The Three-Body Problem

Did not get this at all. Was constantly waiting to get drawn into it in some way, but it never happened. I realise that the translator aimed deliberately to convey the voice of the author even if it did not render in a traditional American style (grammatically and narratively) so no doubt there was some difficulty introduced on that front. However, I found it lurching and simplistic and plodding, and I can't put any of that down to cultural differences, just bad writing. Some positive reviews have dismissed criticism saying that this is just “Hard SciFi” as if naysayers just can't handle the fact that the book contains swathes of discussion about physics and mathematics. That didn't bother me - in fact, they were probably the most compelling parts. At least I was learning something! Ditto the historical sections that provided information about the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Everything else was just too straightforward, there was no nuance. Characters were one-dimensional, plot devices were introduced and dismissed without any depth, and the science itself just didn't hold together. There were so many bad explanations and contradictions that I got more and more frustrated:
* Communication with the aliens seemed suspiciously easy - the difficulties of language and translation were dismissed with a sentence claiming that the message contained a 'self-deciphering' system* The Trisolarian pacifist who responds to the first Earth message complains: "I am tired of Trisolaris... We have no art, no literature..." - so how is it that he knows what these things are?* When explaining about the three-dimensional proton unfolding resulting in shapes that looked like eyes, the author pops in a note explaining that of course we don't know what they look like... And then goes on to describe them having an iris, a pupil, and being an eyeball that loses the shape of the eye to become a circle. So, it sounds like we do know what the Trisolarian eye looks like, and it sounds very much like a human one.

Not to mention that the whole three-body 'game' involved almost zero interaction. Where was the gameplay? It was more like an interactive movie. (Although that may well be what video games are like these days.) And how do you fall in love with an alien species you know nothing about, other than the fact that they live in a planetary system with three stars? And how is it that a civilisation that spends a long proportion of its time dessicated and inert can somehow become more technologically advanced than Earth, which has a temperate climate?

Other reviewers have pointed out that the third book in the series is clearly the best, and is brilliant, and whatever. I'm intrigued to see what that might look like, but not so much that I want to wade through a second terrible jumbled turgid mess before I get there. This was a one-book problem for me, and thankfully my game is over.