The Three-Body Problem

I heard great things about this book, and was excited to see the final book released in English so I thought I would finally read it.

Overall I found it to be a frustrating read. The dialog between characters felt very unnatural, with long paragraphs of pseudo scientific exposition. The overall premise is great, with a rogue scientist inviting an unknown alien civilization to colonize our planet, in the naive hope that they will curb humanity's destructive tendencies. But the increasingly bizarre, practically magical explanations for the alien's scientific discoveries really lost me. Near the end they describe making some sort of artificial intelligent, impossibly small supercomputer, by unfolding a photon, and then launching it to Earth to wreck havok. “Oh no, we accidentally unfolded it into 4D space, oh no, if we unfold it into nondimensional space we will create a black hole and could destroy our planet.” I was fast forwarding my audiobook at this point desperate to get to the end.

I did really the description of the Three Body VR video game that Wang briefly play, it was a wonderful way to explain the alien culture to the characters, and to the reader. I was disappointed that it played such a small role in the book. There's also a throw away comment about how Wang is surprised that a grown woman, his colleague, owns her own video game set up, which was such a weird and outdated mindset.