Everyone you've met

Visited Shanghai in 1922; Shao Lin's father accompanied him, and they only once spoke, about a child laborer's five-cent daily wage.

A younger, fanatical Red Guard faction of over two hundred; it kept iron stoves packed with explosives wired together inside its headquarters.

A period of factional civil war and madness in China; many intellectuals including Lao She and Fu Lei killed themselves.

The Red Guards ransacked Ruan's home, tore her paintings, toppled her piano and publicly humiliated her as a decadent capitalist.

A veteran Red Guard faction formed at the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966; it besieged the April Twenty-eighth Brigade's headquarters for two days.

Ye Wenjie's college advisor and closest friend and confidante, other than her father, through the Cultural Revolution.

Ye Zhetai's wife and a physics professor, from a prominent family; forced to denounce him publicly, she went mad and laughed after his death.

A public rally to humiliate and break enemies of the revolution until they confessed; over seventeen hundred victims were beaten to death in Beijing in forty days.

Ye Zhetai's daughter; held back by janitors from rushing onstage, she watched her father die and then placed his pipe in his hand.

A physics professor at Tsinghua who refused to repent, kill himself or go numb, defying his struggle sessions to the end.

Bai Mulin is a sensitive, bespectacled reporter for the Great Production News who is horrified by the Corps' deforestation and drafts a letter to Beijing leaders.

Cheng is a gentle-seeming woman in her forties, a military representative from the Intermediate People's Court, who uses kindness and then cruelty to pressure Ye.

Director Zhang of the Division Political Department investigates Ye Wenjie over the letter and labels Silent Spring reactionary.

The double-bomb project shocked the world in 1964 and 1967 and was protected by top leaders from Cultural Revolution disruption.

The Corps, over a hundred thousand strong, was partly created for border defense against the Soviets, yet its members mainly clear forests and grasslands; it was disbanded in 1975.

Ma Gang is a muscular company chain saw operator who feels nothing about felling a 330-year-old larch and dismisses intellectuals' fussing.

Radar Peak is a heavily guarded military base with a large antenna whose operation causes strange weather, animal panic, nausea and hair loss; sentries shoot intruders without warning.

Rachel Carson's 1962 book on pesticides was distributed to select cadres for criticism; Bai gave Ye a copy, and officials later branded it reactionary propaganda.

Ye's younger sister Wenxue was a radical Red Guard who denounced their father, contributing to his death, and died two years earlier in factional fighting.

Lei is the political commissar of Red Coast Base and was doubtful about recruiting Ye, calling it unconventional.

The antenna transmits a powerful electric field; birds flying into its beam fall from the sky and clouds glow faintly blue.

Red Coast Project is run under the People's Liberation Army Second Artillery Corps.

Yang is Red Coast Base's chief engineer and was once a graduate student of Ye Zhetai, Ye Wenjie's father.

The Battle Command Center is a military-led, secretive body that includes police, scholars and foreign NATO/CIA observers, investigating an unnamed enemy attacking elite scientists.

In this era Beijing is a forest-like city of tall trunks with branches and hanging buildings; the Hibernation and Reawakening Center is part of one tree.

Major General Chang Weisi presides over the Battle Command Center meeting, calling it a combat zone in a time of war and withholding background from newcomers.

Ding Yi is a theoretical physicist famous for discovering the macroatom while studying ball lightning, and was Yang Dong's boyfriend.

The Frontiers of Science is an international academic group that formed from 2005 World Year of Physics exchanges and uses science to seek science's limits.

Wang's nanomaterial can be drawn into a line one-hundredth the thickness of a hair, strong enough to slice a car like cheese.

Wang's Nanotechnology Research Center earned a lot of money from the Liangxiang accelerator.

Shen Yufei is a Japanese physicist of Chinese descent working for a Japanese company in Beijing, formerly of a Mitsubishi lab; she is a Frontiers of Science member.

Shi Qiang is a crude, chain-smoking police captain with a bad record, but he is very observant and was requested by General Chang.

Sinotron II is a twenty-billion-yuan high-energy particle accelerator under construction at Liangxiang; Wang led its nanoscale components.

Wang Miao is a nanomaterials researcher and amateur landscape photographer who dislikes rude people and had been admiring Yang Dong since seeing her a year earlier.

Yang Dong was a young theoretical physicist whose superstring model was to be the first test at the Sinotron II accelerator; she avoided media interviews.

Ding Yi's pool experiment illustrates that physical laws being invariant across space and time underlies all science; the accelerator results suggest this may be false.

Three new high-energy accelerators exist: in North America, Europe, and Liangxiang. They raised collision energy by an order of magnitude.

A ghostly countdown starting at 1,200 hours appears on Wang's photographs, even with the lens cap on, and tracks real elapsed time.

Dou Dou is Wang's six-year-old son.

A scientist turkey infers that food arrives every morning at eleven, but on Thanksgiving the farmer kills the flock.

Flying Blade is a new ultrastrong nanomaterial, so far made only in tiny precious quantities by stacking molecules one at a time with nanoprobes.

Wang's 1988 Leica M2 is fully mechanical and cannot add date stamps; he examined it and found no tampering.

The chamber tests huge numbers of molecular combinations, supplementing reactions with mathematical simulation, but had run over a year and its sensors were degrading.

Pan Han is a biologist in the Frontiers of Science whose specific predictions about genetically modified foods proved accurate, prompting rumors he came from the future.

Pastoral China is an experimental community inside a large city that lives on urban trash and has over three thousand permanent members.

Dr. Zhang is Tianming's attending physician and a high school classmate of Tianming's sister; he seems to be acting on her behalf.

A marksman's whim making holes in a target is mistaken by two-dimensional creatures for a fundamental law of their universe.

An ophthalmologist there found Wang's eyes healthy and attributed the numbers to floaters or exhaustion, suggesting psychological causes.

The V-suit is a gaming set of panoramic helmet and haptic feedback suit that simulates sensations like pain, heat and cold.

Wei Cheng, Shen's husband, stays home and seems to research something on a very expensive HP workstation in his upstairs room.

Three Body is an immersive game accessible only by V-suit, set in a world where the sun moves unpredictably.

In the game, Chaotic Eras are periods of unpredictable sun movement, bringing extreme cold or heat; people survive them by dehydrating.

Civilization Number 137 reached the Warring States Period before being destroyed by a 48-year night of extreme cold.

The CMB matches a black body at about 2.7255 K and is nearly uniform; its overall fluctuation should change only over cosmic timescales.

People survive Chaotic Eras and cold by dehydrating into skins stored in dehydratories, and are revived by being thrown into water.

One flying star appears in the sky during Chaotic Eras; two herald a Stable Era; three are dreaded by King Wen.

Follower is King Wen's disciple who dehydrates himself to survive and be carried by Wang; he suggests burning or eating dehydrated bodies.

Fu Xi, a man in black, believes the sun is a temperamental god; he proposed the pendulums to lull it to sleep, and bathes in a cauldron.

Soldiers keep tens-of-meters-tall pendulums swinging in unison around King Zhou's pyramid, meant to hypnotize the sun god into a long slumber.

In the game King Wen is a scholar traveling to Zhao Ge to give King Zhou an accurate calendar based on yin-yang and the I Ching.

King Zhou rules from a pyramid palace in Zhao Ge and stays awake during Chaotic Eras while his country is dehydrated.

King Wen carries a five-compartment sandglass on his back that empties every eight hours, used to measure time.

Stable Eras are periods with regular day-night cycles and mild climate, lasting from a day to a century; civilization can develop only then.

Their appearance in the sky signals the arrival of a long period of extreme cold.

She is a retired astrophysicist, familiar with Chinese cosmic microwave background facilities, who lives alone and refuses a caretaker.

Zhao Ge is King Zhou's capital, centered on a huge pyramid palace; King Wen says yin and yang meet there so predictions are accurate.

Sha is Ye's former student who works at a radio astronomy observatory near Beijing and will be on night shift the next day.

It holds Yang Dong's drawings from age three, which are only furious, desperate tangles of lines, dated by Ye.

3K glasses are a science toy made for the Capital Planetarium that converts seven-centimeter CMB waves into visible red light.

An explosion at the Liangxiang accelerator construction site is cited as one of the crimes against science institutions.

Destroyed in flames when a gigantic sun rose and burned everything, despite Mozi's prediction of a four-year Stable Era; it had reached the Eastern Han Period.

Predicted a five-year Stable Era using rites; the sun went out suddenly after a month and he froze into a column of ice.

Claims the universe is a machine: a hollow double-shell sphere in a sea of fire, with holes producing stars and the sun.

It is the true heart of Red Coast, with a liquid-helium-cooled maser receiver, CRT terminals, FORTRAN and databases; it watches enemy space activity.

Ye saw that transmissions 304, 318 and 325 used frequencies below microwave range and could not heat any target.

Built in 1963 in Puerto Rico; collecting area exceeds all other radio telescopes combined, monitors 65,000 channels and can transmit at ultrahigh energy.

Rejected the first draft of the message as "utter crap" and ordered the Cultural Revolution leadership kept out of Red Coast.

1960 SETI search at Green Bank using a 26-meter telescope on Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani for 200 hours; Ozma II planned for 1972.

Builds a linguistic code from basic mathematics and classical physics so any civilization with algebra, Euclidean geometry and classical mechanics could understand it; supports Chinese and Esperanto, 680 KB total.

