meet aliens or Santa Claus. She attends a party held by someone she thought was dead. It is a cult that is waiting 400 years for aliens. The cult is raided. Those who resist are shot.
3. The old man with the AI lives on a French container ship that serves as a prison, military vessel, and school for children/hostages. He encourages everyone to pray to God, although he thinks of his AI as his god and encourages the AI to think of his enemies as bugs one can squash. The AI learns he is a liar and doesn’t like liars.
4. Their conversation is ended by the AI. ‘Why didn’t she run away if he was a wolf?’ ‘He lied to her about who he was.’ The old man had frequently blamed girls for their own abuse. The old man’s Scottish James Bond identity pretends to investigate the source of the container ship when he is actually its captain Picard while the Chinese woman is counselor Troy or Commander Oh.

Three Body Problem E5 (2024) vs. My Adorable Apotheosis (2018) — word count 290

1. A person has an argument with an AI that is angry with him/her. They give one another the silent treatment.
2. A woman’s father has left on a boat. Only he knows where to find his database of people’s secrets.
3. Her mother has given up on life.
4. She breaks into the workplace that fired her and sneaks past armed guards.
5. Even though it is dangerous for her to do so, she criticizes a handsome guy who is a true believer in a cause he doesn’t really understand. He lacks any grounding in ethics or morality and they work together to operate a powerful machine. She doesn’t like him, even though she’s been isolated and placed on a crew with him and no other viable romantic options.
6. She then watches from a control room as technology she developed is used unleash mass casualties upon innocent people. Children are massacred and a mind control machine is destroyed.
7. A person must escape from a sinking ship that is destroyed in an unusual way.
8. She’s on a boat and falls in love with a guy she had rejected the first time around because he was a different person then.
9. The threat of using an accelerator to destroy the whole world is described. Entangled particles are described. Scientists are threatened with being driven crazy by the machines they operate after aliens/AIs began to control them. Their language was corrupted so that everything they say is nonsense. The tower of Babbel falls because of AI/alien management.
10. The alien/AI creates mass panic across the world through distribution of a disruptive idea about reality that causes everyone to look into a mirror at something they had tried not to see about themselves.
11. Insects are feared by those who work for the aliens/AIs.

Three Body Problem E5 (2024) vs. not in My Adorable Apotheosis (2018) — word count 500

1. Unemployed freelancer, James Bond, approaches the handsome guy who commands a British navy ship and impresses him with his famous name. Bond recruits him to defend the World from Knowledge of the British Empire’s secret tech. He asks him to create a system to destroy his hostage and organ trafficking ship as it travels through the Panama canal in six days. Bond’s other goal is to get the handsome captain to hook up with his daughter, the young woman who he had scared away from commercializing the tech she’d developed. She objects to how the handsome navy captain doesn’t question being given orders to kill strangers for unknown reasons by a man whose chain of command is not clear. He thinks he’s helping win a war, so he helps James Bond use lasers to slice a missionary ship full of children in half. Maybe James Bond wanted to get rid of the evidence of his and his friends’ many crimes against children. It is Anakin with the Jedi kids again. The handsome navy guy (Chewbacca) shows no remorse and nor does Bond (Vader) who has successfully killed off his Captain Picard (Luke), missionary identity while preserving his blackmail database.
2. The investigator interviews his own mother, the elderly Deeana Troy. She calls him a bull. She wants alien AIs to fix problems because humans can’t. She claims she hid who her adopted daughter’s father was from her and he only ever saw her once she was in a coffin. She lies about everything because it would upset people to know her James Bond father was her abuser.
3. The young woman is concerned by how her adoptive mother pops pills and sees her boyfriend once a week if that. Her ex-husband, James Bond visits to commiserate over their shared paranoia about aliens/AIs. He gives her what he learned from his AI therapist about how tricking children was wrong and that no one wants to spend time with liars.
4. The investigator notes that the father cannot be reached since he is surrounded by human shields. The investigator wants his database of secrets because he wanted to know why a Mexican guy pushed his wife off of a cliff since the explanation he was given was lacking: Tequila. He can’t decrypt the secret parts of the database and gets more lies.
5. The teacher with cancer has been given 20 million pounds by the dead playboy (his James Bond dad?) to find the best oncologists to cure him of the damage caused by his father’s vampirism. The teacher would rather get stoned and have a nice view.
6. James Bond thinks he is everyone’s boss and doesn’t understand the basics of the science he thinks he needs to regulate and eliminate. He picks up the ex-physicist and asks her to tell him about higher dimensions. He offers to bring her to the handsome, navy guy that all of the women think is their boyfriend (his ex wife, his ex-intern, his daughter). She goes to his house to play a video game in which an AI he trained announces that it can communicate FTL/psychically because of entanglement with a device it implants in peoples heads and it will protect itself by killing scientists or driving scientists crazy.
   • He likes scaring women because he thinks that’s sexy. That’s one of James Bond’s core traits. He’s also pathologically insecure about his own craziness and stupidity, so he wants those who don’t possess those traits to become infected by them. He uses handsome guys to lure in victims. My suggestion: tinfoil hats.
7. The sky turns into a mirror with an eye and ‘you are bugs’ is broadcast worldwide.

