The Three-Body Problem opens with a struggle session. This violent scene depicts the intersection between politics and science, in which a well-regarded scientist is put on trial for his failure to properly implement the correct political ideology in his work. His work isn’t dialectical, his wife accuses, meaning that he has failed to adhere to communist ideology. Ye Zhetai is unapologetic. He doesn’t believe that science and politics are compatible in this sense, given that science—and, in his particular case, physics—are beholden to a universal set of laws that are objective and apolitical. After he refuses to integrate politics into his science, Ye Zhetai is beaten to death by a group of radical students. His daughter watches. The violent scene depicts the stakes of the battle between politics and science. The battle is uneven, the scientists vastly outnumbered by the political activists. Adherents of politics and science are both devoted, however. The battle is a matter of life and death for those involved and, over the course of the novel, these stakes continue.

Ye Wenjie is traumatized by her father’s death during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Her experience imbues her with a sense of nihilism that she never really escapes.