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Spoiler warning for The Three Body Problem, and by extension, the Chinese live-action adaptation Three-Body
If you haven't read The Three Body Problem and ignored the spoiler warning, it deserves a bit of exposition. The Three Body Problem is a book about a lot of things. It's got themes regarding the limitations of human experience that I loved, and which were totally eclipsed in the second half by this conflict between two factions fighting over the fate of humanity. The Three Body Problem follows Earth on the precipice of a total invasion by a highly advanced alien race called the Trisolarians. It's going to take a few centuries for them to arrive, though. Aware of the fact that humans tend to develop technologically and industrially at an exponential pace (interesting assumption #1 of the series), the Trisolarians decide to organize humans against each other by establishing the Earth Trisolaris Organization (ETO).
The ETO is mostly formed of a band of highly intelligent people, following the somewhat realistic stereotype that smart people tend to be more cynical and depressed. While there's a few competing sub-factions of the ETO with different beliefs about the Trisolarians, the "Adventists," relevant to our discussion, believe that humanity is completely beyond redemption. They work to aid the Trisolarians in completely annihilating the human race by paving the way for their takeover.
Really, really important to the way this plot is framed is that Liu Cixin decided to make the leaders of the Adventists environmentalists.
One of them is named Pan Han: a biologist, famous for making several highly accurate predictions about otherwise unforeseen negative impacts of technological development on human health and the environment. In the book, he was very explicitly an anti-industrialist. Pan Han believes that industrialist and by extension scientific progress is a cancer and should be treated as such. Another is Mike Evans, a conservationist who dedicated his life to protecting endangered birds after being estranged and alienated from his oil magnate parents. Two people who'd done quite a bit in service to the environmental movement, both of whom ultimately decided we were better off being genocided by aliens.
When I'd finished reading The Three Body Problem, I was left with the sense that while the conclusion was absurd, the ETO weren't exactly the "bad guys." They were sympathetic people who succumbed to despair, leading them to absurd and dangerous ends. They weren't "ecofascist," as I understand it. The book could have gone down the ecofascism route, but it really didn't. Liu Cixin went as far as to couch Mike Evan's philosophy in what he called "pan-species communism," which is a sort of animistic communism where all living creatures are to be treated equally. In that sense, there was something really tragic about the ETO. They were the enemy, but they wouldn't have been, had they only seen things a little differently.
In the TV show, Pan Han is hands down my favourite character. The production crew was tasked with making him the most evil and insufferable environmentalist the world has ever seen, and they did this flawlessly. I genuinely had no idea you could make carrying a reusable cup look so malignant on screen. If the book left room to sympathize with Pan Han, the TV show absolutely did not. You're supposed to know that he's evil before he's even given a name on screen.
The underlying idea is the same: there is this tension between what human society could be (as manifested by our protagonists, seeking to fight for the future of humanity) and what human society demonstrably is (cornucopianist, industrialist, capitalist, colonialist...). What makes Pan Han a tragic character in the books is essentially that he fell for capitalist realism—the belief that there is no alternative to the current world order, and in that despair, took a leap of faith in believing the Trisolarians would be better stewards of the Earth. The only thing the TV show really changed was to make his critique of science in particular more pointed, and to lean more heavily on his hatred of humanity as the defining aspect of his character.
It took watching the TV show, seeing this part of Pan Han really laid bare in a way it wasn't in the book, for me to pick up on the bigger picture I feel I missed on my first reading: The Three Body Problem is a book about class struggle—particularly, the struggle between the people and the wealthy intellectuals. The TV show does this among a number of other things to make the point a lot less subtle, my favourite being how it will not shut up about how the main character researches applied science. All the ETO members are distracted by trivialities on the frontiers of theoretical physics, but Wang Miao does science for the people! Of course Pan Han wouldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel: he's a biologist, not a sociologist. The story overwhelmingly feels like a warning that those who pursue knowledge may be cursed by a narrowed mind—that through specialization, you risk losing sight of the bigger picture.
And in the end, I don't really know how I feel about this. Maybe I need to read the book again; I confess, lots of this is a bit half remembered. I've written a lot about my complicated feelings about science, but more recently, I feel like I might have been a bit too harsh. As Pan Han seems to more earnestly identify in the book, the problem isn't science, it's industrialism. It's industrialism as a goal in and of itself. Sure, I do think the scientific community is responsible for destruction caused by research its produced, but ultimately, the goal of science is to build knowledge, not to build faster, stronger and more dangerous machines. Someone else had to decide to apply that knowledge to disastrous ends, and they're the real problem.
Maybe The Three Body Problem is a dangerous story to tell at a time like this. Maybe a less faithful but more accurate adaptation would have made Pan Han something other than an environmentalist. I haven't watched the American adaptation yet, but I know they rewrote Mike Evans to literally be an oil magnate himself, quite possibly for this very reason. You could tell a very similar story without dragging the environmental movement through the mud, were the ETO staffed by people worried about some other existential crisis, but I guess then it wouldn't be The Three Body Problem.
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"You're not supposed to sympathize with Pan Han" was published on 2024-06-23
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