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
More years passed, and Ye and Evans did not speak. Eventually, though, Ye was brought to the Second Red Coast Base, a ship floating in the middle of the Atlantic. Like Radar Peak, the ship had a giant parabolic antenna in the middle of it. Later, Ye would learn that the ship—which Evans had bought with his father’s money—was called Judgment Day.
Though Evans has revealed that the divide between East and West is overblown, it is still important to note the contrast between the Adventists and the Redemptionists. The Adventists are based in the West and draw on a Judeo-Christian framework (as evidenced by the name Judgment Day); the Redemptionists are based in the East and (as Shen suggests) are more closely aligned with Buddhism.
Themes
Evans explained to her that he had gotten back in contact with the Trisolarans, and that their interstellar fleet had already set sail—it would arrive on earth in 450 years. Gesturing to the other people on the boat, Evans introduced Ye to the first members of what he’d named the Earth-Trisolaris Organization. He asked Ye to be the commander of the ETO, and she accepted. The Earth-Trisolaris movement had officially begun.
It now becomes clear that the timeline Wang sees in the game is slightly behind the real timeline of the Trisolaran departure. Also worth noting: though Ye invited the aliens to earth, and though she is nominally the commander of the ETO, she is not its founder. Individual action, the novel reminds readers, always leads to consequences the individual in question might never predict.
Themes