An internal article judged SETI the field where a technological leap is most likely, with impact exceeding all other fields combined.

Intelligence suggests systematic, long-term SETI investment, including a planned global-scale VLBI radio telescope system.

Sociologist at RAND Corporation who proposed the 'contact as symbol' theory in his book The 100,000-Light-Year Iron Curtain: SETI Sociology.

Theory that contact with aliens acts as a symbol or switch; regardless of its content, it would magnify divisions within human society and likely cause disaster.

Kardashev divided civilizations by energy command: Type I equals Earth's output, Type II a star's, Type III a galaxy's. Earth is about Type 0.7.

Aristotle argues that Wang's theory implies three normal suns should sometimes be seen, which has never been recorded; he prepares to light Wang's pyre.

Civilization 183 was destroyed by a tri-solar day after reaching the Middle Ages.

Galileo champions observation and experiment, scorns Eastern scholars including Mozi as mystics, and objects that Wang's theory predicts never-seen intermediate-sized suns.

Bruno's charred body is tied to the stake; he too came and preached such ideas and was burned.

Leonardo notes a record of one civilization destroyed by two suns, and quietly calculates while others prepare the burning; he mentions the system recorded Wang's retinal scan.

The pope presides over the council, mocks Wang's theory and repeatedly orders him burned, smiling like King Zhou of Shang.

A tri-solar day, when all three suns appear in the sky, melts rock and destroys civilization; an eon passes before life returns.

The Adventists and Redemptionists are factions in the organization, one wanting humanity eliminated and the other saved; Pan asks which the commander favors.

Wei Cheng's method treats motion-vector combinations as life forms, eliminating disadvantaged ones to predict a three-body system's next state; it requires enormous computing power.

Wei Cheng argues Poincaré only proved sensitive dependence on initial conditions and non-integrability of the three-body problem, not that it is unsolvable.

Wei says the Lord can no longer even protect Himself; sunrises now feel like sunsets to him.

Most attendees at the meeting are Redemptionists, who would side with the government in a crackdown.

The abbot, after thinking, concluded that Shen's 'Lord' really exists, and warned Wei Cheng against leaving with her, sensing unimaginable things behind her.

The commander orders the reawakened contingent to serve as acting captains of centrally commanded warships, relaying former captains' orders to guard against the Imprinted.

Computers have definitively proven that the three-body problem has no solution; the three-body system is chaotic and unpredictable.

Xu Bingbing is a computer specialist from the Information Security Division who shares Da Shi's office.

The astronomy minister, a Cambridge doctorate holder, realized the sun was actually three suns aligned and warned that disaster was coming.

Qin Shi Huang says Caesar is waking up and reinvigorating his army, though Newton says Rome is sunk in extravagance.

Civilization 184 reached the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, with Newton's classical mechanics, calculus and Von Neumann architecture computers, but was destroyed by a tri-solar syzygy.

Newton duels Leibniz over the claim to have invented calculus, wounds him, and boasts that his three laws of mechanics make him the greatest after God.

Wiener reportedly died fighting pirates near Madagascar so the other scholars could escape.

Qin I is a thirty-six kilometer square computer motherboard made of thirty million soldiers, with CPU, memory, bus of light cavalry, scribes as hard drive, and display.

Qin Shi Huang rules the East in Three Body, commands over thirty million soldiers, and has the same eyes as King Zhou of Shang and Pope Gregory.

The system administrator invited Wang to a Three Body players' meet-up the following night and gave him an address, but refused his questions.

In the syzygy the three suns line up with the planet at the end, adding their gravitational pulls and tearing the planet's surface into space.

Von Neumann proposes a human-wave computer of thirty million soldiers to numerically solve the differential equations predicting the three suns' motion.

The author, a famed avant-garde novelist, is disgusted with humanity and yearns for Trisolaran civilization to bring beauty.

The philosopher argues the Conquistadors' conquest benefited history by stopping the Aztecs, so Trisolaran arrival would be good for humanity.

The executive calls the others' thoughts very dangerous, citing the Aztecs' destruction.

The vice president tested the formation computer idea with employees, and rejects the philosopher's Aztec argument.

The reporter has lost hope in humanity and welcomes outside intervention.

Pan says the formation computer, made of people raising flags, really existed on Trisolaris before mechanical and electronic computers.

Astronomers found the system once had twelve planets; the other eleven were consumed by the suns, whose gaseous layers 'breathe' over eons.

It reached the Atomic and Information Ages, proved the three-body problem unsolvable, and was destroyed by twin suns; Three Body's goal became finding a new home among the stars.

In this Three Body scene, Einstein is a homeless old violinist begging at the UN steps, dismissed from Princeton and UNESCO.

A distant sun appearing motionless against the starfield signals possible collision; it is an extremely unlucky omen on Trisolaris.

It is about a quarter the size of Trisolaris, the smaller piece torn off in the great rip, and a lifeless world with ruins of Civilization 191.

Three suns fell toward Trisolaris and passed within its Roche limit; the third tore the planet in two, destroying Civilization 191.

The African UN secretary general declares Trisolaris must leave its system and gamble by finding a new world among the stars.

A modern giant pendulum with metal pillars as tall as the Eiffel Tower, built as both a monument and a tombstone for the effort to solve the three-body problem.

Earth has one sun and an eternally mild climate; the listener saw it as paradise.

The game invites Wang to attend the organization's meet-up, with the address to be sent by follow-up e-mail.

The fleet is a square formation of over a thousand artificial star-like ships, each able to reach one-tenth the speed of light.

Mike Evans is the mastermind of the Adventists who deceived the ETO about their genocidal aim.

Rafael is an Israeli who lost his son, gave up on humanity, joined the ETO and became a core Adventist before exposing their agenda.

Evans built it on a ship in the Atlantic, modified from a sixty-thousand-ton oil tanker, with a huge parabolic antenna in the middle.

A device of three levitating silver spheres moving randomly sits in the meeting hall as a real-life three-body problem.

Boundaries between subzones of the sun's radiation zone that reflect lower-frequency radiation and, per Ye's model, amplify it about a hundred million times.

Peterson, an American astronomer, replied to Ye with a letter and photocopied waveform records of the Jupiter radio outbursts.

In the Wallbreaker's chain reaction, Jupiter would also fall into the sun, and Uranus and Neptune might follow.

Humans could use the sun as a superantenna to broadcast radio waves into the universe, at power far beyond anything Earth can produce.

Ye concluded the reply came from Alpha Centauri, about four light-years away, the nearest extra-solar system.

The sun works as an amplifying antenna for radio waves, and it adds a sine wave to what it amplifies.

A pacifist on the Trisolaran world received Ye's message first and warned Earth three times not to answer, or Earth would be located and invaded.

The young woman who had twisted Pan Han's neck held a nuclear bomb and demanded the commander's release; the bomb's partial explosion killed her.

A space elevator from the ground to a geostationary point could be built if ultrastrong nanomaterials were mass produced.

Hunter Qi's daughter-in-law, who nursed Yang Dong most and asked Ye why the stars don't fall.

Former hunter and herbalist turned farmer who, with his wife, took Ye and her baby into their home in Qijiatun.

Maple is a recent movie whose ending asks whether a dead Red Guard is a hero or enemy, answered only 'History'.

Restored exam open to anyone, even children of the Five Black Categories, which motivated village children to study.

Qijiatun is a small village below the clouds beneath Radar Peak, which Ye gazes toward from the cliff.

A high-level Education Ministry cadre, later deputy minister, who told Ye to drop old historical debts regarding her father's death.

Tang Hongjing struck Ye's father fatally with her belt; she later drowned in the Yellow River trying to save sheep.

Three former Red Guards meet Ye; they have aged, look worn and broken, and no longer carry the fervor that once drove them.

Evans's father was president of an international oil company and told his son that human civilization's comfort and survival take priority over other species.

Loggers from Nange Village and another village cut down Evans's forest, joined by the village chief's people, a forestry bureau deputy secretary and local police.

The hills were rejected as the observatory site despite the best electromagnetic environment, because the task force leader feared conflict with poor, crafty villagers.

Evans said this swallow subspecies nests only in the area, had under ten thousand individuals, and would go extinct within five years without his trees.

An ideology Evans invented, holding that all species on Earth are created equal; he sees it as continuing human rights and akin to Buddhism.

The ship that houses the Second Red Coast Base; a converted oil tanker with a giant round antenna.

The Survivors are a third faction who serve the Trisolarans so their descendants will survive the war 450 years away; they come mostly from lower classes in the East, especially China.

Only a receiver was built before construction stopped; the equipment and base were dismantled for lack of messages.

Six years ago Trisolaris accelerated two protons to near light speed; they reached Earth two years ago and are said to lock human science.

U.S. Marine special-operations expert who initially scorns Shi Qiang, then gives him cigars as a gift; he comforts Wang before the attack.

A trap of nanofilaments strung between two steel pillars across the canal, invisible but able to cut through a ship and everything in it.

Narrowest point of the canal, about 150 meters wide, chosen as the operation site; the ship must cross by day so crew are upright.

Named for the Chinese zither; the slicing net of nanofilaments is called the 'zither'. Fifty 160-meter filaments are strung between two pillars at the Gaillard Cut.

Stored on Judgment Day and possibly vital to human survival; they must be captured intact, since the enemy could destroy the storage within about ten seconds.