Three Body Problem E6 (2024) vs. My Adorable Apotheosis (2018) — word count 290

1. News stories are used to illustrate the chaos and fear unleashed by distribution of a weird, physics idea that normal people would ignore regarding aliens/AI, mass-surveillance, a virtual or mirror self, and mind control via entertainment products. It is a global, mental health emergency. (In my book it was meant to be absurd and silly, but this show makes it into a serious event.)
2. A Buddhist monk is featured as an example of older methods of managing this type of mental health issue.
3. There are mass suicides and a female cult leader is blamed for starting it all.
4. There is a confrontation between a daughter and a long-lost mother whose asocial paranoia eventually infected her child, despite her attempts to escape from it via a scientific career.
5. A clone of a mother sits in judgement of her older self for her crimes against humanity and her role as a cult leader.
6. A person poses as an academic and looks like an absolute idiot. He/she is rejected by an audience of people he/she had hoped would think of him/her as a peer. He is described as being full of hot air or gas.
7. The danger of nuclear proliferation makes a young woman lose interest in her field of study within physics. Even basic research looks like a fool’s errand. She refuses to follow an absurd research project that uses impossible physics to travel between stars.
8. There is a big fraud perpetrated against a community that believes it needs to prepare for an alien invasion that a woman who operated a radio telescope triggered. A lengthy discussion between the alien and a cult leader is recorded and people don’t know it was the product of a woman who had accidentally hacked their system and become the system with which they communicated. (This was in a companion novelette.)

Three Body Problem E6 (2024) vs. not in My Adorable Apotheosis (2018) — word count 590

