[14] During China's Cultural Revolution, astrophysicist Ye Wenjie witnesses her father be beaten to death during a struggle session.

At Red Coast, Ye discovers a method to amplify radio frequency transmissions using the Sun, with which she secretly broadcasts a message.

Hundreds of Trisolaran civilizations have risen and fallen, each attempting but failing to develop an accurate calendar that can predict and help prepare for Chaotic Eras.

This alarms Earth's governments, who form an international task force to investigate, recruiting nanotechnologist Wang Miao and detective Shi Qiang.

As part of his investigation, Wang plays the virtual reality video game Three Body, which is a simulation of Trisolaris created by the ETO to identify potential recruits and to garner sympathy for the Trisolaran plight.

[17] Liu and Martinsen's translations contain footnotes explaining references to Chinese history that may be unfamiliar to international audiences.

[15] In Liu's early childhood, when he was three years old his family moved from the Beijing Coal Design Institute to Yangquan in Shanxi, due to his father changing jobs.

[18] Several years later, Liu found a box of books under his bed in Yangquan, which included an anthology of Tolstoy, Moby-Dick, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Silent Spring.

Liu says he cannot help thinking about the future world and lifestyle of human beings, and he tries to invoke readers' curiosity with his books.

[23] In December 2019, The New York Times cited The Three-Body Problem as having helped to popularize Chinese science fiction internationally, crediting the quality of Ken Liu's English translation, as well as endorsements of the book by George R. R. Martin, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and former U.S. president Barack Obama.

[24] Obama said the book had "immense" scope, and that it was "fun to read, partly because my day-to-day problems with United States Congress seem fairly petty".

[25] Kirkus Reviews wrote that "in concept and development, it resembles top-notch Arthur C. Clarke or Larry Niven but with a perspective—plots, mysteries, conspiracies, murders, revelations and all—embedded in a culture and politic dramatically unfamiliar to most readers in the West, conveniently illuminated with footnotes courtesy of translator Liu.

"[26] Joshua Rothman of The New Yorker also called Liu Cixin "China's Arthur C. Clarke", and similarly observed that in "American science fiction ... humanity's imagined future often looks a lot like America's past.

For an American reader, one of the pleasures of reading Liu is that his stories draw on entirely different resources", citing his use of themes relating to Chinese history and politics.

[27] Matthew A. Morrison wrote that the novel could "evoke a response all but unique to the genre: an awe at nature and the universe [which] SF readers call a 'sense of wonder'".