The Chronicler Recommends: The Three Body Problem
Welcome Readers!
For the month of May, we’re celebrating the release of the latest Guild Wars 2 update The Only Way with a book recommendation for one of the last remaining Seers—Isgarren.
As our Commanders journey deeper into Castora on the heels of Inquest Director Vloxx, Isgarren can sit back, relax, and enjoy a nice book.
To recommend the perfect book however, we need to learn more about who Isgarren is. While we only first met Isgarren during the Secrets of the Obscure expansion, he has been keeping watch over Tyria for a very long time. Several millennia ago during the Seer-Mursaat war, Isgarren disagreed with the practices and rules imposed by the leaders of his people. In protest, he performed a forbidden ritual to save the life of a Kodan and was banished from Castora by Sydony. He was never to return to his homeland or release the curse of his banishment. The punishment for doing so would be death.
Before his eventual return to Castora with the Commander to break the curse, Isgarren spent his life wandering the different lands of Tyria to find a way to assist the races deemed “lesser” by the Seers. In this quest for purpose, he founded a secret society known as the Astral Ward. Their goal was clear: monitor the outer bounds of Tyria to ensure no outside forces infiltrate or threaten the people of the world. Our recommendations for today perfectly fits this theme. Although Isgarren can be quite the grumpy old man, we hope he can find something of interest in this book as much as we did.
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
The Three Body Problem begins in China during the 1960’s and 1970’s. China’s Cultural Revolution is in full swing as the movement reshapes the country’s social and political standards on the world stage. During this time, Ye Wenjie is recruited into a secret military organization with a focus on extraterrestrial research. As the years go by, Wenjie finds a way to contact a distant world and must make a decision that will alter the course of history drastically.
“On Earth, humankind can step onto another continent, and without a thought, destroy the kindred civilizations found there through warfare and disease. But when they gaze up at the stars, they turn sentimental and believe that if extraterrestrial intelligences exist, they must be civilizations bound by universal, noble, moral constraints, as if cherishing and loving different forms of life are parts of a self-evident universal code of conduct. I think it should be precisely the opposite: Let’s turn the kindness we show toward the stars to members of the human race on Earth”
- The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu. Translated by Ken Liu.
Wenjie’s decision to contact these extraterrestrial beings is the thematic opposite of Isgarrren’s Astral Ward. Isgarren’s goal is to hide Tyria from outside forces—to keep the dark forest at bay—and to bring the might of the Astral Ward’s army against anyone who attempts to invade. We’re convinced that forcing Isgarren to read Three-Body Problem would send him into a diatribe for the ages, which would be a sight to behold.
Liu’s trilogy is a philosophical journey into the human psyche: the desire to reach out into the unknown, but also to show the extraterrestrial Other who humans are, what they can be, the horrors they have committed and what they decide to do in response. It is a testament to humanity’s ability to collaborate and bring out our greatest potential to the forefront, but also an exploration of our capacity to reach into the darkest pits of despair when faced with total annihilation. We highly recommend you to dive into this science-fiction trilogy with an open-mind and take from it important lessons about the human experience.
Thank you for reading our latest recommendations.
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