The look of incredulous disgust on their face when I admitted I hadn't read 'Three-Body Problem'. It was too much to bear, so at my earliest convenience I picked up a copy and devoured it.

This is incredible! I know I've been saying a lot of great, hyperbolic things about a lot of the sf I've been reading in the last years since getting back into professional bookpushing, but Cixin Liu is the real deal.

The official back-cover synopsis sets up the plot better than I can, but the story's roots are in the Cultural Revolution when a discredited scientist is sent to a remote laboratory to conduct experiments with a large antennae set up in opposition to SETI. The People's Republic would have contact with aliens before the corrupt West. Shockingly, they do. Or rather, one woman does, the discredited scientist, but she hides the evidence. It is an advanced and hostile civilization that is contacted, and they are coming to Earth. The invasion forces will not arrive for many years. In close enough to present-day China, and across the world, people are taking sides in the secret struggle to welcome the invaders and those who would oppose them.

Its a fascinating plot, but what makes the story shine is its roots in hard science and in how the story is slowly revealed. There are many surprises and the whole trilogy has been translated into English and is in paperback! Fuck Amazon, and get them from your local bookstore.

Remembrance of Earth's Past

Next: 'The Dark Forest'

I have been getting yelled at for a while to read "The Three-Body Problem." I really wish that I had left it alone. I had a hard time even getting immersed in the book cause not a lot of it made sense to me and we kept changing POVs.  I know about the Cultural Revolution in China (East Asia was my main focus when I got my undergraduate degree in History) but linking that with science fiction didn't gel that well in my opinion. I can see though why some of the characters were over mankind though due to what they had been through in their lives, but I would still hard pause about some of the choices that we had people make throughout this book. The ending just left me nonplussed. 

"The Three-Body Problem" follows several characters, Ye Wenjie a disgraced scientist, Michael Evans, a rich man, and Wang Miao, a nanotechnology professor, and a whole host of people I am probably forgetting at this point. I am not going to lie, after a while I stopped taking in people's names. The book bounces back and forth the most between Ye and Wang though.

The book starts off during China's Cultural Revolution. Ye witnesses her father being murdered and is sent off to work in a labor camp after being labeled a traitor. While there though she is recruited by Red Coast (China's organization that is out there looking for proof of alien life). Due to Ye's expertise she is asked about working with radio communications to get messages back and forth from aliens. Eventually Ye does have first contact with people from the planet Trisolaris. 

Fast forward to Wang in the present day who gets asked to work with a detective who is looking into the deaths of some scientists. Wang starts to notice some things that are weird and wonders if something more sinister is going on. Eventually though Wang is playing a virtual reality game called "Three Body." 

I didn't feel a real connection to any of the characters while I was reading this. I tried, but I found myself getting bored for the most part. The only things that held my interest was when Wang went into the Three Body game and I found myself becoming fascinated with the game. 

The writing got a bit convoluted to me when trying to explain the science behind everything.

"Can the fundamental nature of matter really be lawlessness? Can the stability and order of the world be but a temporary dynamic equilibrium achieved in a corner of the universe, a short-lived eddy in a chaotic current?"

 

“And it is this: The human race is an evil species. Human civilization has committed unforgivable crimes against the Earth and must be punished. The ultimate goal of the Adventists is to ask our Lord to carry out this divine punishment: the destruction of all humankind.”

 

The flow of the book was off and as I said, I struggled to finish this. I just found myself wishing for the book to finally get to the ending. When I did I was just relieved I managed to finish it. 

This was so confusing. Definitely not a fan of it. This took me almost three days to struggle through. The only thing I got is that people from Earth are bugs.