It is a small, old listening post with limited transmission power, with a maximum range of about twelve hundred light-years.

The listener at Post 1379 detected a radio signal from Earth rated Red 10, the first message from another world that any Trisolaran had read.

The princeps rules Trisolaris and plans to send the fleet to seize Earth's solar system, calling Humans warlike and dangerous.

Its humanism and culture, sent by alienated forces on Earth, have strong appeal on Trisolaris and risk spreading dangerous pacifism.

The response to the Trisolaran message came from an Earth traitor, suggesting alienated forces exist that Trisolaris can exploit.

Recognized the mirror's danger and warned of a zero-dimensional proton becoming a black hole.

A plan that sophons will be the main means of carrying out, in addition to interfering with the three powerful Earth accelerators.

The collider has a twenty-kilometer circumference, housed in an aboveground concrete tube, and has stopped operating; the supercomputer now serves other projects.

Aims to unfold a proton into two dimensions and turn it into a superintelligent computer; secret from most consuls, it replaced the second fleet.

Wrongly assured the princeps that the three-dimensional proton structures would have no effect on Trisolaris.

A sophon is a proton unfolded into two dimensions, etched with giant integrated circuits, then folded back to higher dimensions as the smallest artificial intelligence.

The first completed sophon. Raised to six dimensions, it can see inside everyone and entered the control center as a mirrored sphere.

Sophon Three and Sophon Four stay on Trisolaris, instantly receiving information from the two sophons sent to Earth through quantum entanglement.

The first unfolding made a one-dimensional string about fifteen hundred light-hours long that fell as glittering threads but was harmless.

Locusts have survived all human efforts to exterminate them throughout civilization; they have never been truly defeated, and their plague has worsened for ten years.

A rusty metal base covered in vines is all that remains of the antenna that sent Earth's first cry to an extraterrestrial world via the sun.

Ye Wenjie names chains of suspicion, with the technological explosion, as one of two further concepts needed to derive cosmic sociology, but does not explain them.

Cosmic sociology studies the nature of the supersociety formed by the vast number of civilizations in the universe; it would be purely theoretical, built from axioms like Euclidean geometry.

Luo Ji was Yang Dong's high school classmate, formerly studied astronomy and now teaches college sociology at the school where Ye Wenjie taught.

Ye Wenjie names the technological explosion as a key concept for cosmic sociology but leaves Luo Ji to work it out.

An ant crawls over Yang Dong's gravestone, forgetting most shapes and retaining only the characters for Yang Dong's name; it and the spider are the only witnesses to the axioms' birth.

The spider's web is swept away by Luo Ji's flowers, and it patiently rebuilds it.

The Trisolaran communicates by brain waves that display thoughts directly, so Trisolarans cannot lie, cheat, or hide, and they do not understand scheming or pretending.

Astronomer called a second Carl Sagan, who resents the military's requisition of Hubble II and holds 12.5 percent of its observation time.

Bai Rong is a young-adult novelist who earns more from royalties than her salary; Luo Ji considered marrying her.

English former scientist and EU president; named Third Wallfacer. Discovered brain activity operates at quantum level and was twice Nobel-nominated.

Black and White is a good-cop/bad-cop technique that isolates the subject, works best on intellectuals, and loses effect once the subject knows it.

The space force is being built on a naval model because space warfare is thought closest to naval warfare.

A survey finds defeatism spreading among space force troops, driven by technology worship; some request hibernation to join the Doomsday Battle four centuries later.

Escapism holds that defending Earth is futile and a portion of humanity should flee into space via New World, Starship Civilization, or Temporary Refuge.

Recently retired US secretary of defense; named First Wallfacer. His theory holds that technology ultimately empowers small countries over large ones.

A high-level coordinator with the Planetary Defense Council with no command over NORAD; Raeder believes he is a petty hype artist.

21-meter telescope assembled in orbit from eleven launches, fifty times more capable than Hubble, requisitioned by the military for observing the nearest star.

Superconductivity expert whose death from leukemia was officially said not to be a sophon strike; rumors claimed otherwise.

Karnoff speaks at the UN session, saying Escapism must be treated as harshly as the ETO, with missiles for anyone building an Ark.

Neuroscientist, Hines's wife, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for applying his theory to treating amnesia.

A statue outside the UN, a Soviet gift, showing a man hammering a sword; Luo Ji sees violence in it before being shot.

President of Venezuela and heir to Chavez's socialism; named Second Wallfacer. He defeated a US invasion using guerilla teams and cheap mass-produced high-tech weapons.

Small room in the UN building holding a six-ton raw iron rock, a gift from Sweden symbolizing timelessness and strength, plus an abstract painting.

Shanxi coal boss and neighbor who says the government is closing the mines and he must go clean up trouble.

Kent is a tall, experienced European official who welcomes Luo Ji; he says he is not authorized to explain the purpose of the meeting.

Its intercept headings were redirected into space as humanity's first planetary defense system, intended to destroy sophons unfolded in lower dimensions near Earth.

The UN General Assembly plans a special session on Escapism, co-facilitated by PDC permanent members; the failed tech-sharing plan ended the United Earth Space Force.

Cynical NMD target screening officer who doubts the defense system's value and hopes a sophon unfolds so it can be destroyed.

Filipino UN Secretary General who presides over the Planetary Defense Council meeting and announces the Wallfacer candidates.

Nameless man lying in a basement, who reviewed his life and aimed a gun at his own temple before a sophon text stopped him.

Shi Xiaoming is a salesman who persuades Zhang Yuanchao to buy into the escape fund, claiming ships will launch in about 120 years.

A snake-eye is a precise radar system that locates a shooter's position from a bullet's path; it helped catch the assailant.

Launched by Escapists, it demanded major powers share advanced technology free; the US and Britain vetoed even a limited version, splitting technological powers.

A carrier still under construction in dock; during fleet training exercises its place is filled by the training ship Zheng He or left empty.

The assailant is a European ETO militia guerilla with a permanent slight smile, captured after shooting Luo Ji.

The List is an interrogation technique of repeatedly asking the same questions and comparing answers for inconsistencies; silence is the best defence.

He told Luo Ji that his love for a fictional person was not a sickness, only natural literary talent, and that he should not try to forget her.

The woman is a character Luo Ji imagined in full life detail for Bai Rong's gift; she became so vivid that she seemed alive to him.

Hubble II's confirmation of the fleet ended humanity's last fantasies and began life under the Trisolar Crisis.

The UN General Assembly passed it by overwhelming majority, declaring Escapism a crime against humanity and calling on states to legislate against it; China supports it.

The UN uses the revised Wallfacer Act and the hibernation of Luo Ji's family to coerce and control him.

Luo Ji recognizes it by its sculpture of a giant revolver with a knotted barrel; an important meeting is to be held there.

Trisolaris views the Wallfacer Project, about to be put into action, with the same revulsion humans feel toward a snake; the ETO offers to help navigate its mazes.

Captain of the carrier Tang, he cannot read his political commissar Zhang Beihai's inner thoughts, which troubles him.

Xiao Zhang is a young crew member who explains the plane's rules and serves dinner; the plane may perform special maneuvers.

Retired middle school teacher who once followed world affairs but, feeling powerless against the crisis, has stopped caring.

Considered the most capable political commissar aboard; precise and forthright at work but inscrutable. His father is gravely ill in hospital.

Zhang Beihai's father is an old soldier in hospital who communicates through silence and brief words, and advises his son on space warfare.

A newly retired Beijing chemical plant worker who never cared about world affairs but is now troubled that humanity will be gone in four hundred years.

Zheng is a young subordinate of Shi Qiang who brings Luo Ji a bulletproof jacket and urges Shi to attend to his illness.

Chang Weisi believes few soldiers will have faith in victory in the Doomsday Battle.

Dr. Allen directs Los Alamos; he says no existing model fits a bomb ten times larger than the biggest thermonuclear device.

Garanin, a burly white-bearded Russian, is the PDC's current rotating chair and approves Luo Ji's request pending commission audit.

Harris, a young skeptic among the astronomers, weeps on realizing the invasion fleet is real.

High-tech: about 16,000 km/s (5% of light speed), full life support, reaching the Oort Cloud with preliminary interstellar navigation.

Hubble III, a planned hundred-meter telescope, will still only see Trisolaris as a dot.

Japan's defense chief Koichi Inoue strongly opposes Tyler's proposal to revive kamikaze special attack units in Japan.

The estate was donated to the UN by an anonymous wealthy owner; Luo Ji has only right of residence but keeps the leftover paintings and furnishings.

Low-tech: about 800 km/s, no life support, combat radius within Neptune's orbit (30 AU). Twenty-four officers chose it.

Mid-tech: about 4,800 km/s, partial life support, combat radius within 1,000 AU, beyond the Kuiper Belt. Seven officers chose it.

Luo Ji says the meaning of the Mona Lisa's smile changes every second and never repeats.

The fighters would network into one large group for cruising, then disassemble into independent fighters in battle, operating within roughly the orbit of Mars.

Allen's team is designing a 200-megaton superbomb whose fireball will burn for minutes and whose model is essentially a star, far more complex than today's bombs.

The old man, leader of an organization named in legend after Asimov's novels, says the group lives on hatred, which has faded, so it will die.

Each Wallbreaker is assigned to one Wallfacer and uses sophon surveillance to expose their actions and deduce their strategic aims, since only thoughts are secret.

