Character from three-body-problem by
The Trisolaran leader who, upon receiving Wenjie's reply and learning of Earth, orders the launch of a thousand-year colonization fleet — and the construction of the Sophons.
Princeps is the head of a civilization that has died and rebuilt itself hundreds of times, and his decisions reflect that long memory. Trisolarans cannot lie — their thoughts are visible as light to one another — and so his courtroom speech is not rhetoric but data: Earth has a stable orbit. Earth has a single sun. Earth, the consul has determined, is winnable. The fleet will go. He is not a tyrant in the human sense; he is a planetary consciousness's executive function. When Mike Evans on the Judgment Day reveals to him, via the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood, that humans can speak words they know to be untrue, his reaction is unguarded horror — a civilization built on transparency cannot conceive of a sentient species that lies. He cuts off communication immediately. In Book 1 he has just authorized the launch and sealed the Sophon project. Everything that follows is in motion.
Trisolaran physiology is never directly described in the novel; what the player sees in the game is a presence rendered through the visual-light language of Trisolaris itself: shifting glyphs, projected on the chamber walls, that the game translates into Mandarin and English. A throne. A consul standing at attention. The smell, somehow, of a planet that is too dry.
Also known as: The Princeps