The Three Body Problem and the Phenomenon of Convenient Protagonists
Or, Science Fiction as a Matter of Taste
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It never takes long for the febrile buzz of indoor-induced insanity to return, once it has been purged through an act of communion with outside beings. This is the brutal truth: you can’t go backpacking for a few days, then seal yourself up alone in some interior space and hope that the large dose of trees, birds, streams, and stones will keep you safe from the hobgoblins of your own mind. I know because I tried it recently. The cavortings of Canada jays, splendid vistas from high ridgelines, and plunges into cold mountain lakes, all immensely refreshing in themselves, only formed so much of a bulwark against anxiety once I was home again. It took about eight hours indoors, by myself, for me to begin vibrating violently. Walks, bike rides to libraries, post offices, coffee shops, are needful things, even on days of life-hostile heat. I walked the two miles to my parents’ house on several evenings in order to keep from losing my head. Once, while I walked home at midnight, I heard a western screech owl hooting gently by the canal. I learned to identify the wistful whistles of lesser goldfinches. This was good.
But, ah, the madness still accumulates. This week I broke a personal commitment and downloaded the colony simulation videogame Rimworld to my computer. Over the next two days I spent some twelve to fifteen hours obsessively trading livestock to interstellar empires and building specialized bionic limbs for my colonists. Well, such occasional lapses aren’t unusual, and there’s little sense getting too upset about them. When I had put the game away, I took up watching The Three Body Problem on Netflix and chewed through it in short order.1 When it first came to the platform, my brother watched it and subsequently told me he’d had a hard time suspending his disbelief around some elements of the plot, especially the fact that the show’s protagonists are somehow, coincidentally, perfectly positioned to respond to the apparently insuperable threats that humanity faces. It felt too unlikely to accept, even in the context of the show’s fictional world. More than anything, he said, he felt that he didn’t know the characters well enough to say whether he thought they were the right people for the job of saving humankind. He’d said something similar before, after watching Godzilla Minus One, which was a movie I liked. I therefore dismissed his objections on the grounds that science fiction is a genre in which wildly improbable things happen as a matter of course. What’s a little coincidence when a nuclear-powered lizard has just crawled out of the ocean and destroyed Ginza?
After watching The Three Body Problem, however, I’d like to extend more courtesy and consideration to my brother’s point of view. I have learned, over many years of consuming science fiction, to accept the common trope of the hypercompetent protagonist. Sometimes stories depend on such tropes and neglect to let the kernels germinate into believable people, and this is okay because sometimes the people aren’t the point. Sometimes, I just want to watch a quirky gang of predictable misfits make trouble for a dark lord or extraterrestrial scourge. The fun of science-fiction stories with underdeveloped, trope-ish main characters is more in solving the problems that robots, aliens, or superplagues present, and less in seeing those main characters learn and grow as people. So what if such stories entertain, but fail to truly move me?2 Entertainment is a worthy goal, even if we preface it with the word “mere.” My favorite science fiction and fantasy stories supply both an exciting adventure and a rich human story, but such texts tend to make for heavier reading than the kinds of trope-laden stories I’ve been discussing. Furthermore, many such works, like certain novels of Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, or Ruth Ozeki, are likely to be shelved with general fiction, rather than relegated to the Sci-fi/Fantasy section.3
This is all bringing me dangerously close to engaging with arguments about the taxonomy of literature and the hierarchy of quality. I have no wish to slip too far into the murky currents of those important but possibly intractable matters. Instead, I shall return to an earlier theme. I see why my brother had a hard time accepting the characters in The Three Body Problem. They’re a standard-issue gang of geniuses, and most of them don’t receive a lot of rich characterization. They come off a little like pre-rolled Dungeons and Dragons characters, each with a Bond, an Ideal, and a Flaw. For me, that’s enough. I want to see what they will do about certain existential threats to humanity, which I shall not describe here. The characters are sufficient for me because they’re already familiar.4 I’ve met them before in many other stories. And if they’re not already familiar to my brother, that would make them harder to accept. This is the part where I come up against the adage that there’s no accounting for taste. Why did I like the show while he didn’t? The answer is as unsearchable as any of the mysteries of the universe, which we have no choice but to approach by approximations. Nevertheless, I’ve put my reasoning to him, and he agrees that it’s a plausible way of explaining his reaction. We have shaken hands and each agreed that the other has a valid opinion. Familial harmony, that vaunted foundational virtue of civilization, goes on.
My empathy and understanding has its limits, though, and I still think he’s objectively wrong about Godzilla Minus One.
Am I just bored? Is this bouncing from one entertainment to another symptomatic of something else entirely, some unresolved loop of thoughts and feelings? I don’t know, and I’m too busy checking out eight books from the library to find out.
Plenty of stories have falsely moved me. The experience always leaves me feeling a little disgruntled.
See Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Curse of Chalion or Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book for examples of texts that achieve the balance between plot and character and will also be found in the sci-fi/fantasy section at the library.
And because they’re not so annoying that I can’t stand to spend another second in their fictional company. I’m looking at you, Wheel of Time.