The lads host their first UMB Official Sports Update as Jesse manages to survive a weekend of ultimate frisbee before getting into the second half of Cixin Liu’s sprawling and ambitious The Three Body Problem. The UMBers revisit some of our old friends, like Neal Stephenson’s habit of setting up narrative chessboards for a long time and eventually letting the game unfold, examining if Liu’s narrative setups have plausible payoffs. They also identify some of the “hapless protagonist” effect they’ve seen before in The Diamond Age and The Arrest, and talk about Liu’s claim that his work does not allegorize IRL history and action. Despite some misgivings, Jesse is excited for his third time through the subsequent two books, and Bagg is also looking forward to discovering how the earth responds to the Trisolaran “problem.”