Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 448

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Three-Body Problem," by Cixin Liu.

Through her wet clothes, the chill of the inner Mongolian winter seized Ye like a giant's fist. She heard her teeth chatter, but eventually even that sound disappeared.The coldness penetrated into her bones, and the world in her eyes turned milky white. She felt that the entire universe was a huge block of ice, and she was the only spark of life within it. She was the little girl about to freeze to death, and she didn't even have a handful of matches, only illusions...

As an astrophysicist, Ye was strongly against nuclear weapons. She knew this was a power that should belong only to the stars. She knew also that the universe had even more terrible forces: black holes, anti-matter, and more. Compared to those forces, a thermonuclear bomb was nothing but a tiny candle. If humans obtained mastery over one of those other forces, the world might be vaporized in a moment. In the face of madness, rationality was powerless.

Interrogator: Let's look at the current composition of the ETO. The Adventists would like to destroy the human race by means of an alien power; the Redemptionists worship the alien civilization as a god; the Survivors wish to betray other humans to buy their own survival. None of these is in line with your original ideal of using the alien civilization as a way to reform humanity.

Ye: I started the fire, but I couldn't control how it burnt.