Dories: Identity, Reality, and Anthropocentrism in The Three-Body Problem
Summary: Academic paper by Jeff Dories (University of Pittsburgh) arguing that Cixin Liu uses The Three-Body Problem as a transitional text — building a narrative and philosophical framework to challenge anthropocentrism across the full Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy.
Sources: raw/Dories-Identity-Reality-Anthropocentrism-Three-Body-Problem.md
Last updated: 2026-05-05
Liu’s central argument: science fiction against narcissism
In his essay “Beyond Narcissism: What Science Fiction Can Offer Literature”, Liu argues that the humanities engage in an “intense anthropocentric narcissism” — centering human history and relationships when the universe is 13.8 billion years old and humanity appears only at the very end. Science fiction, Liu argues, is uniquely suited to destabilize this perspective. The Three-Body Problem uses this as its premise but does not yet deliver the break: the novel is building the framework that the second and third books deploy.
Anthropocentrism built up to be torn down
The novel’s characters move from environmental concern to radical anti-anthropocentrism through a recurring pattern: ideology encounters a novum (Suvin’s term for the generative device that makes SF possible), radicalization follows.
Ye Wenjie is radicalized by Silent Spring: reading Carson allows her to see that the Cultural Revolution and pesticide use are structurally identical — both treat nature as an adversary. This is an anthropocentric comparison (she still frames nature through human history), but it begins a shift that ends with her calling the Trisolarans to Earth: “Come here! I will help you conquer this world. Our civilization is no longer capable of solving its own problems.”
Mike Evans takes Singer’s Animal Liberation further than Singer intended. Singer argues equality of suffering across species; Evans turns this into “Pan-Species Communism” — a religious ideology closer to Taylor’s biocentrism (all living things have inherent worth, humans are not superior) — and ultimately into Adventism (humanity must be eliminated for Earth to heal). The radicalization is triggered not by a novum but by watching a successful conservation effort destroyed by logging, which pushes him beyond reform into annihilation.
Liu’s point is that anti-anthropocentric ideologies, when fully internalized and popularized, produce something potentially more destructive than the anthropocentric worldview they oppose. The bugs, the novel ends by noting, have never been truly defeated — but the humans trying to defend them have become as extreme as those destroying them.
Images, photographs, and the destabilization of reality
Liu uses photographs throughout the novel to prepare the reader for the dissolution of stable reality that the Trisolaran contact requires:
- Wang Miao’s landscape photographs — wildernesses “free of human presence” — are the visual correlate of his work: imagining a world without humanity.
- The countdown appearing on his photographic film, then on his retinas, literalizes the alien intrusion into human perception itself.
- The contrast between a Song Dynasty painting (Along the River During the Qingming Festival, depicting daily life in meticulous detail) and a photograph of empty sky: the sky contains more information by orders of magnitude. Liu reads this as literature’s problem — it centers humans, but human experience is a small fraction of what exists.
The photographs work as Baudrillardian simulacra: images that create their own reality, eventually displacing the “real” they were meant to represent.
Three Body: the game as hyperreality
The virtual reality game “Three Body” is Baudrillard’s third-order simulacra — simulation of simulation, based on no original. It reconstructs historical civilizations (players take the roles of Newton, Aristotle, Mao) in a world modeled after the alien civilization of Trisolaris, which operates under chaotic, unpredictable physical laws. The players begin to prefer it to reality:
“Compared to Three Body, reality is so vulgar and unexciting.”
The game is also a site of political resistance — players use it to organize against the Chinese state — making it simultaneously fictional, political, and a stand-in for a real civilization that is about to make contact. Liu uses it to blur the distinction between Earth, Trisolaris, and virtual representation.
The Earth-Trisolarist Organization: a taxonomy of anti-anthropocentrism
The ETO’s three factions represent different ideological positions:
- Redemptionists: humanity can be saved by alien intervention
- Adventists (Evans’s faction): humanity must be eliminated; pure biocentrism/Pan-Species Communism
- Survivors: betray humanity for personal survival
This is not sympathetic portraiture. Dories argues that Liu is problematizing these positions — showing what happens when anti-anthropocentric theory is radicalized and acted upon. The Trisolarans, the ETO discovers too late, regard humans as “bugs” to be exterminated. The novel ends with the observation that bugs, despite all human efforts to eliminate them, have never been truly defeated — an ambivalent final note on the value of persistence at the species level.
Key concepts
- Novum (Suvin): the generative device or idea that makes SF possible — the alien intelligence, the countdown on the retinas, the physical laws that do not hold. Each novum catalyzes a shift in the character’s worldview.
- Cognitive estrangement: SF’s mechanism of making the familiar strange in order to see it differently.
- Anthropocentrism: the assumption that human beings are the center of value in the universe.
- Biocentrism (Taylor): all life has inherent worth; humans are not inherently superior.
- Speciesism (Singer): arbitrary discrimination on the basis of species membership, analogous to racism.
- Simulacra (Baudrillard): representations that have no original — the map precedes the territory.
Connection to the rest of the trilogy
Dories reads The Three-Body Problem as preparatory rather than culminating. The novel establishes why characters might turn against humanity, builds the philosophical vocabulary of the trilogy (anthropocentrism, betrayal, outside intervention), and introduces the Trisolaran threat. The Dark Forest and Death’s End then explore what genuinely non-anthropocentric thought might look like — and whether it is livable.