Month: May 2024

The three-body problem in classical mechanics is the problem to determine the motion of three point masses interacting gravitationally and followng Newton’s laws of motion. It is often used as a type example of a physics problem that is easy to state, but where there is not possible to find a general solution in closed form. The resulting dynamical system will for almost all cases exhibit chaotic evolution. The problem also serves as inspiration for Cixin Liu when authoring his book The Three-Body Problem, just as its title may hint.

The story begins in China in 1967, during the Cultural Revolution. Ye Wenjie is an astrophysics graduate who witnesses her father being beaten to death beacuse of his refusal to stop teaching modern physics. Ye is forced to work at a labour camp in Inner Mongolia, and is later recruited to forced work as a scientist at a top secret military radio project, Red Coast, with a strong transmitter and sensitive receiver used for initially unknown purposes. What can possibly go wrong when a brilliant scientist with extremely pessimistic view of the direction of human endevours has access to such equipment?

About forty years later, Wang Miao, a nanotechnology professor, is asked to work together with a blunt and rude detective to investigate why many reseachers, including Ye Wenjies daughter, in the frontline of science have recently killed themselves under what seems like coordinated cirumstances. The two further note that the governments in the world are preparing for war with some external enemy, and that there seems to be a connection to an online computer game with three-body thematics. These two plot lines are of course interconnected; there is a first contact with an extraterrestrial civilisation in there. We have a few hundred years to prepare.

I must say that it was mildly confusing to read a book almost immediately after seeing it as a TV series. On one hand, I was already aware of the direction the story would take, but at the same time there are rather big changes in the collection of characters involved and also in the focus of the plot. I really enjoyed a clearly unfilmable section describing the creation of supercomputers, made from unfolding inherently 11-dimensional protons into two dimensions, etching strong-interaction based circuitry, and then refolding it back into a proton now containing artificial intelligence. These are the “sophons”.

The Three-Body Problem is fun to read. It has both a story that is exciting and some science to which I can relate. The setting is also in China, and that is an environment I do not have a lot of experience with through popular culture (the translator has actually added some footnotes to explain the context of some references that I would have had problems understanding). Those things combined have made me really enjoy the book.

Emelie är en stockholmsjournalist. När hon sommaren 2023 bränner ut sig packar hon ett tält och en sovsäck och ger sig av till sin farmors hemtrakter någonstans i Norrland för att finna lugnet som skogen borde kunna erbjuda. Hon får på avstånd syn på en grupp människor som beter sig märkligt, och börjar följa deras förehavanden på avstånd. Vilka är de sju personerna som tycks kollektivt ha dragit sig undan från resten av samhället?

Annika Norlins bok Stacken börjar lite trevande, men ganska snart börjar de individuella historierna vecklas ut, som svar på frågan. Det handlar om människor som på olika har vänt sig bort från någonting svårt som de inte har haft ork att ta tag i, där historierna vävs samman och till slut landar ute i skogen. De är varken goda eller onda, utan bara just människor som har egna bakgrundshistorier.

I och med att texten till allra största delen är tillbakablickar så är det inte särskilt mycket som rör sig framåt i handlingen, utan istället fylls luckorna i bakgrunden in allt eftersom. Det var just därför som jag hade lite problem att komma in i Stacken. Den kändes liksom lite gles till att börja med, men när jag väl kom in i den så är den väldigt fängslande, och den sätter igång en hel del funderingar. Vad är frihet? Vem är det som bestämmer det? Kan man leva endast i nuet? Allting dras till sin spets när Emelie till slut närmar sig det inhomogena kollektivet vars gemensamhet krockar med hennes extremt individualistiska tankevärld.

Annika Norlin har verkligen fått till en bra och läsvärd debutroman, där hon blandar svärta med humor i precis rätt proportioner och använder ett fint flödande språk. Det märks i texten att hon verkligen gillar all åtta huvudpersonerna i Stacken med tanke hur mycket liv hennes ord har gett dem.