Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Three-Body Problem, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Technology, Progress, and Destruction
Scientific Discovery and Political Division
Trauma and Cyclical Harm
Theory vs. Lived Experience
History and Legacy
Summary
Analysis
Upon returning to Tsinghua, Ye was asked to help the university pick a site for a large radio astronomy observatory. Eventually, she settled on a quiet, hilly village in northwest China. The once-beautiful place now felt barren: most of the hills had been deforested, and erosion had caused the ground to break and slide. Ye was surprised, then, to hear of a mysterious foreigner named Bethune who was planting trees up in the hills, hoping to restore birds to the area.
In this small village, Ye sees just how much humans are quite literally destroying the earth; the ground is beginning to slide out from under them. But if the deforested trees remind Ye (as they always have) of the loss of her father, this scene also makes clear that when one part of a natural ecosystem is destroyed, the other parts similarly collapse. Thus deforestation means the death not only of trees but of the birds who live in them.
Themes
Her curiosity sparked, Ye asked the villagers to introduce her to this stranger up in the hills. To her surprise, Ye saw that the man was a white American; he introduced himself not as Bethune but as Mike Evans, and he explained that he was trying to save lives. When Ye asked which people Evans was trying to save, he asked Ye, “Why does one have to save people to be considered a hero? Why is saving other species considered insignificant?” Evans believed that humans did not deserve “saving”; instead, he wanted to focus on protecting vulnerable animals.
There are two critical ideas in what Evans says. First, he presents a (slightly different) version of Ye’s philosophy that humankind is beyond saving. Second, Evans ostensibly decenters humanity as a whole from the historical narrative—but even as he claims to turn the focus away from people, he is also deeply concerned with his own heroism. Even someone who hates the course of human history, then, can desperately want to participate in it.
Themes
In this village, Evans’s particular goal was to save a dying breed of swallow. Though the bird was about to go extinct, no one seemed to care because “they’re not as crowd pleasing as giant pandas.” After a few months of planting trees for the swallows, however, Evans ran out of money. As he explained to Ye, though his father was a billionaire, he refused to bankroll any of his son’s environmental projects.
Again, Evans’s bitter comparison of the swallows and pandas demonstrates how arbitrary even the most altruistic science actually is. Though environmentalists might claim to want to help the earth, even they are influenced by their own personal preferences (for example, prioritizing cuter animals over more nondescript ones).
Themes
Evans told Ye the story of his life: his father had made his money as an oil executive. When Evans was 12, there was a gigantic oil spill from one of his father’s tankers, and Evans himself saw the sea birds covered in black goo, dying. Despairing, Evans sought guidance from his father—but instead of offering comfort, the oil executive suggested that because so many species were going extinct, no actions really mattered anymore. Evans’s father thus taught his son his rules for “the game of civilization: The first priority is to guarantee the existence of the human race and their comfortable life. Everything else is secondary.”
Evans’s story parallels Ye’s: just as Ye was shocked to see her mother betray her father, Evans is horrified to watch his father turn his back on the world around him. For both leaders of the ETO, then, childhood trauma lies at the source of their hatred of their compatriots. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, Evans’s father’s love of the “human race” also reflects a particularly naïve view of “civilization”: just as swallows are dependent on trees, humans are dependent on the plants and animals they kill, and so focusing only on humans at the expense of other life forms is deeply damaging.
Themes
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For Evans, this moment shaped his worldview—but rather than accepting his father’s philosophy, he devoted his life to rebelling against it. As he grew older, Evans formulated the philosophy of “Pan-Species Communism,” which extended the idea of universal human rights to all species on earth.
Though Evans is from the capitalist West, his use of communism as a framework for animal rights still suggests yet another way in which the legacies of the Cold War continue to shape the characters’ thinking. And as always, though Evans’s philosophy has wide-reaching impacts, it is deeply rooted in his small-scale, intimate, relationship with his father.
Themes
Years went by, and Ye and Evans did not speak. Finally, though, Evans reached out, and they agreed to meet on the same hill where they had first encountered each other. Though Evans’s trees had grown, deforestation had moved even more quickly, and the forest was almost bare. When Ye asked, she learned that the forest was falling so fast because two villages were competing for the logging profits.
The constant deforestation, a running motif throughout the book, now becomes tangible proof that what people believe is progress is in fact destructive. As Ye sees in the logging competition, the desire for individual profit and success will ensure that any technology is put to harmful use.
Themes
In the years that had gone by, Evans’s father had died and left Evans all of his money. But money did not soothe Evans’s fears: rich countries would keep shifting polluting industries to poor countries, and poor people would keep exploiting natural resources just to stay alive. Evans had once hoped that the East would allow Pan-Species Communism to thrive; though Christianity tells the story of the Ark of Man, Buddhism prioritizes saving all life. But by this time, Evans was realizing that people everywhere are “the same.”
Throughout the text, everyone from Galileo to Commissar Lei has asserted that there is an unbridgeable divide between the East and the West; indeed, that conflict is at the heart of much of Ye’s science. But here, Evans comes to terms with the fact that such a divide does not actually exist—and that rather than coming together over shared values, what really links all people is a kind of universal selfishness.
Themes
Ye agreed, expressing her belief that humanity’s only hope to save itself comes from an outside force. She then confessed to Evans her contact with the Trisolarans. When she finished, Evans promised to devote his resources to the cause, and the two shook hands, becoming “comrades.”
Ye’s confession to Evans marks another critical historical moment: what begins as a conversation becomes the founding of the earth-shattering Earth-Trisolaris Organization (ETO). Two traumatized adults, having found a shared ideology with which to process their trauma, have changed the universe forever.
Themes
