Speaking in Riddles on Trisolaris: Communicating Liberal Democracy to the Disillusioned

In: Defence strategic communications: the official journal of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, Band 13, S. 39-50

Abstract

It is hard to overestimate the effect of The Three-Body Problem and the ensuing trilogy by Liu Cixin1 on the collective imagination. Not many works of science fiction have achieved such global fame as The Three-Body Problem trilogy, also known under the common title Remembrance of Earth's Past,2 and even fewer have had a three-part documentary series produced by BBC Studios explore the science behind the fiction.3According to the IMDB, at least 65 million people have watched the docuseries. Netflix has now commissioned Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss to develop a TV series,4 to be released in January 2024—despite protests from several US Republican senators who had noted the writer's controversial statements on Chinese policies against the Uighurs in Xinjiang. The first book of the trilogy had sold more than 8 million copies by the end of 2020. On Reddit, fans discuss which disciplines one has to study in real life to approximate 'cosmic sociology', a fictional academic field that one of the central characters, Luo Ji, develops in his work.