Reference · World Book

The book within the book.

Every concept the system pulls into a conversation lives here first. Browse the canon and the timeline; the characters draw on these entries when you speak with them.

Goal

Stop the destruction of the human world.

Turn clock

Forced event every 2 turns

Next timeline pressure

1967 · Ye Zhetai is killed

2 turns remaining

Timeline · Book I

Next in 2 turns · Earth · 1967
Ye Zhetai is killed
Ye Wenjie's father, a theoretical physicist, is beaten to death by Red Guards at a denouncement rally. His own wife denounces him.
Queued · Earth · 1969
Greater Khingan Range
Ye Wenjie is sent to the Inner Mongolia Production and Construction Corps, felling forest. Bai Mulin, a journalist she trusts, uses her handwritten copy of Silent Spring to denounce her. Facing prison, she is offered Red Coast instead.
Queued · Earth · 1971
First transmission
Ye Wenjie works out the solar amplification effect and, without authorization, beams a message at the Sun. Amplified, it goes out in every direction at once. She tells no one and waits.
Queued · Trisolaris · 1979
Pacifist warning received
Eight years on, the listener at Trisolaran Monitoring Post 1379 breaks protocol and warns Earth: 'Do not answer! Do not answer!! Do not answer!!!' Ye answers anyway — inviting them to come, and fixing the Sun's position for the fleet.
Queued · ETO · 1980s
ETO founded
Ye Wenjie and Mike Evans formalize the Earth-Trisolaris Organization. Adventist and Redemptionist factions diverge.
Queued · Trisolaris · After 1983
First Trisolaran Fleet launched
Ye's reply reaches Trisolaris four years after she sends it, and the decision is made. A thousand ships set out for the Solar System at a fraction of light speed. Estimated time of arrival: roughly 450 years.
Queued · Trisolaris · Present
Sophons online on Earth
Two intelligent protons enter Earth's atmosphere. Fundamental physics begins reporting impossible results.
Queued · Earth · Present
Scientist suicides
Yang Dong and others take their lives. The Frontiers of Science accelerates its recruitment.
Queued · Earth · Present
Wang Miao enters Three-Body
Da Shi drags Wang Miao into the Battle Command Center, then back out to infiltrate the Frontiers of Science. A countdown burns itself into his photographs, and he puts on the V-suit.
Queued · Earth · Present
Operation Guzheng
The Judgment Day is bisected. The ETO archives are captured. The truth becomes a state secret.
Queued · Earth · Coda
Two axioms
On a hill, Ye Wenjie sketches the founding postulates of cosmic sociology. The Dark Forest is named, but only later.

Place · ≈ 4 lightyears

Entry · trisolaris

Trisolaris

A planet locked in chaotic three-body orbit around α Centauri's stars. Civilization rebooted 200+ times.

Trisolaris orbits three stars whose mutual gravitation cannot be solved analytically. The planet is captured, cast away, scorched, or frozen at intervals impossible to predict.

Civilization has risen and been destroyed at least two hundred times. Survival took the form of dehydration: a Trisolaran can desiccate, be filed in a stack, and rehydrated when a stable era resumes.

Their solution to chaos is to leave. They intend to find a stable sun and take it.