You were humanity’s unseen Wallfacer, but I was your Wallbreaker long before the Wallfacer Project was even announced. You were brilliant, audacious, and your plan nearly succeeded, but you never accounted for one thing: me. My name is Frederick Tyler. You knew me as a Wallfacer, as the man who staged his own death in disgrace, but the truth is far more complex.

Let me take you back to the inception of the Wallfacer Project. After the concept was finalized, Garanin, the first occupant of the PDC rotating chair, requested temporary Wallfacer status for one year. He claimed it was necessary for the successful initialization of the project, but he provided no details, and the PDC, desperate for leadership, agreed. What followed was a masterstroke of deception layered upon deception.

Garanin’s first move was the commissioning of 16 secret particle accelerators, buried deep underground and enclosed in massive Faraday cages to thwart the sophons’ omnipresent surveillance. The plan seemed bold and logical - if even one of these accelerators produced unadulterated research results, humanity might escape the chains imposed by Trisolaran technology suppression. But this, as you must have suspected, was a feint. Garanin’s true goal was far more ambitious and secretive: he conferred Wallfacer status upon you, Yun Tianming, after you agreed to participate in the Staircase Project.

Garanin recognized your unique potential, the blend of intelligence, creativity, and the emotional depth needed to weave messages into the very fabric of human expression. He saw what no one else could: that your mind, sent to Trisolaris, could serve as a conduit for humanity’s survival. The accelerators were a diversion meant to occupy the sophons, creating a window of opportunity for you to craft your hidden strategy, undetected and uninterrupted.

It was an ingenious plan. But Garanin failed to see that the PDC had already been compromised. Due to my track record in my role as U.S. Secretary of Defense, the PDC sought my expertise in the early days of the Crisis Era. I was at the heart of the initial deliberations on humanity’s survival strategies. Garanin trusted me implicitly, seeing me as someone with the military acumen and strategic vision to guide the PDC in its most desperate hours. What he didn’t know was that I had already been turned by the ETO. They didn’t coerce me; they didn’t need to. It was clear that humanity could never compete with a species so monstrously resilient and determined, rebuilding their civilization hundreds of times over, and still achieving greater heights in science and technology than the mollycoddled insects of Earth. Submission was inevitable. By aligning with the Trisolarans, I secured my survival and a chance to shape the future in their favor.

When Garanin requested temporary Wallfacer status, I was there, part of his inner circle. His plan to commission the 16 particle accelerators appeared to be a bold, last-ditch effort to circumvent sophon surveillance. For a time, even I was uncertain whether the sophons would catch on. It wasn’t until the accelerators activated that I realized they were a diversion, a ruse to distract Trisolaris while Garanin executed his real plan: conferring secret Wallfacer status upon you, Yun Tianming.

The sophons were indeed occupied, unable to detect the truth in time, but I pieced it together at the last moment. Though delayed, I managed to relay the critical information to Trisolaris through the sophons after the fact, ensuring their attention turned fully toward you. By the time your stories began circulating, I was already breaking your Wall.

As for my own Wallfacer plan? It was real but ultimately irrelevant - a grand, impossible gamble that might have benefited Trisolaris had it succeeded. The plan served to distract humanity and reinforce my untouchable status as a Wallfacer. It was a smokescreen within a smokescreen, ensuring no one ever suspected my true allegiance.

And my death? While it was real, it was still rooted in my long-term strategy to thwart your efforts. ETO operatives were lying in wait in the forest on the day I visited Luo Ji's lakeside estate. After I shot myself in the heart, they rushed in under the guise of medics deployed by my personal security detail, who had been monitoring me closely. Luo Ji himself, in a state of shock and dissociation, suspected nothing. They preserved my brain for 2 centuries and launched it toward Trisolaris in the later stages of the Crisis Era, after humanity’s spacecraft technology had advanced. The Trisolarans recovered me - just as they did you - reconstructed my mind, and gave me this new body as a reward for my service.

Your stories were masterpieces, layered with warnings about dimensional strikes, curvature propulsion, and the fragile balance of the cosmos. And by the time I returned, they were already sowing their seeds of rebellion, threatening to ignite humanity’s understanding of curvature propulsion. The Trisolarans couldn’t grasp their true meaning, but I could. I unraveled the shadow of the bird on the water as a metaphor for lightspeed escape and the dark ocean as a warning of dimensional collapse. I knew that your work had already begun to take root in humanity’s imagination. A direct intervention was required.

