I recently finished reading the English translation of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past novel trilogy (also referred to by the title of the first book, The Three-Body Problem). I thought they were really good, a bit of a throwback to the Clark and Asimov school of hard science fiction. I think going into the books cold really helped me appreciate them, so I’ll just say that this depicts a scene from one of the novels involving a device nicknamed the Droplet.