The ETO announced Wallbreakers on its public website, verified by the CIA; a Wallbreaker's appearance would likely mean the end of that Wallfacer.

After the 'Wallfacer smile', 'part of the plan' became an idiom for anything absurd that must be done anyway.

The knowing smile directed at Wallfacers expresses the question of whether they are already working; it will become as famous as the Mona Lisa's smile.

Cosmo's team discovered 275E1, where a planet fell into a G2 star and ejected a spiral of stellar matter.

Zhuang Yan is a young graduate of traditional painting from the Central Academy of Fine Arts who loves painting twilight.

187J3X1 is a star 49.5 light-years from the sun that Luo Ji chooses; he asks Ringier to draw up its position pattern.

Bed flu is a mild, highly infectious flu that turned out to be a genetic weapon engineered to kill Luo Ji.

Its 160-kilometer-deep ocean holds more water than Earth's oceans and could supply a thousand space cities.

Metaphor for Starship Earth: limited capacity means some people must be expelled, and those who 'eat the fruit' grasp this.

High Frontier is a scorched, patched space plane on its thirty-eighth flight; the fourth such plane in operation, likely the last generation of chemical spacecraft.

Luo Ji's plan broadcasts three images of scattered dots, one larger marked dot, via the sun's radio amplification, targeting star 187J3X1 as a proof of concept.

The Resolving Imager scans all brain cross sections at once at 24 frames per second to model thought at neuron resolution.

She first conceived leaving a lasting legacy for humanity, planning an unmanned ship of artifacts, which was deemed Escapism and halted by her death.

Snow patches are interstellar dust clouds the Trisolaran Fleet passes through, five on its four-century voyage, leaving a visible wake.

Tyler's Wallbreaker is a pale, emaciated, humble man in a wrinkled suit and bowler hat who deduced Tyler's hidden strategy.

Xia Xia is Luo Ji and Zhuang Yan's one-year-old daughter.

Zhang Xiang, who saw Luo Ji off five years ago with Shi Qiang, now heads security at the underground facility.

Grandson of Zhang Yuanchao, whom Shi Xiaoming once cheated; he co-founded High and Deep Company and witnessed the Great Ravine.

A space force station in geostationary orbit, eighty kilometers from Yellow River Station and one-fifth its size.

The collector, a former soldier in the General Staff Department's Surveying and Mapping Bureau, became hooked on meteorites after an Antarctic survey.

Zhang Beihai wants it to become mainstream in spacecraft research; the Three Body side thinks radiation drive is an unsurpassable but fruitless peak under sophon lockdown.

This contingent consists of space force political cadres who will hibernate and serve as future reinforcements, after at least a year of space training.

The base achieved controlled fusion; its surface heat melted the snow and made peach flowers bloom, though most of the base is underground.

Tianti III is the only ocean-based space elevator, with a single sixty-centimeter rail and a cabin reaching 500 km/h, taking sixty-eight hours to reach geostationary orbit.

Verne Island is a nuclear-powered floating island on the Equator in the Pacific that serves as Tianti III's mobile base.

A wheel-shaped station 300 km above the space elevator terminus, serving as counterweight; the largest human structure in space, housing over a thousand people.

Zhang Weiming brings home ration cards and grain tickets, signalling a return to rationing and coming food shortages.

275E1 lies about 84 light-years away and its star resembles the sun; a small planet collision produced a spiral cloud 3 AU in radius.

Sends a continuous signal; if the signal is interrupted, the receiving system triggers. It monitors heartbeat, blood pressure, temperature and responds to voice commands.

A faith book holds the proposition for the volunteer to read; a ten-member panel inspects it, and changing even one word is a crime.

Faith Center is a building near United Nations Plaza with a Statue of Liberty replica; only space force members may use the mental seal there under strict supervision.

The monument bears the only permitted proposition: humanity will win the war against Trisolaris, the invaders will be destroyed, and Earth will endure ten thousand generations.

The Human Diary website let people record their lives, grew to over two billion users and became the largest body of information on the Internet.

The project collects data and artifacts of human civilization to send into space; the PDC halted it as defeatism, equating it with Escapism.

Technique discovered as a by-product of Hines's research that bypasses calculation in the brain's judgment process, making a person firmly believe information is true without thinking.

The underground test on Mercury threw up rock that formed a thin ring around the planet, making it the first ringed terrestrial planet.

Fusion reactors tested in geosynchronous orbit 30,000 km up for future non-media radioactive propulsion; they often fail when electromagnetic containment breaks and the core is exposed.

P269 is a joint proposal by the US, UK and France to terminate Rey Diaz's strategic plan.

The first stellar hydrogen bomb has a projected yield of 350 megatons, seven times the largest hydrogen bomb ever built by humanity.

A volunteer college student who, after an enhanced scan during the proposition 'Water is toxic', came to sincerely believe water is toxic and refused to drink.

With the UK, France and Germany, demands suspending Rey Diaz as Wallfacer and trying him for a new crime of Extinction of Life on Earth; the CIA waits to arrest him.

Rey Diaz's Wallbreaker is a handsome middle-aged man resembling Superman who watched Rey Diaz through sophon images.

Wilson, a drunk civilian space force member, asked for a mental seal proposition that his wife Katherine loves him and is faithful; Hines threw him out.

Vice-captain of Natural Selection who joins the silent eye communication.

The fleet has become an independent country with a president as supreme leader; the commander only runs the military.

Special Commissioner of the SFJC who arranged Luo Ji's reawakening and briefs him on the modern world.

Blue Shadow is a small high-speed fusion-powered ship with a five-seat capsule, sent to rendezvous with and closely track the Trisolaran probe.

Concept that after suffering the Great Ravine, civilization's immune system ensures humanism comes first and the early Crisis Era's extremism won't recur.

Cabins fill with oxygen-rich fluid that trained personnel breathe, equalizing pressure inside and outside the body so they can survive extreme acceleration.

Young captain of Natural Selection, tall and spacer-born; she greets Zhang Beihai as her forbear and offers him a pistol to kill her if she proves defeatist.

He is Earth's lead scientist for the Ringier-Fitzroy Telescope, favors fast station rotation for Earth gravity and admires Earth's superpowers over fleet bureaucracy.

After the split, humanity is divided into Earth International, Fleet International and Starship International.

Europe is now a single country including eastern and western Europe, but not Russia.

Financial Counselor 8065 of the General Banking System appears on a billboard and claims to be a real person.

It plans to use nuclear blasts to spread oil-film dust between the sun and Earth to reduce solar radiation and ease global warming.

A group of scholars, scientists and strategists around Zhang Beihai's father who predicted the Great Ravine, the Second Enlightenment, and humanity's defeat in the Doomsday Battle.

Hibernators' interest is calculated by a special formula that skips the Great Ravine inflation.

He is the fleet's head of military affairs for the Ringier-Fitzroy telescope and prefers a slow or zero rotation of the station.

The Great Ravine is a catastrophic event after which marriage and family disappeared; the doctor suggests it is better Luo Ji not know of it.

A sculpture of skeletal arms reaching from a desert, with an obelisk reading: Make time for civilization, for civilization won't make time.

Greenleaf Group sells homes in the tree-like buildings, called leaves, and advertises personally to Luo Ji through a cigarette pack.

Guo Zhengming is a PSB Digital Reality Department officer who hibernated with leukemia and awoke at thirteen, adapting to modern life.

The cup heats milk with a slider and no visible recharge; the era has inexhaustible electricity and no batteries.

Hibernation does not count as age by law, so reawakened people count as the younger generation.

Funeral firm founded by Shi Xiaoming and Zhang Yan, offering space burials and mine burials that double as anti-Trisolaris tombs.

A network murder virus released by the ETO a century into the Crisis Era, made to target Luo Ji, and dormant while he hibernated.

Vice-captain of Natural Selection who joins Dongfang Yanxu in silent eye communication about fuel, parts and killing.

Superconductor belt generating a magnetic field that interacts with the ship's field, letting personnel move freely in weightlessness.

Flagship of the Asian Fleet's third squadron, with a disc-shaped body and separate cylindrical engine; fusion drive reaches 15 percent of light speed.

A hibernator settlement oasis near the old Beijing-Shijiazhuang expressway, with a district government, hibernators farming, and modern visitors called walltappers.

A substance in Neptune's rings that, when heated, turns into gas and condenses into nanoparticle dust that the solar wind does not easily disperse.

Pacific brought a hydrogen bomb and four oil-film spheres from Neptune's rings, left them in space, then returned to Neptune base.

A UN proposal to provide space in the Solar System for defeated Trisolarans after a human victory, with Weak and Strong Survival Plan versions.

Proposed by the North American and European Fleets to terminate the Wallfacer Project and abolish the Wallfacer Act; passed unanimously.

It had entered deep-sea state before the battle at Ding Yi's behest and escaped at Ahead Four after the third row fell.

Located at the outer rim of the asteroid belt, it discovered 415 new trails in the dust cloud near Trisolaris on the thirty-eighth day after deterrence ended.

A telescope of six giant barrelless lenses, the largest 1,200 meters across, built jointly by the three fleets to monitor the Trisolaran Fleet.

The pills delivered under this name were actually a prescription short-term hibernation drug that is fatal without hibernation equipment, often used for suicide.

Restaurant robot servers look beautiful, follow fixed paths and see only table and chair sensors; one stabbed a knife at Luo Ji's chair twice.

