It has been several years since I read Big Liu's (Liu Cixin's, as fans call him) The Three-Body Problem. Apart from the grand narrative and a few classic scenes, I've forgotten most of it. When I started watching The Walking Dead, I took it for a straightforward zombie show, but as the plot went deeper I found it was describing a lot more. In some important respects, such as the setup of the world, the two are very similar. One extends Darwinism to the whole universe and builds a rather extreme, Darwinian cosmic sociology. The other drops humanity into a world full of death, where small groups survive dark-forest style, reshuffling a world order that took millions of years to form since humans first appeared and taking a fresh look at humans as a species. It too is steeped in Darwinian thought.
The basic setups of The Three-Body Problem and The Walking Dead
Both setups are heavily Darwinian and put great weight on the struggle for survival.
The basis of the theory of evolution
In a given environment, resources are limited and can support only a certain number of living things, while the number of living things keeps growing. To win the limited resources they need, they must struggle to survive: the winners live on and the losers are eliminated.
The setup of The Three-Body Problem
Big Liu extends this idea to the whole universe and sets up a similar sociology at the cosmic scale: the universe's total resources are also limited, all kinds of civilizations live in it, and the more advanced a civilization, the more resources it needs. At the same time, every civilization's highest principle is that "survival is the primary need of a civilization"; it wants to survive. In such a universe, Big Liu plays out civilizations' strategies for survival.
The setup of The Walking Dead
A sudden virus disrupts the existing world order and drops the surviving humans into a world of walkers, full of danger on every side and short of the resources needed to live, to show how humans survive at the end of the world.
Strategies in The Three-Body Problem and The Walking Dead
The Three-Body Problem
Whether it's the Trisolarans' interference by sophons or the Singer's erasure by dual-vector foil, the strategy is pure dark forest: no cooperation, no game playing. "I destroy you, and what does that have to do with you?" Blunt and direct. You could say it pushes the struggle for survival to its limit. The loser mentality mocked in "Trust in Losers and Never Be Redeemed" [1], the review that has long held the top spot in the Three-Body section of Douban (a Chinese book and film review site), is exactly this survival-competition thinking pushed to the extreme.
The Walking Dead
It adds more elements. The protagonist's job before the apocalypse was police officer: the best representative of the old world order and its rules. It also examines humanity and morality: police officers, soldiers, doctors, teachers, priests, ordinary citizens, children and others each stand for a different kind of person and are shown in different ways. Survival strategies of every kind, family-style, community-style, trap-style, are examined one by one.
Order in The Three-Body Problem and The Walking Dead
The Three-Body Problem
The whole story opens against the backdrop of the Cultural Revolution, and what it sets out to highlight is the tense atmosphere of suspicion of that period and the chaos of moral order at the time: a single political movement was enough to incite countless people to push the so-called morality and humanity of thousands of years of civilization into the abyss. One major theme of the Cultural Revolution was how to survive, and that was only within humanity itself. Extend these fragile things to different civilizations across the whole universe and magnify them, and the dark forest is not unimaginable. Losing reason can overturn morality and humanity, and so can complete reason. Big Liu shows one such possible cruelty: morality and the like are too unreliable, and what can be relied on are strict rules of the game. The Swordholder logic understands the rules; Cheng Xin (in my view the "saintly" Cheng Xin is the spokesperson for morality and humanity) doesn't understand them, or rather doesn't want to. "Lose humanity, and you lose much; lose bestiality, and you lose everything." Big Liu stresses this point in different ways [2].
The Walking Dead
It keeps the story on Earth and clearly examines different kinds of people in much more detail and in many different ways. As the plot develops, the conflict between humans and walkers, though always an important backdrop, gradually fades, while conflict between humans and humans comes to the fore. Tens of thousands of years ago humans gradually began forming societies and used language, technology and so on to discipline themselves, eventually more or less completing their own domestication and forming a world of meaning that represses themselves [3]. I think this could be called the technological origin of morality and world order. But this order arose from a particular stage of humanity combined with a particular environment, and the apocalypse ended the old order along with the social and natural conditions that went with it. In the new environment, how should highly evolved modern humans survive? Can they rebuild a different world order? How will moral standards change? After going through many situations, Rick and his group gradually shake off the influence of the old world order. In this group led by a policeman you can still see things beyond survival, and their minds still waver, but the struggle for survival has sunk deeper and deeper into the group's consciousness. I don't know what strategy would serve their survival best, but it will certainly differ from the dark forest of The Three-Body Problem.
Darwinian thought and sociology
Darwin's idea of the struggle for survival holds a significant place in sociology, and a social Darwinism grew out of it. Applying Darwin's ideas to sociology also produces analyses that are logically clear and especially seductive, much like analysis in the sciences (The Three-Body Problem is one such case). But Darwin himself overemphasized the role of the struggle for survival and neglected phenomena beyond it, and when applied to society it struggles to handle complex social phenomena. Besides, Darwin's idea is only "evolution" in the sense of change over time, not "evolution" in the sense of progress.
January 2016, Huilongguan, Beijing
Notes
[1]: For details see "Trust in Losers and Never Be Redeemed" (信卢瑟，永世不得超生). I personally don't agree with this review. What I disagree with is not whether its criticism hits The Three-Body Problem where it hurts. Quite the opposite: the review is right that the book does adopt an extreme, even radical, principle of survival competition. What I disagree with is its misunderstanding of science fiction as a genre. A common technique in science fiction is to assume a premise and then build out a self-consistent world from it. Since Big Liu assumed that survival is the primary need of a civilization, a novel written from that premise is bound to look like this. Of course you could assume that survival is not the primary need of a civilization and describe a relatively harmonious universe, but that would be a different story. A similar example is the classic science-fiction stories built on the premise "what if ice were denser than water". Under such a counterfactual premise, you can't fault the author for the premise itself. What you should look at is whether the world the author shows under that premise is self-consistent, and how deep the portrayal goes.
[2]: In his new book Liu Cixin on Science Fiction, Liu Cixin reveals that he is a scientism believer and a worshipper of technology. The worlds he builds are often as hard and cold as steel, short on humane concern. I think this is a weakness, but also a strength.
[3]: Here I draw on Wu Guosheng's Lectures on the Philosophy of Technology, which gives a lecture-style overview of the philosophy of technology. Human self-discipline is one of its important themes.
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