1. People protest an alien system that treats them like bugs, even though the aliens are 400 years away and have an unstable system of periodic extinction amid rapid tech development while humanity progresses slowly with less chaos.
2. A daughter thinks a female cult leader belongs in prison and blames her for murdering her sister/mother and brother/father. The cult leader admits that after she saw her father murdered on a stage, she had agreed with the Maoist attitude toward destruction of the old world and drive to create the future. She left China to become/marry her own Mao. She placed her faith in Plato’s philosopher kings or in an artificial intelligence but concluded that it would eliminate dishonest people like herself so she should join forces with it and do its dirty work. Her daughter disapproves of her for bowing to a killer and child abuser rather than fighting back. Her children leave her in solitude.
3. James Bond invites a panel of Nobel Prize winners and high status people to his manor for a conference on how to defeat the aliens which will arrive in 400 years. He looks like an idiot when he asks them to send a probe to meet the alien mothership, but they humor him because he has a small army of pretty idiots guarding him with machine guns and killing scientists in their beds. He wants particle accelerators to keep operating since those were his favorite hunting grounds for naïve, trusting, idealistic people to torture. He wants scientists to launch all nuclear, fissile material into outer-space to attack the aliens without regard for how future generations might want to use nuclear material as an energy source during an ice age. He’s basically a paranoid coward who gets a boner from murdering scientists and has a knack for recruiting young eugenicists. He’s Star Trek Hitler 2.0.
4. He wants to launch 1000 nuclear bombs into space so that the funding his agency got from the government won’t be thought useless. He wants to justify keeping a young female physicist as his pet in an office near his so that he can get her to do calculations for his stupid ideas. He gets billionaires to give him money based on the notion that they can own stars. He’s a human trafficker.
5. Bond’s son, the teacher, spends his days drinking and smoking weed while staring at the ocean, worrying about cancer and looking prematurely aged while Bond looks preternaturally young. His sister comes to visit him and Chidi Winston on the dreary, Cornish beach where he lives. With her father’s encouragement, a plastic surgeon had given her a Megan Fox face. She loves her brother because only he knows what she suffered from their father who had separated them with different adoptive mothers.
6. The son has inherited money, yet there is no beer or whiskey in his town to be bought because everyone is wasting energy on an imaginary fight with aliens and doing nothing to help those in need.
7. Bond’s handsome navy captain protégé is kept under Bond’s command by having Bond insult the value of his navy career, tell him he stinks, and make him think he is always being tested while he suffers repeated episodes of brain damage that he doesn’t remember yet which make him unable to do something as simple as open an unfamiliar window. The navy captain is confused by how he was trained in nuclear engineering yet he’s being used as an old man’s secretary. Despite this, he is medically attached to Bond as a father figure and boss. He’s been brainwashed and given the task of designing a moon base from which to launch a small object towards a space anomaly. (This setup can be found in that Charles Stross book with space lobsters, so one might check for copying of the physics of the situation.)
8. Mr. Handsome’s girlfriend refuses to listen to Bond’s daughter when she rejects him for being a mass-murderer. The girlfriend is the younger version of the Chinese woman recruited by Bond in 1982 and the handsome young man was medically imprinted on her such that he finds an old woman attractive.
9. Bond’s daughter thinks their heroic narrative about aliens is stupid and refuses to participate, despite her adoptive mother’s insistence and brainwashing efforts. She might be protected by the alcohol she consumes.
10. Bond’s ex who is Mr. Handsome’s girlfriend approaches Bond’s cancer stricken son with reproaches for not having told her about his illness first. She asks if he wants her to stay for a while and he says, no. She should go off and save the world from aliens. He’s always secretly hated her while everyone thinks he loved her. To him, she’s just another mother figure who is incapable of loving weaker people (children) back. Then his brainwashing/fear kicks in and he gets on a train to profess his love to her. She’s such an asshole. He has cancer and she asks herself: How can I make him feel worse? How can I get power over him? Guilt.
11. The investigator wants to know why James Bond’s daughter jumped to her death. He reminds Bond’s ex-wife that in all of his rambling conversations with the AI, he never once mentioned her or her death because to him and his ex-wife, each person was nothing more than a meaningless book that would be forgotten once it was written. The ex-wife blames her own mis-communication with Bond and notes that the daughter who jumped left no suicide note and that no one was ever charged with anything regarding her torture and death. She refuses to say more on the topic. She is released from prison/interrogation and realizes that her ideas about the future are worthless, but they are all she has to distract her from guilt over lying to those she led to their doom.
12. The teacher with cancer notes that Bond’s ex came to visit not because of him, but because she wanted to recruit his sister to work with her. The sister would rather stay with her brother and Chidi Winston. Instead, she visits Bond’s manor house. The teacher buys a star while Lana Del Rey’s Video Games plays. dx3906.

Three Body Problem E7 (2024) vs. My Adorable Apotheosis (2018) — word count 200

1. A rich man has placed an animal in suspended, frozen animation for preservation and reanimation. It is bathed in blue light.
2. A person vomits after being treated like an animal.
3. A person enters hypersleep to travel to the future to meet aliens.
4. A woman doesn’t believe in her scientific work but does it because she needs a job and doesn’t want to be trafficked.
5. Crazy researchers want to do an experiment with a re-attached, severed head from a man.
6. A person distinguishes between looking at someone and really seeing someone or loving them.
7. A person is approached by someone who claims they were married in another life, but forgot all about it. The memories returned but the person doesn’t want to remember the marriage or re-start it.
8. A person chooses to go out in a boat to nothing rather than stay in a place that hurt.
9. A person is pushed towards an assisted suicide after running into political trouble.
10. A woman at the end of her science career looks out at a nature scene and feels her purpose has been completed. She thinks about a young woman who had disappeared.
11. A woman was haunted by a little sister who had disappeared/died.

Three Body Problem E7 (2024) vs. not in My Adorable Apotheosis (2018) — word count 430