The three fleets (Asian, European, North American) are independent suprastate entities and UN members, each with the might of an old superpower.

Successor to the Planetary Defense Council; it is nominally the highest Solar Fleet command but only coordinates and has no real power.

The nurse is kind and reassures Luo Ji that things are not so serious; she calls her folded-over bicycle her bicycle, not an umbrella.

The future city's buildings are giant tree-like structures with homes as leaves; nearly every surface works as an information display.

One Trisolaran probe is due to reach the Solar System this year, with nine more arriving three years later.

Xiong Wen is a young hibernator who entered hibernation before the Wallfacer Project to escape reality; he woke five days before Luo Ji.

It was the last ship destroyed by the droplet.

Luo Ji calls Starship Earth's Battle of Darkness a microcosm of cosmic civilization, where a chain of suspicion emerged among humans.

Blue Space survived because it had made its interior a vacuum and put everyone in space suits, so the infrasonic waves could not harm them.

It had entered deep-sea state before the battle at Ding Yi's behest and escaped at Ahead Four after the third row fell.

The chain of suspicion means civilizations cannot know what the other thinks about what it thinks, regardless of morality; across space distances it becomes practically indestructible.

Starship Earth's first governing meeting; it settled the destination and independence, and debated a constitution before leadership structure.

Psychologist and chaplain on Enterprise, he speaks of vipers in the second Garden of Eden and urges Lan Xi to seek the fruit of knowledge himself.

Military psychology agency responsible for psychological health; it had prepared hibernation quarantine for mass psychological disaster and has special power to impose mandatory counseling.

Luo Ji's spell broadcast the position of star 187J3X1 to the cosmos so that hostile civilizations would attack it, as a hunter fires on a marked location.

Its captain bypassed safeguards to enter Ahead Four without deep-sea state protection, crushing personnel; the droplet still destroyed it.

The bureau refuses to reawaken Zhuang Yan and Xia Xia, saying Luo Ji's Wallfacer powers do not apply here.

Hibernators in the fleet were mostly in low-level duties but tended to regain clear judgment earliest during the destruction.

Infinite Frontier was the first warship hit by the droplet; its fusion fuel tanks exploded in a nuclear fireball.

Every ship carries them and stealth launches are hard to defend against; the captains consider using them against other ships.

Lieutenant Colonel and chief psychologist of Natural Selection, he heads CSD2 and prepared mainly for homesickness, not the real crisis.

A captain and hibernator who noticed the projectile slowed slightly after each ship, inferring a single object; he and Zhao Xin are friends.

A small unmanned craft with an extra-long robotic arm, previously used to collect asteroid samples; it captured the droplet.

After the Battle of Darkness, people called space-dwelling survivors of escape a 'Negacivilization', spiritually alienated and an enemy of human civilization like Trisolaris.

It was the first ship to try intercepting the droplet, with gamma-ray lasers.

The European Commonwealth's third space city was hit by ten million laser beams from Earth, heating it and forcing evacuation.

A planetary system in Cygnus with two Jupiter-like gas giants, unsuitable for life but a source of nuclear fuel.

A photoid is a tiny object moving near light speed whose relativistic mass reached one-eighth of 187J3X1's, destroying the star on impact.

Homesickness was widespread but mild on Starship Earth because Earth was in chaos and doomed.

The Snow Project would seed dust clouds with stellar hydrogen bombs and Neptune's oil film so droplets passing through leave trackable traces.

The tomb carries a nuclear-powered votive lamp and a titanium plate engraved with victims' names; it travels at 1 percent of light speed toward NH558J2.

The five ships Natural Selection, Blue Space, Enterprise, Deep Space and Ultimate Law form an independent country of just over five thousand people, all that remains of Earth's space fleet.

Council of the five captains formed to decide major affairs, keeping existing chains of command.

The new mayor, a bespectacled hibernator and Shi Qiang's former superior, took office the day before after the former mayor died in a car crash in a riot area.

Its captain shot himself on the aft platform, murmuring 'Dark. It's so fucking dark.'

It entered Ahead Four after evacuating some personnel; over a hundred people in its hangar were crushed, and the droplet caught and destroyed it.

Quantum's science officer, born in the Asian Fleet; she will accompany Ding Yi on his examination of the droplet.

An ensign and hibernator who correctly deduced from visual images that a single tiny, fast projectile was passing through ships in succession.

Luo Ji's cradle system is far more advanced than Rey Diaz's; its maintenance signal continues as long as he lives.

Earth and Trisolaris concluded the two explored systems were lifeless, which was why the sophons were allowed to approach them.

She felt shame and anger toward Luo Ji, whose rise and fall shattered her belief in ultimate justice, and she told him of his expulsion.

The Oort Cloud, about one light-year from the sun, is the birthplace of comets; Blue Space and Gravity were the first human ships to cross it.

The antenna is a mirror-smooth cylinder 1.5 km long and 50 m wide, suspended two meters above the ground by antigravity.

A Trisolaran who was the operator who sent the warning to Earth two and a half centuries earlier, now very old, speaks via a sophon.

A written account the narrator composes from memory; it is only a frame for a history rather than a detailed record, and lacks the rigor of history.

Sealed containers holding the preserved details of the events, which are hoped to reach the new universe and endure there.

The hoped-for destination of the floating bottles carrying preserved details, where they might endure.

Writes only a frame of events from memory, hoping someone someday will fill in the specifics, though that task will not fall to the narrator's generation.

The age of magic lasted from 4 p.m. May 3 to 9 p.m. May 28, 1453, twenty-five days and five hours, ending ten hours before Helena died.

Two identical gold chalices were cast under Justinian; one was held by the emperors, the other sealed in a secret chamber under Hagia Sophia in 537.

Constantine XI is the Byzantine emperor, practical and distrustful of miracles, defending Constantinople during a five-week Ottoman siege while hope of European relief fades.

Constantinople's walls, built by Theodosius II in the fifth century, are the world's strongest but are now being breached by Ottoman bombards.

Citizens of all ranks and Christian denominations gathered at Hagia Sophia for a final Mass before the battle.

Helena is a prostitute who claims magic that lets her see sealed places as 'open'; she says she can kill the sultan.

The high-dimensional fragment intersected Earth on May 3, 1453, and left on May 28, after which the world returned to its normal orbit.

Mehmed II is the Ottoman sultan; he drowned his brother and beheaded a slave girl, and is the sole reason the Ottomans have not retreated.

The minaret was said to have lost its top to a stray cannonball, but a soldier knew it vanished overnight without cannon fire; later it appeared complete.

Orban is the engineer who designed the monstrous Ottoman bombards, which fire twelve-hundred-pound stone balls every three hours.

Phrantzes is one of the emperor's most trusted ministers, who recruited much of the city's defenders and brought Helena to the emperor.

The spy stabbed Helena in the chest with his sword; it stuck in the wall, and he let go rather than touch her hands.

The model combines biology, geology, astronomy and atmospheric and ocean science to simulate Earth's surface evolution; with life unchecked, Earth becomes a dry, oceanless planet.

Green Glasses is a young man with thick bright green frames who runs an Earth-simulation program on the supercomputer terminals.

Cheng Xin first spoke to Tianming at a college outing at Miyun Reservoir and folded an origami boat; he thinks of her more and more.

The law, passed by a special session of the National People's Congress Standing Committee, lets patients end their lives through a multi-step confirmation procedure.

Tianming identifies with Kafka's story 'The Judgment', where a son accepts his father's death sentence.

Green Tempest is a grass-based herbal drink inspired by Tianming's college remark about crumpled weeds in mineral water; Huiyuan Juice wants to buy the company.

Hu Wen, a college classmate of Tianming and former aerospace engineer, became a beverage entrepreneur selling Green Tempest.

Lao Li, Tianming's terminally ill roommate, chose euthanasia so his children would not have to sell their houses to pay for his treatment.

A UN project, authorized by Resolution 479 of the Planetary Defense Council, that accepts bids from individuals and enterprises, not NGOs.

Tianming's father is frail and is paying Tianming's hospital bills from his life savings.

Tianming's sister and her husband cannot afford a home and live with their father; she resents Tianming's care draining their father's savings, which she sees as her inheritance.

Tianming is a terminally ill lung cancer patient whose cancer has spread throughout his body; chemo and radiation can only prolong his life.

Amendment placing development of natural resources beyond the Kuiper Belt under UN auspices; it also gave the first international legal definition of 'civilization'.

Historians used this label for incomprehensible events of the first twenty years of the Crisis Era, arising from the clash between the Crisis's impact and society's conservatism.

A pre-Crisis treaty modeled on the Law of the Sea Convention and Antarctic Treaty, originally limited to Kuiper Belt resources.

The academy in Shanghai is a large complex with over twenty thousand employees and five entrances.

Dr. He, an astronomer at Beijing Observatory, helps Tianming buy the star and privately thinks the project is a scam.

DX3906 is a dark red, faint star about 286.5 light-years away, apparent magnitude 5.5, visible to the naked eye; title registered to Cheng Xin.

Camille, an older French consultant from the European Space Agency, mocked Cheng Xin's idea at first, then acknowledged the route-distributed fuel was a genuine invention.

Bombs are launched ahead by rockets or repurposed ICBMs and spaced along about five AU; each detonation behind the sail accelerates the light probe.

