三体

The trilogy is 三体, 黑暗森林 (The Dark Forest) and 死神永生 (Death's End). Ken Liu's translation of the first book won the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Its "dark forest" idea, that civilizations stay hidden in order to survive, is now a common figure of speech.

usage

The title comes from the 三体问题 of physics, the motion of three bodies pulling on one another by gravity; in the novel it is also the name of the alien world. In medicine the same word means trisomy, an extra copy of a chromosome.