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Personification
Definition of Setting
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or it can be an imagined... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the... read full definition
Setting
Explanation and Analysis:
Perhaps the most unconventional setting Cixin Liu presents to readers in her novel is virtual reality: the game-play space users occupy within the Three Body game interface. In The Three-Body Problem, virtual reality serves to augment the human imagination, allowing those who play the game to explore radical ideas and chaotic scenarios without reality's immediate physical consequences.
Within this "gameplay" space, Wang and the other scientists can think beyond the world they know, expanding out and away from the staid, inaccurate theories their colleagues clung so fiercely to. Liu is not the first author to use virtual reality thus: Orson Scott Card's 1985 novel Ender's Game features several children who are recruited to play a war "game" by the government, only to discover that each decision they make influences real-time war efforts. Both Card and Liu use this virtual setting to explore human psychology.
Importantly, The Three-Body Problem also takes place during and in the aftermath of China's Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 and ended in 1976. Liu uses this setting to explore the relationship between government and scientific institutions, between curiosity and ideology. The Three-Body Problem develops a philosophy around these dichotomies, using the actions of the Red Guard and Ye Wenjie to disabuse readers of the notion that science cannot be ideologically-driven or "subjective."
