Images of International Politics in Chinese Science Fiction: Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem

Abstract

ABSTRACTScholars are increasingly exploring the links between the other worlds of science fiction and theorizations of our own reality. This article extends the scope of political science fiction studies by focusing on the Chinese author Liu Cixin's Three-Body novels, thus incorporating a key non-Western work. I interrogate the Three-Body series through the lens of Kenneth N. Waltz's three images of international relations, recovering the abundant homologies across the texts. Both writers represent human nature as malevolent, are skeptical of the importance of domestic politics, and place most weight on the logic of survival perpetuated by an international/interstellar system. They share meta-theoretical commitments too, each stating that global/galactic politics must be interpreted rather than observed. Yet the final pages of Liu's text destabilize the apparently copacetic relationship with Waltzian thought. Liu reveals his interstellar system to be created rather than given, and subject to positive transformation through the acts of agents. Liu's final move calls into question statist, positivist, and zero-sum premises about our contemporary world order by suggesting that they, too, are created by powerful actors rather than being scientific givens. The implications for our practice of politics are clear.