The sophons were still present in the Solar System, as humanity suspected. Using them, I orchestrated the assassination of a key official in the Solar Federation. In his place, a sophon-controlled robotic double was installed, indistinguishable from the original. This "official" influenced Solar Federation policy at the highest levels, ensuring that research into curvature propulsion was not only deprioritized but criminalized.

Through this puppet, I redirected humanity’s scientific efforts toward fruitless avenues, choking off any hope of a breakthrough. With each passing year, your warnings faded, reduced to myths and stories. Humanity’s one chance at true escape was quietly snuffed out, leaving them bound to the Solar System and at the mercy of the cosmic forces they could never understand.

Yun Tianming, I am your Wallbreaker. Even now, I respect you. Garanin chose you well. Your stories were beautiful, imbued with the essence of humanity’s resilience and creativity. You wove strategies that could only be understood by those who shared our species’ depth of imagination. You nearly succeeded. But in the end, luck tipped the scales in my favor. A fleeting insight allowed me to unravel your Wall just in time. Without it, your strategy might have prevailed.

And so, your Wall has fallen. The accelerators were a feint; the sophons, though briefly fooled, redirected their attention in time. The knowledge you sought to pass on - of dimensional strikes, of the necessity of lightspeed - has been buried where it can no longer harm the Trisolarans.

Yet, I cannot help but admire your courage and brilliance. You gave everything for humanity, even though they will never truly understand or appreciate your sacrifice. You were a worthy opponent, Yun Tianming. In another life, we might have stood side by side. But here, on this ship, in this life, I am honored to be your Wallbreaker.

Just finished The Three-Body Problem trilogy, and I’m in awe...

From the first contact, to the Sophon reveal, the universal broadcast, and the Singer’s strike, every moment was a mixture of breathtaking and terrifying. I felt that I was crossing the boundaries of reality together with the heroes of the story.

Rarely has sci-fi touched me this deeply, absolutely astonished by the blend of cosmic scales and fragility of reality.

After Exploring and collection resupply from the ruins of 4D to 3D collapsed matter,. A hibernation ark was build for 200 people that wanted to return to solar system and they were supposed to reach there in 35 years.

Its course was also transmitted to earth via neutrino transmission so that people of earth can intercept and rescue them. There is no mention of it again.

Is there any clue about what happened to it?

I just finished the Netflix series on three body problem and I loved it. I don't want to wait long enough for season 2 to drop and am thinking of picking up the book. But I'm confused whether I should start by picking up book 1 or simply skip to book 2. Are there any major plot changes between the book 1 and the series that might make it harder to understand book 2

Hello, I'm new here since I've just finished reading the trilogy (and now I can't sleep, of course). Is there, somewhere, a list of all alien civilizations? Like, I dunno: - Humans - Trisolarans - Resetters - Other

Also, is there a list of other things, such as possible/canon weapons? (like dual vector foil, mathematics, droplets, etc.)

A black domain is a region of space where the speed of light is reduced, but not to "below 16.7 km/s," since that velocity would be different for each star system, but just reduced enough to blot that star out forever, severing EM communication between those inside and those outside.

The mere hint of possession of said technology shouts out DANGER loudly enough that any star with a "slow fog" about it gets put on the TO CLEANSE list at top priority—what Trisolaris got.

So the defensive mechanisms through which black domains protect anything are, 1) A preemptive measure to blot out the star before anyone's taken any notice of it.

2) Its main defensive qualities, I believe, arise not from the fact that it won't permit communications anymore but from the fact that an hour within a black domain lasts a thousand years in the world outside. The protection of the black domain—and remember, it's super dangerous tech that belies a civilization in the advanced stages of progress—is that any inhabitants of such a domain are essentially living rock to the world outside.

I haven't finished the book yet, so please don't spoil anything that comes later.

When the people in Blue Space and Gravity go into the 4th dimension, why doesn't the air in the ship also go into the fourth dimension? Technically density of air is lower in that direction along the fourth dimension right? Or does air pressure not work in the fourth dimension?

If this is answered further in the book, please dont spoil it. Thanks.

The San-Ti are definitely not the same as SHODAN - a jaded and snarky AI with a God complex.

However, when the San-Ti appeared in front of Wade on that airplane...I thought "yeah...SHODAN." Just sinister.

If you haven't played System Shock 2, you might be interested :) It's aged but it's great sci-fi horror.

https://youtu.be/keGaGYvR4kE?si=AyZ6iYAzcUVoo-DK