3: Gender, History, and Nation: The Three-Body Problem in Liu Cixin's Love-Murder Complex

“The slender figure of a beautiful young girl emerged at the top of the building, waving the giant red banner of the April Twenty-eighth Brigade. Her appearance was greeted immediately by a cacophony of gunshots. The weapons attacking her were a diverse mix: antiques such as American carbines, Czech-style machine guns, Japanese Type-38 rifles…People’s Liberation Army Rifles…and even a few dadao swords and spears. Together, they formed a condensed version of modern history” (Liu Cixin 2014: 10).

How do national subjects imagine futures without the translation of perspectival pasts? How are such pasts and their contingent futures translated without the reproduction of receptive personhoods to reiterate and consume them? What institutional forms encompass, yet are ultimately dependent on, the translation of these temporalities and personhoods; as well as the divisions of social labor both entail? In answering these questions, this presentation treats contemporary sci-fi literature as a key ethnographic site for exploring political discourse in post-socialist China. Drawing on Talcott Parsons’s (1943) study of kinship in 1950’s America as well as Kimberle Crenshaw’s (1991) landmark research on intersectionality, I will explore a relationship between tropes of gender, nation, and history in Liu Cixin’s sci-fi novel, Three Body Problem (2014). These three tropes are a key counterpoint in Liu’s account of the consequences an imagined  alien ‘First Contact’ moment were it to have happened in the dying days of China’s cultural revolution. Their relationship between these tropes, I suggest, can be understood in terms of what I call a ‘love-murder complex.’