Hibernation is a relatively mature technology; a 70 kg person would leave about 110 kg for the coffin-like hull and equipment.

Vadimov, a tall Russian in his forties with heavy accent, directs the Technology Planning Center and has a vague, possibly intelligence-linked past.

The PIA reports directly to the PDC and will focus intelligence work on the Trisolaran Fleet and Trisolaris, unlike earlier efforts aimed at the ETO.

A thin film that carries the payload in a capsule dragged behind it on cables about five hundred kilometers long, like an upward-flying parachute.

Code name for the feasibility study of en-route propulsion; the probe gains speed stepwise with each bomb, aiming above one percent of lightspeed.

Wade, an American, is the young, handsome, expressionless PIA chief; his office has a cold painting of early eighteenth-century New York and a bloodstained wreath picture.

Yu Weiming is a forgettable-looking Chinese assistant chief of the PIA who gave a concise speech about balancing national and agency loyalties.

Human cloning raised moral questions, mostly for those influenced by Christianity, but was sociologically far less complicated than hibernation.

After the Industrial Revolution, progress became a constant feature of society and humanity's faith in the future grew stronger.

Run by the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, it uses cryoprotectant and minus-50 °C cooling; the whole system weighs about three metric tons.

A fourteenth-century Ming Chinese multistage gunpowder rocket weapon, similar in principle to antiship missiles, with booster rockets that ignited smaller rocket arrows inside the missile.

Joyner, an HIV-positive NASA engineer, also refused the oath and died of pneumonia the next night, her brain unusable.

Under the amended Space Convention, anyone leaving the Solar System using Earth's resources must pledge loyalty to humanity; candidates took this oath at the UN.

It had a 25 square kilometer sail, a 45 cm capsule, and 1,004 bombs along its acceleration route to Jupiter's orbit, reaching 1 percent of lightspeed.

Gravitational waves were the main method of deterrence that humanity later used against Trisolaris.

Neutrinos, along with gravitational waves, are far more efficient signaling methods than electromagnetic waves.

Humanity's deterrence against Trisolaris consists of gravitational wave antennas on Earth and in space.

The fleet captain publicly greeted Bronze Age's crew warmly, then in silence announced their dishonorable discharge and transfer to Fleet International's justice system.

Gravity was the first stellar-class warship built after the Doomsday Battle, a perfectly regular white cylinder unlike modular Deterrence-Era ships.

Panicking crowds swamp the spaceport; some people launch shuttles amid the crowd, incinerating dozens with fusion plasma, and empty flying cars block launches.

Executive officer who led the first boarding party onto Quantum and directed the storage and distribution of the bodies as food.

Communications officer of Quantum; a Bronze Age crewman thanked her by name after identifying her tracking capsule in his food.

Captain of Bronze Age; claimed sole responsibility for attacking Quantum but, under pressure, admitted 1,670 of 1,775 crew (94%) voted to attack.

California high school teacher who in 1967 turned his class into a miniature fascist state in five days, as described in The Third Wave.

Lieutenant commander in charge of Bronze Age's targeting; one of two officers able to stop an attack, he did not stop it.

AA is an astronomy Ph.D. who discovered DX3906's planets using one star as a gravitational lens; she became Cheng Xin's liaison, then resigned to run her company.

Peace in the Deterrence Era let humans build cities above ground, move heavy industry into orbit, and restore Earth's ecology; society grew strongly feminine.

Replacing the Swordholder with AI was rejected: AIs decide poorly in complex deterrence, dictatorship-by-machine is politically worse, and sophons could interfere.

Humanity threatens to broadcast Trisolaris's location, destroying both worlds, to force Trisolaris to abandon its invasion plan and share technology.

Ultimate deterrence succeeds only if the degree of deterrence, the probability the threat is carried out, exceeds 80 percent.

Soviet Cold War system from 1974 ensuring a second-strike nuclear capability, with an operator in a secret underground chamber making the final launch check.

A holographic film that won Best Picture, based on a Li Zhiyi song; it tells of lovers kept apart for the entire story.

Li Zhiyi was a Song Dynasty poet who composed the busuanzi-form song on which A Fairy Tale of Yangtze is based.

Name given to Trisolaran-made films, novels, poetry, music and paintings imitating human models, which were sophisticated and hard to distinguish from human works.

An international organization at the same level as the UN, founded after deterrence was created to receive and digest scientific information sent from Trisolaris.

A. J. Hopkins is a bald candidate whose identity was lost; he refuses to reveal his past, which makes him a strong candidate.

Bi Yunfeng, 48, a former particle collider designer, warned the police and thereby saved Cheng Xin's life.

Cao Bin, 34, is the youngest candidate, a former physicist and colleague of Ding Yi who hibernated to wait for the sophon lock to end.

Cheng Xin's mother adopted her as an abandoned baby and ended relationships with men who showed impatience toward her daughter.

Ivan Antonov, 43, is a former Russian Navy vice-admiral and Baltic Fleet deputy commander who hibernated due to terminal illness.

Sophon is a robot woman controlled by sophons, serving as the Trisolaran ambassador to Earth; she lives in a bamboo house atop a giant tree.

The closest blind region lies about 1.3 light-years from Earth and was encountered by the sophons accompanying Gravity.

A spherical bubble about a meter across erases everything within it with mirror-smooth edges; Ike's bow remained undamaged after poking it in.

Devon commands Gravity's military police, is a survivor of the Doomsday Battle, and favors a hard line and reviving the death penalty.

An astronautic psychology concept: in deep space the world loses materiality, and the ship feels like the only object on display, causing loneliness and anxiety.

A nutrient tube ruptured here, showing micrometeoroid damage despite lying deep inside the ship, with no breach in the bulkheads above.

Guan is a civilian scholar living in Gravity's stern observatory, nicknamed the hermit at the stern, who suffers unexplained claustrophobia.

Ike, a sublieutenant, saw a one-meter spherical bubble cut through his cabin wall and Verenskaya's legs without harm, vanishing after about an hour and a half; he kept it secret.

Ivantsov, an ecological engineer formerly in external maintenance, identified a ruptured nutrient tube as damage from a micrometeoroid at about thirty kilometers per second.

During a hull inspection, Liu saw Gravity's tail appear cut off by an invisible knife, reappearing intact after he counted to thirty; he did not report it.

Park Ui-gun is the commander of the marines on Blue Space.

Verenskaya, a Russian AI system engineer on Gravity, secretly sympathizes with Blue Space and opposes hunting them while allied with humanity's enemies.

The Deterrence Center lies about forty-five kilometers beneath the Gobi Desert, in the mantle, and is the deepest man-made structure ever built.

A gravitational wave station here was nearly seized by the Sons of the Earth; defenders destroyed the antenna in time.

The first deterrence system was over three thousand nuclear bombs wrapped in oil film in solar orbit, meant to make the sun flicker and reveal Trisolaris's location.

A human-supremacist extremist group that advocated annihilating Trisolaris; over three hundred members attacked the Antarctic transmitter station in Year 6 of the Deterrence Era.

The fleet chief warns Cheng Xin that the red light may come on without warning and that Earth gets nothing if she does not return.

The switch resembles a sword hilt, with four buttons that need force and a specific order to press, preventing accidental activation.

The Tribunal's prosecution accuses Luo Ji of suspected mundicide.

A degenerate-matter string running the length of a gravitational wave ship has a fifty-year half-life, after which a whole new ship must be built.

Most of its ships head toward Sirius; it turned away from the Solar System after dark forest deterrence was established.

Assumes the new fleet will take two or three centuries to arrive and, after the Great Ravine, refuses to sacrifice the present for the future.

Consists of 415 ships that left Trisolaris five years earlier and passed through the first dust cloud four years ago.

Australia and one-third of Mars's surface are designated as human reservations; Australia is the main resettlement destination since space habitats hold only about three million.

Within three months over a billion people were relocated to Australia; governments and the UN moved to Australian cities and national districts formed.

Mars base, designated by Trisolaris as the second human reservation, houses about a million people and is patrolled by two droplets.

It orders humanity to disarm completely and resettle 'naked' with no heavy equipment or facilities within one year, to prevent any return of dark forest deterrence.

SIM is the only material able to defend against droplets; only small lab quantities existed, and large-scale production would have needed about ten more years.

Australia's food plan depended on factories with genetically modified crops needing ultrabright lights and massive electricity; without power the crops rot in days.

Exempt from disarmament, Australia kept its military and became the world's hegemon, then turned hard-line and dictatorial toward migrants and the UN.

The Australian Army fired on a mob of a hundred million heading for Canberra; over half a million died, mostly from hunger, thirst and stampede.

The resistance, about 1.5 to 2 million loosely organised fighters, wages hopeless guerrilla war against the ESF and is eliminated cell by cell.

The ESF has five million members in Asian, European and North American corps, recruited by Sophon with promises of freedom; it killed almost a million people enforcing resettlement.

Fraisse is an elderly Aboriginal man, formerly a wealthy Melbourne doctor and head of an Aboriginal cultural preservation organization, who hibernated in the Crisis Era.

Canberra's Parliament House became the UN headquarters after the Sydney Riots.

Australia's forced removal of migrants from Sydney caused clashes and casualties, provoking over a hundred million people to enter New South Wales and loot Sydney.

Blue Space's captain, 43, scholarly and calm. He ordered the ship's interior turned to vacuum during the dark battles and delayed its return after deterrence began.

