Three-Body Problem Series

I very rarely give a book less than 3 stars. I can nearly always find something to like about a book that allows me to rate it 3 stars. That was not the case here. I did not enjoy this book at all. The few interesting ideas were not enough to counter the fact that I couldn't have cared less about the characters and found the extensive "scientific" explanations and conversations tedious. I stopped paying attention so many times. At one point I even yelled at the audiobook "I DON'T CARE!!". I have no idea how this book is as popular as it is or how it managed to be popular enough to get a TV deal.

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 want to read a hard science fiction book driven by the mystery of unraveling a deep cosmological conspiracy against all humankind…this is your book.

The story starts with Ye Wenjie, a little girl, watching her father, a theoretical physicist, get beaten to death in a square during China’s Cultural Revolution. This is the era in the 1950s when Mao Zedong reigned supreme, and anything that anyone said could get interpreted as being against the Communist party. Her father’s crimes include teaching the Big Bang…and Einstein’s theory of relativity…which are construed by convoluted logic to be Western propaganda meant to undermine the Party.

I’ve always found it hard as a Westerner to fathom such bizarre politicizing and inhuman behavior. Scenes like that feel alien because we’ve never experienced anything like it here in the West.

But actually…it’s not so far-fetched. I can see the extreme polarization that we are reaching in our politics today where anything and everything is politicized and weaponized. I’m afraid we are going a bad direction. But I digress.

At first glance, this first scene appears disconnected from the rest of the plot. But it’s not. I’ll come back to it.

Ye Wenjie is exiled for her father’s “sins.” She goes to work at a secret base known as Red Coast, which sends out an enormous radio signal, the world’s strongest, actually. What she’s told that the base does and what it actually does are two very different things. But eventually Ye discovers the truth that only a small handful of people there know.

Spoilers from here on out by the way. There’s just no way to talk about this book AT ALL without spoilers. It’s not possible. Otherwise this review would be generic vague garbage.

So anyways, Ye discovers that the actual purpose of Red Coast Base is to send out the world’s largest radio wave signal in order to make contact with extraterrestrials. The People’s Republic of China is bothered by the fact that the USA and USSR have both sent out signals into space to make contacts with alien lifeforms, and they are worried about the consequences if aliens only heard from these other nations.

So they need to send out their own message and represent their own worldview. And of course they want to do it bigger and better and send it out to more star systems than the other nations. Hence the insanely huge radio station, which, when operating, makes people’s hairs stand up on end, literally, and other weird things. It affects the local weather. It’s weird.

Anyways, Ye Wenjie is a bit of an astrophycisist nerd, and she—despite her outsider status—gets promoted and given the authority (eventually) to operate the telescope and plan out their experiments because she just flat-out has the expertise that no one else there has.

One day she makes a very interesting discovery, and the way she makes it is really cool so I won’t spoil all of that, but basically, she discovers a way to amplify their radio signal by millions of times. Quite literally. And there’s real science behind this. This book taught me about some very interesting scientific principles, I’ll just leave it at that.

And in fact, all of these details up to this point are actual history. Red Coast Base existed and did all of this.

But the book diverges from history and becomes alternate history at a certain point. In this story, the ETs phone back, and in short, the message is: Don’t send any other messages out! If you do, there are aliens who will be able to deduce your location* and then they will use that to come to your planet and destroy you!

Basically, there is an interesting property of how radio communication in space works. You can only really tell the vague direction of the transmission that you received. It could have come from any distance in that general direction, so you don’t know which of thousands of stars it came from. However, if you send out a message in response, and then they send you another message in response to that…now all of the sudden you have some data to work with. You know roughly how long it takes for messages to go between the two of you. Based on that you can narrow it down pretty precisely to which star the messenger is sending messages from.

So, Ye gets this message. What does she do? She actually responds. She says: Humanity is screwed up. We deserve to be obliterated.

Now let that sink in. She is a character so jaded and also so intelligent that she came up with that response. She has seen some awful, awful stuff.

So anyways, that’s the first section of the book. The rest of the book takes place many years later, in modern day. I won’t give away any more spoilers because some pretty cool revelations happen, but some of the things that you can expect are conspiracy theories that turn out to be true (more or less), some interesting astrophysics, super advanced aliens, string theory (higher ordered dimensions), the three body problem of course.

Also, a really interesting exploration of how Earth’s nations and cultures would be effected at a global scale if it were proven that there were aliens coming to destroy us, aliens who are demonstrably several times more advanced than us. Such an existential threat has profound impacts and there are all sorts of groups that arise from this.

This story is essentially the story of humanity’s struggle to survive, and the first battle to be fought is psychological. How can you give up and not lose hope when your enemy has tanks and you have clubs (by analogy)? So part of the story is about political warfare, propaganda, etc.

And because the aliens aren’t arriving for another 500 years, the preparations have to take place over many generations of humanity. How does one coordinate such a vast undertaking? One of the implications is that, because the vast majority of Earth’s GDP is going to be put towards building a space fleet for the defense of Earth, this means that standards of living will decline greatly and people will lose heart.

So they expect morale to reach a nadir in the future. To counteract that, once they have their plans set into motion, they take some of their officers with the highest amount of faith and fortitude and put them into hibernation, essentially sending them as reinforcements for the future. This creates a really satisfying throughline for us to follow as familiar characters wake up hundreds of years later and see how things have changed. But I digress. That’s the plot of the second book in the series, not this one.

This book is about uncovering some covert sabotaging that the aliens are doing on humanity from far away. How can they even do this? It appears for a while to be absolute magic, in fact even I was fooled. But by the end of the book, the mysteries are revealed and it is quite satisfying, if a little far-fetched, and yet not outside the realm of possibility. I’ll just leave it at that. There are some very wild concepts in here of what super advanced civilizations could do if they could access more than three physical dimensions.

In short, this book is awesome. I love so many things about it. It’s so intelligent. The guy who wrote this, Liu Cixin, must have so much knowledge of so many disparate fields in order to pull all these things together and come up with this. It’s truly remarkable. This is hard science at its best, pulled into a space opera type plot of epic proportions.

Oh yeah, and that opening scene? Turns out it’s vital. The main characters are survivors of some atrocities that make them really tough, that give them certain traits that turn out to be invaluable when they are sent as reinforcements to the future in the next book, which is also awesome. But I digress.

While I did find this book particularly dense in the classic word soup that a lot of sci-fi falls into, it made me consider the implications for Earth of the discovery of alien life in a way that I hadn't before - can't wait to read the sequels!

@faelif@mastodon.social @bookstodon@a.gup.pe

The sentiment on the internet has always been that this is one of the best science fiction books to read, with its fresh take on what can often times be a stale genre. The perspective is unique and has moments of revelation that feel surprisingly different from the traditional "investigation of self" that I typically get from science fiction, identifying moments of hope despite the fractures in civilization. Despite the intense shift towards the end, it leaves a lot to feel good about which I don't commonly leave hard sci-fi with.

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.

I'm afraid hard sci-fi will never really be my thing but still I have to say this was a pretty impressive read.

Not since Iain M Banks have I been so taken with an author. In fact I'm annoyed that writing this review is delaying me starting the second novel. That's how good it is.