The Three-Body Problem

Executive Summary: Easy to see why this is up for awards, very enjoyable.

Audio book: Luke Daniels! He's awesome. Maybe not the best fit for this book, but I'd take him over just about anyone for audio books. I hope he'll be narrating the rest of the series.

Full Review
This is a hard one for me to review. I generally don't like Hard Sci-Fi too much. I read for pleasure, and I do enough thinking at work. I don't really need to spend my free time thinking hard.

That said, I didn't find the science too overwhelming, except maybe at the end where there was a huge infodump about folding protons. I think if you are a fan of hard sci-fi, you may love this book, where I just found it pretty enjoyable.

The story pulled me in slowly. I wasn't really sure what the prologue had to do with anything until maybe halfway? Possibly later. I have a hard time with names in general, especially in audio, so this was no different, but it was easy enough to keep the characters straight. There isn't a ton of POVs to deal with at least. I think my favorite is probably the no brain/mouth filter cop. His dialogue always made for some fun parts.

My favorite part is probably the Three Body “game”. This is what finally pulled me completely. I'm fairly confident I would have quit it quite early on, but it's interesting to read about someone obviously far smarter than myself take on the challenge.

I really had no idea what this book was going to be about, and I can't say I really saw where it ended up coming, but it wasn't a total surprise either.

The Chinese setting makes for a breath of fresh air. If there is stuff this good coming out of China, I hope more of it gets translated soon. It seems as though Ken Liu does an excellent job with it.

Overall, I think an enjoyable read, and I'm looking forward to picking up the second one when the audiobook gets released.