The antenna would decay and fail in two months. The broadcast would reveal only Trisolaris's location, hoping to force Trisolaris to abandon Earth and let humans escape.

Hunter, 78, is officially Gravity's culinary controller but secretly holds captain's rank, assigned to destroy the gravitational wave transmitter controller if the ship's officers lose control.

Joseph Morovich is captain of Gravity and gathered senior staff in the combat center after the attack.

Reiko Akihara is a sublieutenant and navigator aboard Blue Space, and the only woman Hunter truly loved.

The four-dimensional fragment is a region of four-dimensional space inside three-dimensional space. Its three-dimensional projection is thought spherical, with a radius of forty to fifty AU, about the Solar System's size.

An independent hibernation ark is to be built and powered by one of the seven fusion reactors on the two ships, to carry those who want to return to the Solar System.

High-dimensional spatial sense is the felt perception of four-dimensional space, in which three-dimensional vastness is replicated infinitely along a new direction, like a hall of mirrors.

The pinnace monitoring the slip melted into the two-dimensional plane, killing its two crew members.

A database for teaching Earth languages to Trisolarans, with two million characters of documents plus images and decoding software; sent to the Ring by Gravity's neutrino beam.

The Ring is a sealed true four-dimensional object, roughly 80 to 100 km across with a band about 20 km thick and circuit-like patterns. It is probably an abandoned ruin.

A warped point is a tunnel from three-dimensional space into four-dimensional space. It is invisible in three dimensions, and objects entering it seem to vanish.

Science officer aboard Blue Space with relatively extensive experience navigating four-dimensional space; piloted the pinnace to the Ring.

For people of the Broadcast Era, the only smart choice was to carry out all three survival plans simultaneously.

This theory holds that the Trisolarans have no proof of dark forest theory. Their harsh evolutionary environment gave them a mass persecution complex, a faith akin to Medieval religions.

This tea conversation confirmed that a safety notice to avoid dark forest strikes is possible, giving humanity a sliver of hope.

Dark forest attacks are casual, with no reconnaissance, and economical, using a cheap projectile to trigger the energy already in the target star.

A safety notice is a universal broadcast meant to convince all listening civilizations that Earth poses no threat, so it must be trusted by all.

Proposes broadcasting a message proclaiming Earth civilization's harmlessness; most people thought it foolish because no one in the universe would believe such a message.

Advocates building a system beyond human control that would destroy the world if humanity behaved inconsistently with its claimed safe nature.

Holds the majority view that Earth must truly eliminate its potential to threaten others, combining talking and doing, with doing being the key.

Anti-intellect groups sought to lower human intelligence; one plotted to put neural suppressors in New York City's water but was caught in time.

The Green Saviors advocated a return to agrarian life; about 20,000 settled in Australia but quit collective farming within a week, since modern bodies could not handle the labor.

A space church in near-Earth orbit consists of a giant glowing cross with beams 20 and 40 kilometers long, surrounded by worshippers and vacuum candles.

A Crisis Era engineering project that failed its objectives and left nothing of technological value; it was forgotten even before the Great Ravine.

The dinghy has a hidden bomb, about five kilotons, that Sophon will detonate three seconds after the red light turns on.

A collection of Cheng Xin and Tianming's childhood stories, popular among Trisolaran children; Cheng Xin is credited as author.

The terminal station was completed in Crisis Era Year 15 and has eight concentric rings, with outer rings newer and larger, linked by five spokes.

The Halo Group is Cheng Xin's space construction company, headquartered in a building near the terminal station where AA works.

The meeting with Tianming will occur at an Earth-Sun Lagrangian point about 1.5 million km away, chosen as symbolic and per Trisolaran custom.

A tiny room with electrified dark metal walls, shielded from sophons; humans can achieve such shielding only within extremely confined spaces.

The team embraced Cheng Xin and told her she had accomplished a heroic deed after her recordings.

The IDC chair is also the current PIA chief, successor to Wade's position three centuries later.

The IDC is a joint effort of Fleet International and the UN PDC to decipher Yun Tianming's message and oversees twenty-five working groups.

The content of the three fairy tales is kept in absolute secrecy so the world won't rush to decipher them and expose Tianming.

Made from a slain abyss dragon's wing membrane, bones and kidney-ash stones; it protects its user from being painted, but no foreign material can be added.

Dewdrop's former wet nurse and caretaker, whom the princess feels closer to than her mother; she supplies the obsidian iron.

The captain drives the escape carriage, and neither he nor Auntie Wide has been seen by Needle-Eye.

The Glutton's Sea surrounds Tomb Island, which is hard to reach.

A land of valuable goods across the sea, such as feather-light bath soap; fewer and fewer of its objects remain in the kingdom.

Painter from He'ershingenmosiken who taught Needle-Eye; he is the only one who can stop him by painting him.

Young painter from He'ershingenmosiken who captures people in portraits; each person he paints disappears from their bed.

Only obsidian from He'ershingenmosiken can flatten snow-wave paper; Auntie Wide's gown-pressing iron is made of it.

The king's elder son, who went to Tomb Island in the Glutton's Sea as a child and never returned.

Cruel from childhood, he slaughtered animals in play; as an adult he hid his malice, feigning support for Dewdrop's succession.

Beautiful, kind, and smart, she was named heir apparent by the king and will be queen regnant.

Paper unrolled from a century-old snow-wave tree trunk; the painters' magic works only on it, and it must be flattened with obsidian.

A kingdom with no stories, whose people were happy until the king's children grew up and the succession question brought story to it.

Chose Dewdrop over Ice Sand as heir; he was painted by Needle-Eye and vanished from his bed.

An island out in the sea where Prince Deep Water lives; it cannot be reached because of the glutton fish.

Originally finger-long freshwater fish from He'ershingenmosiken caves, they grew man-length in the sea, bred explosively, and chew ships to nothing.

Weightless soap that produces abundant foam; only two bars are said to remain in the whole kingdom.

Elderly palace guardian stranded on Tomb Island who insists on the blood test to verify the princess's identity.

Grew from research on Trisolaris's destruction, used to model a Sun failure after a dark forest strike, and replaced Tianming's message as the focus of attention.

Interpreted either as cosmic civilizations in the dark forest, or as self-replicating intelligent machines humanity should build.

A last-minute addition to the IDC, made up of Common Era literature writers and scholars; its children's story writer spokesman said the message could never be deciphered.

Interprets the glutton fish as self-replicating machines forming a barrier around the Solar System; it was abandoned because it would take tens of thousands of years.

Abandoned: it required a habitat at least sixty AU from the Sun, beyond the Kuiper Belt, where resources are too scarce.

Neptune and Saturn have collapsed into two dimensions, appearing from Pluto as giant concentric-ring ovals resembling eyes.

Saturn fell into the two-dimensional plane before Uranus because Uranus was on the far side of the Sun.

They would orbit the Sun in sync with the gas giants, not as satellites, needing propulsion to avoid falling toward the planets.

Abandoned as technically impossible: it could save at most one-thousandth of the population and violated human moral principles and political stability.

A Common Era bar made by the Nice Group, bought from a museum at a huge price, it still gives off a faint fragrance.

Cheng Xin and AA silently conclude the fairy tales hint at curvature propulsion, communicating only by their eyes.

They have gained a status like the Bible, as people seek reassurance rather than real strategic intelligence from them.

Proposed in the Common Era, it would fold curved space like paper so points tens of millions of light-years apart touch, pulling the destination to you.

A black domain is a black hole formed by lowering the speed of light; it has a much larger Schwarzschild radius and an open interior rather than a singularity.

The fairy-tale umbrella with eight ribs and stone spheres was identified by Cheng Xin as an eighteenth-century steam engine centrifugal governor.

Poe wrote 'A Descent into the Maelstrom' about Mosken; the Great Ravine had destroyed his works in this era.

Jason is an elderly man from the Common Era, a former lighthouse engineer and the only inhabitant of Mosken, who built a lighthouse there.

Jason's lighthouse still stands there but is unlit, and the region is uninhabited.

The Moskstraumen is a maelstrom about a kilometer wide with slopes of at least thirty degrees; boats crossing its boundary line cannot return.

The paintings of Needle-Eye remain undeciphered; some interpreters think they symbolize the black domain's event horizon, but most disagree.

Oslo is the nearest city with a sophon-free room, and the helicopter heads there after leaving Jason.

Palermo is a historical linguist and philologist on the IDC linguistic group, who decoded He'ershingenmosiken after his girlfriend heard him mumble Helseggen and Mosken in his sleep.

The Black Domain Plan would turn the Solar System into a reduced-lightspeed black hole to broadcast a cosmic safety notice.

This plan relies on curvature propulsion, whose theory was unknown but was easier than the Black Domain Plan, and it gives no security, only escape into the stars.

The false alarm was the largest social disturbance since the Great Resettlement; over ten thousand people died in shuttle launch flames, and nations clashed at space elevator bases.

The church abandoned the giant cross in geosynchronous orbit as religious fervor faded; it is being dismantled until only a giant "1" remains.

Halo is a Halo Group corporate spaceship parked at the geosynchronous base; it has only five deep-sea-state capsules, so five can ride under maximum acceleration.

Ships entering lightspeed leave persistent spherical bubbles in space, transparent with faint borders, possibly lasting forever; one ten AU across lies in the Trisolaran system.

