The books in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy are:[3] Astronomer Ye Wenjie is brought to the military's top-secret Red Coast Project after suffering an attack during the Cultural Revolution.

As they prepare their exodus, Ye Wenjie, despairing of humanity's ability to save itself from itself, exposes the coordinates of the Earth to the Trisolarans, completely changing the fates of both worlds.

[7] Following the Trisolarans' use of technology to lock down Earth science and launch a huge space fleet straight into the solar system, human beings also create a huge space fleet to react to the unprecedented Earth civilization crisis, while the Planetary Defence Council (PDC) uses the fatal flaw in the Trisolarans' logic to create the "Wallfacer Plan".

To be seen with the naked eye, the protons could unfold themselves down to a fourth-, fifth-, or sixth-dimensional form, becoming larger with each subsequent lower dimension without changing mass.

They can visually record anything and thus their secondary purpose is to act as surveillance devices, beaming the information they gather back to another sophon instantaneously via quantum entanglement.

With the advent of the Trisolaran invasion, however, it becomes a near-worthless technology in terms of demand, as people prefer to die naturally in a world still free from Trisolaris rather than skip ahead to doomsday.

[11] Polish science fiction critic Wojciech Orliński argued that the trilogy represents Liu Cixin's endorsement of concepts of world government, consequentialism as well as tacit approval of "China's surveillance and control society".

[12] American journalist and writer Evan Lambert was critical of Liu Cixin's perceived sexism, which was predicated in the author's view that "women need the logic of men to balance them and temper their irrationality."

He cited the author's characterization of Ye Wenjie as a "quasi-villain" due to her curiosity with alien species and her depiction as untrustworthy, incompetent and irrational.

[13] University of Liverpool Chinese senior lecturer Aiqing Wang has argued that Liu Cixin's trilogy does not promote sexism and chauvinism.

She cited the first novel Three Body Problem's depiction of the equal participation of both genders in science and its acknowledgement of the disparate mindsets of males and females.

[21] A live-action, English-language series based on the trilogy premiered on Netflix on March 21, 2024, with David Benioff, D. B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo as showrunners.

[23] The series includes an extensive interview with Liu Cixin and covers many ideas featured in the Remembrance of Earth's Past such as: messaging extraterrestrial civilisations; gravitational wave transmitter; dark forest hypothesis; space elevator; artificial hibernation; fusion drive; and circumsolar particle accelerator.