The Three-Body Problem

So I did something I never thought I'd do: I joined a book club. It's a science book club, but for one reason or another the first book chosen is science fiction with some “hard sci-fi” within it. This book was very popular in China and a 2015 Hugo Award winner. It's starts off interestingly enough with characters dealing with the Cultural Revolution of the late 60s, a tumultuous time in Chinese history. And then it jumps to the present and our protagonist is a nanotechnology developer named Wang. As I read along, I knew that at its heart, this was a first-contact story, so I was interested to get to when that actually happened. But my interest began to fade for several reasons:

> One-dimensional characters – Wang, himself, is a bit of a cipher. And the flamboyant cop “Da Shi” was a laughable cliché.
> Wang spends several chapters immersed in an online video game called Three Body that spans eons and is supremely boring.
> Character motivations were either unbelievable, undiscernable, or too Chinese for me to grasp.
> It's not an exciting story. Very little seems to actually happen. And, through no fault of the translation, this book reads like an outline, written by a high school physics geek – dry, amateurish, and dull.
> And it ends abruptly and unsatisfyingly – it's the first of a trilogy, but that doesn't excuse this ending.
> Near the end of the book, I had to skim a bit, something I rarely do. That's never a good sign.

This wins a Hugo?!