In her book Cities and the Wealth of Nations , Jacobs zooms in still further, looking at "Shinohata", a pseudonymous Japanese hamlet a hundred miles north-west of Tokyo.
The Three-Body Problem spans multiple decades and characters, but it zooms in on Ye Wenjie and Wang Miao, two scientists in the very near future.
Spend six hours of that frozen in a chair, and the risk zooms up by more than a third.
