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Chapter 23
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
Ye finishes her story as the members of the ETO look on with rapt attention. She then explains that the Trisolarans want Wang to stop his research because it could allow humans to create giant ladders through space, potentially preventing the Trisolaran fleet from landing safely. Wang, lashing out in confusion, asks Ye how her daughter died—but she will not answer. Instead, she says only that “compared to our Lord, everything we do is meaningless. We’re just doing whatever we can.”
As her reaction to the mention of Yang Dong shows, Ye uses science to hide from the pain and loss of real life. But though abstract scientists find much of reality “meaningless,” Wang’s more applied science provides potential practical solutions—and solace—in a moment of massive uncertainty. Wang is therefore much more of a threat to the Trisolarans than his more theoretical colleagues.
Themes
At that moment, a group of soldiers and police officers—led by Shi Qiang—burst through the doors. Shi tells the ETO rebels that because they have decided to treat all humanity as their enemy, the police will stop at nothing to take them down. The young woman who snapped Pan’s neck rushes to the spheres at the center of the room and explains that they are actually nuclear bombs. If Shi and his colleagues do anything to hurt Ye, the woman says, the bombs will be detonated.
In a neat twist, the book makes one of its major themes literal: the three spheres (meant to represent the mathematical three-body problem) are actual nuclear bombs, showing how technological questions can tangibly be weaponized. Also, the nuclear bombs once again link this more modern period to the legacies of the Cold War standoff.
Themes
Shi tries to figure out a way to disarm the woman without setting off the bomb. Shi then calls to the young woman, telling her that he has a letter from her mother. While she is distracted, Shi is able to shoot the bomb before she can detonate it; the only person the bomb kills is the woman herself. The room breaks out into chaos as people on both sides start shooting, and several people are wounded in the crossfire. After the violence dies down, Wang takes Shi to the hospital. In the ambulance, Wang asks who that young woman’s mother was—and Shi just laughs. “A girl like that most likely has mother issues,” he explains. “After doing this for more than twenty years, I’m pretty good at reading people.”
Unlike all of the other characters in the novel, Shi’s great skill is “reading people”—while the rest find meaning in abstraction, Shi finds it in the details and quirks of everyday human behavior. It is also worth noting how childhood trauma once again shapes behavior; the young woman, clearly struggling to cope with the absence of her mother, finds her plans upended by the mere mention of this memory.
Themes
