This page is for the novel. For the 2024 TV series, click here.
- Narm: The book opens with a Cultural Revolution near-lynching of a physicist who is espousing views contrary to the Revolution's. The man is led bound and weighted down to a square, where he can be humiliated in front of the crowd. What results is a lengthy physics lecture/debate where each side is making paragraph-long arguments while dropping names of then-contemporary physicists, and recitations of a law of physics is enough to bring a revolutionary to tears at one point, while another is forced to look away in shame. The idea that the "dangerous dissident" could get out that long of a lecture, or that anyone in the crowd would be emotionally moved by his defense of the laws of physics, is pretty laughable.
- Signature Line: The Listener's warning to Ye Wenjie: "Do not answer! Do not answer! Do not answer!"
- Values Dissonance: Jarring to a reader who was not brought up in a communist country is the assumption both that military groupings will have official political officers and that their establishment of 'the correct line' were a vital part of military strategy and any kind of scientific investigation — being so jarred may in fact be a feature of the book for such readers, as a description of attempting to understand alien cultures can benefit from the question of whether disparate human cultures can be fully mutually-intelligible.