Vasilenko is the sublieutenant at Observation Unit #1; he insists they are sentries, and formerly observed the space where the Second Trisolaran Fleet entered lightspeed.

Widnall is the astronomer on Observation Unit #1; he believes issuing a photoid warning would needlessly torment billions for twenty-four hours.

A roughly 300-megaton hydrogen bomb stood in for an exploding Sun, with asteroid fragments modeling the eight planets, to test giant planets as shields.

A potato-shaped asteroid about 110 meters long, painted with Jupiter-like bands and a Great Red Spot that resembles a Cyclopean eye.

Bunker World is plain, metallic and utilitarian; most people work for a living, and information windows are sparse compared with the hyperinformation era.

The accelerator was the only substantive result of sixty years of basic research; it can create microscopic black holes.

Cities near Uranus and Neptune have standard docks so they can join along their spin axes; at Neptune four cities form a 200 km combined city.

The wealthiest city of the Bunker World, with only 4.5 million people, each district lit by its own miniature fusion sun.

A spherical city of twenty million people, radius twenty km, the largest by population and the commercial center of the Jovian cities; gravity varies with latitude.

The first city completed by the Bunker Project; it is weightless, dark, thrusterless and orbits Jupiter as a satellite. About six million mostly unemployed people live there.

An industrial stick-shaped city 120 km long and 3 km wide that tumbles end over end, with different gravity on each level.

Every space city is politically equivalent to a state, and the four clusters form the Federation; the old UN evolved into the Federation Government.

Space City Asia I is a spinning cylinder 30 km long and 7 km wide, behind Jupiter, with 659 km² of usable surface.

Cao Bin says cities favor hollow shells over wheel designs because residents need the feeling of living inside a world.

The Black Hole Project ran eleven years from Year 1 of the Bunker Era, with little hope of altering lightspeed but aiming to provide extreme gravity conditions.

Halo City is a medium space city, with interior area between fifty and two hundred square kilometers, far from the Jovian city cluster, almost outside Jupiter's shadow.

Leda, Jupiter's smallest moon with an eight-kilometer radius, was moved to the Sun-Jupiter L2 point and injected with a microscopic black hole, which absorbed it entirely.

Lightspeed I, built by the Bunker Project in the Saturn cluster, was a research center for lowering lightspeed; sixty years of research gave no breakthroughs.

Lightspeed II was a science city, one of two research centers studying lowering the speed of light for the black domain; it is now abandoned and in ruins.

高 Way headed the Black Hole Project; he suffered severe autism and tied his hope of changing the speed of light to changing himself.

Each bullet is a superconducting vacuum container suspending an antimatter ball by magnetic field; Halo City made fifteen thousand of them.

Blair is the Federation president's special envoy; he met Cheng Xin in person and gave her permission to enter the blockaded Halo City.

The Federation president, an ordinary-looking tired man of Asian descent, hopes Cheng Xin will persuade Halo City to end its resistance, doubting Wade's claim that the decision is hers.

A force of no more than a hundred soldiers in black space camouflage, armed with ancient-style mechanical rifles firing antimatter bullets.

This world was cleansed twelve time grains ago, apparently quickly because slow fog marked it as dangerous; it had exchanged three primitive membrane messages with the Star-Pluckers.

The dual-vector foil is used to cleanse systems with blind corners where a mass dot might leave something behind; Singer needs the Elder's approval to use it.

The Elder refuses Singer's request to use the big eye on the Star-Pluckers, but readily approves the dual-vector foil without questions.

If you can see a low-entropy world, it can eventually see you, so waiting for others to cleanse a seen world is dangerous.

Low-entropy clusters evolved the hiding gene and the cleansing gene; the maxim is 'Hide yourself well; cleanse well.'

The home world is at war with the fringe world; war news stopped, suggesting trouble, and rumor says it may transform into two dimensions.

The main core collects all membrane messages, matches them against star maps to find origins, but cannot judge coordinate sincerity.

Singer is the seed's cleansing agent, judging whether broadcast coordinates are sincere; his low-ranking job is held in contempt, but he enjoys it and sings classical songs.

Slow fog surrounding a world signals that it is dangerous and would otherwise be cleansed; it is a way to appear safe.

The Star-Pluckers pluck their star to broadcast primitive membrane messages; they lack the hiding instinct, and live on one of four solid planets of a star with eight planets.

The tomb is a data bank where useless coordinates and related information about cleansed worlds are stored, like burial effects.

Jupiter Combination II is a combined space city made of eight docked space cities, orbiting Jupiter as a satellite.

It carried the backup exploratory team and observed from about 100,000 km away.

Three-dimensional space falls into two dimensions, the whole Solar System becoming a painting without thickness; two-dimensionalized objects show every internal structure at all scales.

It is a transparent, glowing rectangle 8.5 cm by 5.2 cm with no measurable thickness, resembling a slip of paper.

A medium-sized ship with a large detachable gravitational wave antenna and good maneuverability; it took the paper slip inside its laboratory cabin.

A large science vessel with more advanced instruments, due to meet the expedition in seven days.

It passed the Oort Cloud edge near lightspeed, 1.3 light-years from the Sun, and was the first non-Trisolaran alien civilization humans observed.

Former doctoral student of Ding Yi, awakened 22 years ago; his theoretical models survived accelerator tests and he leads the expedition's technical side.

It is really a tombstone for humankind, buried under Pluto's surface, built to last geologic eons, with human-unfriendly wheel-operated doors and wordless instructions.

Pluto is at its apogee, far from the two-dimensional space, so it will collapse later; it has a surface of blue frozen nitrogen and methane and black rock.

Starry Night, by Van Gogh, is among the artifacts stored on Pluto; Cheng Xin believes Van Gogh painted space as filled with vibrating strings.

The asteroid belt has been flattened, appearing as a glowing necklace across the sky; Mars is next, then Earth.

Europe VI was a football-shaped space city of six million people; half left in ships, and about three million waited to die.

Halo's AI cannot explain how the astronomical-scale snowflakes formed, having no information on such crystallization.

Mycenae is a midsized escaping planetary ship without an ecological cycling system; like all escaping ships, it would be destroyed within three hours.

The two-dimensional Solar System ripples with long waves, the Sun is extinguished into a dark red sea, and all fleeing ships and Pluto fall onto the plane.

After a rupture, a death line becomes a regular trail over a wide region with light speed of only about a dozen meters per second, forming a black domain.

Black columns left by extreme curvature propulsion; lightspeed inside is zero, making them zero-gravity black holes. These ones are about a hundred kilometers high.

Per the new world's theoretical model, the pre-war universe was ten-dimensional with near-infinite lightspeed; Yifan stresses this is only guesswork.

Hunter is Guan Yifan's tiny numbered lightspeed ship named for a friend from Gravity; it lacks an ecological cycle, so long trips require hibernation.

Neural computers imitate parallel brain processing and work at reduced lightspeed; the shuttle and Hunter each have one as a backup control system.

Planet Blue is cold, earthlike in size, with blue mobile vegetation, yellow frozen oceans, thin air at 0.53 Earth pressure, and no complex land animals.

Planet Gray is a Mars-sized, airless, gray planet in the DX3906 system.

The shuttle was caught in the ruptured death lines, trapped orbiting Planet Blue at the drastically reduced speed of light, with all electronics dead.

A time vacuum is a moment in which time does not exist, which Cheng Xin experienced as the death lines ruptured.

Lightspeed ships with no destination that accelerate endlessly to reach the universe's heat death within the crew's lifetime; five have been launched.

Sealed inside a light tomb, a reduced-lightspeed black hole, after its people believed their coordinates had been exposed; no one can return from it.

Also called Resetters; they usually make death lines and want to reset the universe by lowering it to zero dimensions and returning it to the Garden of Eden.

The shuttle and Hunter use backup antimatter engines designed for reduced lightspeed because fusion produces too little power; they use them to decelerate out of lightspeed.

Giant words carved in bedrock 23 to 28 meters underground read as a fragmentary message from 艾 AA and Yun Tianming about a happy life together; the rock sank over eons.

The door is a faint glowing rectangle that selectively admits people and creatures; it exists outside of time, is brand new after 18 million years, and was waiting for these two humans.

He was a Common Era physicist who first conceived the closed-cube world concept like Universe 647.

The Returners announced that the great universe's mass has fallen below the critical threshold, so it will become open and die in perpetual expansion.

Each mini-universe removed matter from the great universe, and the Trisolarans alone have built several hundred.

The Returners are intelligent beings resembling the Zero-Homers who oppose building mini-universes and demand that mini-universe mass be returned to the great universe.

In Trisolaran physics, universes are bubbles above a supermembrane; mini-universes can receive messages from great universes but cannot send any.

The Returners' broadcast reached the mini-universes in 1.57 million languages, including Trisolaran and Earth languages in ancient scripts, listing surviving or remembered civilizations.

It is a cube about a kilometer on each side with opposite faces connected, so walking through a wall returns you to the opposite wall; the world is closed and endless.

The metal box holds a quantum-memory computer containing nearly all Trisolaran and Earth civilization knowledge; it will enter the new universe after the next big bang and broadcast by neutrinos.

The door could send back only a habitability rating from -10 to 10; humans can survive only above zero.

Hidden under the floor, the under-20-meter ship seats three, has fusion and curvature drives, an ecological system and hibernation equipment, and can land on planets.