Wallfacer

Wallfacer is a title from Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, introduced in its second volume, The Dark Forest. The English word renders a Chinese term that draws on an old image from Eastern tradition: a figure who turns to face a wall in silent contemplation. The trilogy begins with The Three-Body Problem, which opens in the China of the Cultural Revolution, where the young astrophysicist Ye Wenjie watches her father persecuted, and moves to a present in which scientists are dying mysteriously and the nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao is drawn into a virtual reality game called Three Body. The Wallfacers enter the story after that novel, and the title, its holders, and the project behind it belong to The Dark Forest.