Three-Body Problem Series

This book ain't great. There will be spoilers.

The writing is bad. And yes, I appreciate there's a cultural gap but the only thing worse than me completely ignoring cultural differences would be me saying "oh maybe stale dialogue, shallow characters, and messy structure are how all Chinese people write".

And to be honest I can forgive the writing, some sci fi authors are better at coming up with cool concepts than writing well (cough Phillip K Dick) so it's not necessarily the end of the world.

My number one issue with this book is that, for a book apparently all about hard science, it has such a profound disrespect for both science and scientists.

The entire crux of the plot - the sophons (which lets be honest, is straight up magic and raises more questions than it answers) stopping particle accelerators from working will cause scientists to just give up on researching things - is completely insulting. History is full of nothing but scientists working around handicaps, and often relishing the challenge. Instead this book treats scientists as close minded and lazy who give up as soon as there's a hurdle.

Don't get me wrong, I really loved reading a story by a Chinese author that is so informed by Chinese history and culture, but I can't forgive that mistreatment of an entire discipline.

I might still read book two though, the series is so popular I feel like I should give it a try.

I tried. I got about 80% done and put it down because it was leaving a bad taste. I came back and gave it another 20 pages before quitting. It wasn't because the characters seemed to lack human-like motivations, not the wooden clunky story, or the cringy virtual reality game. It was its love of authority. You distill this book down and that's what it is, pro authoritarianism. I mean, I get it, communism bad. But, this... this is like a tech-bro version of scifi: unimaginative in its view of life and too high on its own game theory to care about people. Sure, the "science" is cool but it's boring because it's just part of the games instructions. It's too excited to hunt all those threats found in their poorly lit dark forest to tell a good story. One turn at a time. Linear.

It's strange to be so vehemently out of step with the vast majority of readers of sci-fi, but this is not good scifi. I know a lot of people really really like it. That's why I read it. Call me an optimist. But this just suck. I'm glad about one thing - my memories of it are quickly dissipating.

If you enjoy reading "something different", you should definitely pick up this book. At least if your reading experience is similar to mine. For all I know there may be lots of books that are like this, that I just haven't come across. I went back and added this to the start of my review, since the rest of this will focus a bit much on how I wouldn't give this book a general recommendation.

The Three-Body Problem is amazing in many ways. The world building is fantastic and for someone not well versed in Chinese history the way the story is interwoven with recent important events in the most populous nation in the world adds another positive aspect.

On the other hand the story, or stories, never grip me and I find some of the imaginative dealing with physics unsatisfying. It's like the core of the book is exposition and more exposition, and when it comes to the physics it's careful explanations of actual physics up to a point and then all of a sudden it's free association.

Also, as the book develops and layers of obfuscation are peeled back, I come to care less and be less satisfied with the ideas and challenges in the book, and also less satisfied with the lack of fleshed out characters. The main protagonist remains a cardboard cutout whose emotions and motivations are barely touched upon through the book. His wife and child for instance make a brief appearance when they are necessary to elements of the story, but since his feelings about the world shattering knowledge he receives and the events he's part of, are not explored at all, neither is their relation to his family.

I might read the next book for the exposition of Liu's world building, but it's definitely not at the top of my reading list.

It was interesting, but I expected better after all the warm recommendations.

What I liked:
- Depiction of politics, particularly the Cultural Revolution era. Wow, I had no idea! I spent a day on Wikipedia to learn more.
- Flashbacks and perspective switches. I liked the non-linear way that the story was told.
- Getting a taste of Chinese fiction writing style. I am sure this one book is not enough to form any overall opinion of Chinese writing, but it is a start.

What I did not like:
- Characters are not characterized. There are just two characters that are not completely faceless: Ye (old lady) and Shi (arrogant cop). This makes the drama of the main character weak. He is freaking out, but not in a relatable way.
- Sci-fi stuff. The book is near-future, so there is not a lot of sci-fi elements. But what there is, seemed randomly plucked from a hat. Full-body VR, glasses that shift microwave to visible light, nano-wire that cuts steel, levitating baseball-sized nukes. I mean you could fit them in a sci-fi book easily, but here they just pop up randomly and seem out of place among the otherwise current-day tech. No science-y attempt was made to explain their presence.
- Pace. Without good drama, characterization, or interesting science, it is a boring read for 90% of the book. All those visits to the Trisolaris VR game seem very unrelated to the story. Even looking back they seem like an interesting, but ultimately unsuccessful storytelling device.

In the end I am not a fan. But I would love to discuss the book with others! My intuition about a 3-star system would be that one of the stars would get ejected pretty quickly. Not that it moves around randomly but sorta evenly. And does that VR game look correct to you? It seems to conflate days (rotation) with years (orbiting). The rotation would not get randomized from a random orbit.

And that proton folding thing at the end! Interesting idea of course, but the consequences seem totally random. When I saw the numbers appearing on Wang's photos, was I supposed to figure out that a supercomputer built into a proton was "borrowing" energy from the universe to do it? Seems like an unfair puzzle with a moronic solution.

On the other hand if you managed to figure out the solution on your own, I can understand why you would love this book to death :).

I liked this a lot, but it had some problems too. First 40 or so pages were hard to get through, and yes, they set up one of the characters, but I think it could have been two or three paragraphs of exposition and been just as effective. (For my tastes anyway.)

There is one video game featured prominently in the book, and it's interesting, but a tad unrealistically portrayed. Both in tech as well as just naive game design. Didn't have to have been though, which is maybe the sad part. It's supposed to be near future, so maybe the tech realism part is forgivable.

Don't want to spoil, so I'll stop here. I felt like a lot of what I read about the book involved there being left-field twists at multiple points in the novel, and yeah, I'll grant that there was at least one big one. I'll also grant that I was "in the dark" about some major stuff for most of the novel, but I didn't feel like the reveals were particularly surprising, to be honest.

I'm kinda torn about starting the next novel in the series right away.