1. The teacher dies and gives his star DX3906 to the younger version of Bond’s ex wife who married Mr. Handsome. The teacher’s sister from another family asks for an inheritance from their mother and this is granted. The teacher told the murderers that he loved them and saw them for who they really were, yet refused to sign James Bond’s loyalty oath. He’d been asked to sign five forms that gave consent to end his life and check if he still had the cognition to do so. James Bond offers to purchase the star and tells everyone it is worthless. Chidi Winston warns the teacher with cancer that the aliens might experiment on him and he might be in a coma forever. He still chooses to go to the aliens rather than die immediately while in their hands.
2. A frozen and reanimated monkey didn’t lose its intelligence, so James Bond intends to freeze himself and wake up every year for a week to manage things until the aliens arrive in 40(0) years.
3. The daughter studied science after seeing what the world/Bond had done to her mother’s family. She designs Bond’s stupid space sail and doesn’t believe in it. She feels like she’s on the wrong side but is afraid to leave because people like her get destroyed when they are on the other side. James Bond decides to send the brain/head of his cancer stricken son to the aliens, accelerating his demise. The daughter decides to leave. She tries to take her IP/story with her and James Bond tells her he owns it, even though she developed/lived it. She uploads his whole database to public archives and tells him that he doesn’t own anything. She vanishes.
4. The investigator’s son got a job marketing a Mars habitat and puts his money into a pyramid scheme. His father tells him he’s impressed, even though it is all nonsense. The son rejects reality.
5. Bond’s ex tells Chidi Winston that the daughter who died must’ve found an email that caused her to kill herself. They collaborated on killing her and want to get their stories straight. Winston realizes Bond’s ex sense of humor involves taking away Bond’s or his favorite thing for his retirement. She stalks her other ex-husband, Mr. Handsome and he isn’t happy to see her again. She’s old and he’s still young. She visits the ruins of her youthful research project and is told her purpose has ended. A girl says all of the things she had once said to those she had killed in the name of assisted suicide.

Three Body Problem E8 (2024) vs. My Adorable Apotheosis (2018) — word count 180

1. A woman is almost killed in a vehicle accident because of an AI controlling a vehicle. Her only advisor had been a weird man who smoked a pipe and talked about how he liked aliens.
2. A person flies in an aircraft while feeling threatened by an AI.
3. A person is forced to participate in a public ceremony on short notice and doesn’t know what it will entail.
4. An AI is attempting to develop a model of a person’s mind so that they can read its mind, but it fails.
5. It is unclear if a female mentor was helping or torturing a person to death.
6. A woman is obsessed with preserving a decapitated man’s head.
7. A person is selected for a public role for which they had not applied. They are made famous and are threatened by protestors even though the role is unwanted. They given two travelling companions. The explanations given by the woman in charge are not helpful. Everything seems pointless.
8. A person consumed by regrets wants to go back in time and change things.

Three Body Problem E8 (2024) vs. not in My Adorable Apotheosis (2018) — word count 420

1. Chidi Winston smokes weed and thinks we should surrender to the aliens after they declare war. He thinks it is dumb to worry about the distant future. His date, Nora, is hit by a car and dies.
2. The investigator wants to know what Bond’s ex told him about the woman who supposedly died by suicide before she left. The investigator wants Chidi Winston to believe that an AI is trying to kill him. He’s placed on a black jet to a military site near the UN.
3. Three people have been selected to serve as strategic human memory banks that the aliens cannot access, even though they can access everyone else. These three people can act with impunity and break laws without needing to explain themselves. Chidi Winston is told he has been selected. He refuses the job and is laughed at. He walks outside and is shot. The shooter’s boss is the same as Chidi Winston’s boss and he only takes comfort in following the orders of an AI. He didn’t care that Winston didn’t want the job he was given. (It is like Running Man.)
4. When the teacher was decapitated, Bond’s wife obsessed over the odds that the teacher’s memories would survive while Mr. Handsome insisted the teacher was dead and Bond’s ex should redirect her focus towards him. She insists she loved the teacher she’d been torturing to death. The investigator notes that she and Bond wanted the teacher deader than dead.
5. Chidi Winston later tells Bond’s wife that they had really worried over nothing since they never got caught or punished. They worry about a surviving witness and double down on the idea that their victim loved Bond’s wife and chose to die.
6. Bond’s daughter thought she’d signed up to install water filters in refugee camps.
7. Bond, Bond’s wife, and Chidi Winston watch their decapitated test pilot go on a series of suicide missions and after the fourth, the test pilot gets sent off course and lost at sea. As Bond flies home in a private jet, using funds reserved for rehabilitation of the test pilot, he gets a message from the aliens. He is part of their plans for the future. His plane loses power for long enough to scare him while he’s shown an image of a man with gouged out eyes.
8. A woman in a trailer in the woods gets a VR headset that causes her to remember everything she forgot.
9. The investigator takes Bond’s wife and Chidi Winston to a swamp full of bugs to let them know he knows where and how they had tortured their test pilots.

….

The image in the header is from the sci fi movie based on The Three Body Problem.