I’m not saying this series is completely trash or anything - yes the story is engaging, and yes it’s groundbreaking for Chinese sci-fi; but it doesn’t deserve its hype and I firmly believe it would never have won the Hugo Award had the translator chosen to stay true to the original text and not leave out the blatant sexism in the series.

The sexism in this series is so disgusting and gets worse in every book: in book one we have a scientist’s mother saying ‘I told my daughter repeatedly “the world of science is not for women; women can’t go far in this field because their mindset is different from men’s”’; in book two our protagonist falls in love with a fantasy created by his own imagination, he then proceeds to ask a cop to find a young woman who matches his fantasy exactly and bring her to him, they get married and have a kid together, but we never get to know anything about her other than that she is just what he imagines! Book three blames ‘femininity’ for the crisis in the world: we are told that men in the future become ‘feminine’ and are afraid of ‘traditional, masculine’ men, hence they are unwilling to select the ‘strong, masculine’ man (whose motto is he is willing to sell his mom to a brothel! How manly is that?!) as their protector, instead they choose a feminine female who is weak and ‘overly empathetic’ and causes a catastrophe. The feminine female makes the wrong choice every time because she is not the type to sell her mom to a brothel, while the poor manly male makes the right choice at every juncture and dies as a martyr.

To be fair, I don’t mean ‘women can’t be villains’ or ‘a female character can’t have flaws’; what I want to point out is how the author deliberately sets up the plot in a way that blames everything on ‘femininity’. There is a big difference between ‘female characters depicted as villains’ and ‘feminine qualities viewed as inherently bad’, the former is completely fine, the latter is good old pure misogyny. In The Three-Body Problem series, the author is not just writing ‘a few flawed female characters’; he is not even just criticising ‘femininity’; a more accurate description should be ‘he believes femininity should “stay in its place”’ - if you are a feminine female who only serves as a wife and mother matching a man’s fantasy, then you are a ‘good woman’; if you are a woman who doesn’t have any ‘feminine traits’, then you can be a good scientist or whatever; but if you are a feminine female who wants to be more than a mother and wife, then you destroy the world because femininity is weak and irrational and doesn’t belong in the scientific world!

Even the sexism is nothing compared to the social Darwinism in the series. The core belief of the series is ‘if we lose our humanity we lose a lot; if we lose our barbarity we lose everything’; a society that values humanity and culture and love and happiness and equality is ‘weak and feminine’, destined to be destroyed by a ‘strong, masculine, brutal’ society; the feminine female is bad because she cares too much and hesitates to make a decision that may destroy two worlds full of lives; the manly male is good because he is cruel enough and doesn’t care how many people may die due to his actions. These messages are comically ridiculous in books, but they become dangerous when some people begin to view them as principles to live by in reality.

I don’t think the series should be censored or anything, but I believe the problems should be pointed out instead of judging it based on a translation that tries to conceal many details.