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Where to begin? The Three-Body Problem is the first instalment of a popular Chinese science fiction trilogy by Cixin Liu* which has been translated into English by Ken Liu. It's the first Chinese book I have read but the prose had a similar feeling to some of the translated Japanese books I've read.

It opens in 1967 during the Cultural Revolution. Scientists and those who show western, capitalist values are being tortured, imprisoned or killed. Ye Wenjie witnesses her father's death at the hands of the Red Guard and the rest of her life will be marked by her association with a radical.

Four decades later, nanotech engineer Wang Miao is approached by the police to join a secretive group of scientists, which leads him to an online game. In this game he must join other scholars in solving an alien planet's dilemma. Trisolaris suffers from extremes in temperatures, unpredictable seasons which halt all scientific progress until the stable season reappears. The inhabitants can dehydrate themselves, a kind of hibernation until temperatures become stable again.

Understandably one of the big themes covered is climate change, not only on Trisolaris but also the damage humans have done to Earth. I knew a little of the damage done in China by ignoring what was considered capitalist thought in agriculture although this focuses on the felling of forests, which everyone has been guilty of. It talks about technological progress and the search for intelligent life, and what that would mean to the human race.

I think you've got to have at least a passing interest in physics to enjoy this book, the science fiction is pretty hard and some of the physics went over my head. It is not a fast-paced alien invasion book at all, but some of it feels extremely timely. Slowly all the threads come together and things start making sense. I did enjoy reading a non-western perspective for once, it would be crazy to think only the US would be trying to communicate with extra-terrestrial life after all.

Considering the Three-Body Problem is an actual real world physics problem, I'm a bit confused as how the people playing the game didn't get past the first stage quicker. The name is kind of a big giveaway! Is this a failure in translation and the problem has another name in Chinese? I only looked up the problem after reading the book, so it didn't bother me at the time.

In the People’s Republic of China 1967, it was a time where the Cultural Revolution was purging the country of all capitalist ideals. A group of scientists, part of a secret military project, send signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien race on the brink of destruction known as the Trisolarans capture the signal and now plan to invade earth. A deeply philosophical game The Three-Body Problem occupies the mind of many scientist which features a world with three suns, causing chaos and unpredictability; trying to understand the order is what motives these people. The Three-Body Problem is a first contact novel often referred to as a cross between Dune and Independence Day.

The Cultural Revolution makes for an interesting backdrop for this novel and I feel an understanding is essential to the story. The Cultural Revolution was a social-political movement that was set in motion by Chairman Mao to transform The People’s Republic of China into the true Communist ideal. This was a cultural purging to remove all remnants of capitalism and to some extent even getting rid of some of China’s traditional elements. The movement ran from 1966 to 1976, although Chairman Mao did declare it over in 1969, but the Red Guard were still very active in their mission all the way till the death of their military leader Lin Biao.

This was also during the height of the space race, Sputnik was the first artificial satellite to be launched into space in 1957, giving the Soviet Union an early lead. The China National Space Administration (CNSA) is believed to have begun in the late 1950s, although their research into rockets were more focused on a ballistic missile program to help defend the country against the Americans and Soviets during the cold war. However China was still interested in space exploration and their first spacecraft to hold human occupancy, Shuguang-1, was designed in 1968.

Now, a three-body problem in physics, is a scientific process where you take initial data sets (position, masses, velocities, etc.) and determine the motion of the three bodies with the help of the laws of classical mechanics, such as Newton’s laws of motion. Historically the three specific bodies being studied were the Moon, the Earth and the Sun. This ties the title of the novel back to the space race and also predicting the world found in the game The Three-Body Problem. However this is only the beginning of trying to understand the workings of this novel and I have not even touched on the philosophical or social criticism aspects of The Three-Body Problem.

The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin won the Hugo award recently for ‘Best Novel’ and I found it to be an intriguing plot idea. I knew I had to read this, and I went in expecting something similar to Russian science fiction, where there was a lot of social commentary of what was happening within Communist China. This novel did not disappoint, I would compare this to the Russian first contact novel Roadside Picnic in the way it explored social and scientific ideals but then the philosophical elements remind me of the old sci-fi novels from the 1960s.

Special mention needs to be made to Ken Liu who did an excellent job of translating this book into English. I found myself looking forward to reading all his translation notes which explains historical and cultural references that Westerners like myself may not have known about. I also appreciate that he did not try to convert the narrative to a more accessible format but allowed outsiders a taste in the narrative structure found in Chinese books. I was really impressed with the first book in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy and I would like to think I would read the rest of the series, but I know what I am like when it comes to finishing a series.

This review originally appeared on my blog; www.knowledgelost.org/book-reviews/genre/sci-fi/the-three-body-problem-by-liu-cixin/

I am very conflicted about this book. Parts of it are just wonderful, masterfully combining rich, expressionistic and very poetic descriptions of situations with minimalistic, yet terribly well-found descriptions of thoughts and emotional states. The "sci" part of it also feels fairly well-researched.

However, my problem with the book begins with the "fi" part. Some of the characters strike me as flat and wholly unrealistic, especially the roguish cop Da Shi who combines a superhuman level of insight into the human psyche with a cartoonishly insensitive behaviour. It is impossible for me to tell if this is a cultural trope that I as a Westener is unfamiliar with, and therefore cannot accept as readily as someone who shares the author's cultural background or if it is simply poor character construction. Also, parts of the world-building and overarching plot struck me as very cliché, and frequently gave me a feeling of "oh, no they didn't just...". This is unfortunate, because the author's afterword to my edition shows a much greater visionary potential than the book itself!

I read a review in which the writer found it unbelievable that there were so many willing to turn against the human race. Such a reviewer should disqualify himself.

This book, however, is an example of what is great about us humans. It is continually surprising in the directions it takes. To think that I almost abandoned it early on when it seemed to be all about China's cultural revolution, but I had forgotten that is was a sci fi novel! You might turn against the human race too had you lived in the China of that time and your intelligence was taken as a sign of being against the masses. But how far is it to the politics of the United States where it is argued that we don't want to be ruled by "elites" but by people just like ourselves (and by 'ourselves' is meant those unqualified to rule.)

It's hard to say more and remain spoiler-free so you may want to leave now because I fully expect to fail at that goal.

This is also, clearly the start of a series which ends on an ambiguous note of hopefulness for humans, which comes as a surprise since it is clearly established in an unalterable way that we, if I may momentarily align myself with humanity, are doomed.

The thing is, the alien race which will replace us is in so many not so good ways as human as we are so even if I feel we deserve to be wiped out, so do these aliens. It can be argued that their superior science proves something of their right to win, an attitude a veteran of the cultural revolution might espouse, but while I didn't anticipate so many of the ways the plot would develop, I wonder why a race about to be wiped out wouldn't consider the suicide bomber's approach and blow up the entire planet the way a retreating army burns their crops rather than have them fall into enemy hands, but maybe this is taken up in a later novel.

And as humans and aliens have so much in common, so do the Chinese and the West, and yet some kind of chauvinism bounds them to be opposed in the geopolitical struggle for dominance. Or maybe it's fear of the Other that makes us circle the wagons and fight them off, or, worse, plan to destroy them first assuming they would do the same to us were they capable because--see, we're all alike.

This is also the only sci fi I've read that brings string theory into it and has Einstein become homeless because God played dice and he lost.