The Three-Body Problem
Ratings1,567
Average rating3.9
Ça c'est du tome 1 comme on les aime. Liu Cixin tu es ce chinois que tu penses être.
interesting but too technical for me. im sure a real intellectual would've enjoyed this novel than i, a humble smooth-brained peasant.
I enjoyed this much more than the show but watching the show first definitely helped me understand a lot of the context and plot. Very grateful for the translator for including footnotes to help with the historical side of what was happening.
This is a “Big Brain” book for sure… All of the science stuff went right over my head; however, I was somehow able to follow the plot! I’m am curious to pick up book 2 to find out what happens next! Three Stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️!
The book was fun and engaging, but it required more suspension of disbelief that I could give it.
Note: Listened to audiobook. My complaints could be a result of translation style or narrator style.
I have no idea how this book is so popular. If you're not into sci-fi and you get recommended this, please ignore and read Adrian Tchaikovsky or Ursula K. Le Guin instead.
The first few hours were vaguely interesting in terms of Chinese history, but I struggled to connect to any of the characters. It's far too long before anything interesting happens and the characters personalities are not enough to carry the story. When interesting stuff does start happening - great stuff. Interesting and funny while being a little mysterious - excellent!
Then the mystery doesn't get resolved, but a bunch of stuff you'd need knowledge of the mystery to understand happens which left me extremely confused. Maybe I'm stupid but I had no idea what was happening for about 3 hours in the middle.
The last 4 hours are genuinely brilliant - there's great hardcore sci-fi elements in a sort of epistolary framing, which I found super interesting.
YMMV, I won't be reading the sequels.
4.5 stars! this is such a vast and interesting sci-fi. a multigenerational narrative of conspiracies, science, history, and ethics set during the chinese cultural revolution.
i did get a little bored at some points in the story as the characters weren't very interesting to me (except for da shi, i <3 that man) which is why i took half a star off, but overall it was a solid story!
Contains spoilers
Summary (w/ spoilers):
Our past protagonist experiences the worst that humanity has to offer and reacts realistically. She is not a stubbornly positive main character with superior morals - she is a hurt character who loses faith in humanity, and operates in a state of shock and single-mindedness. There is scant accountability or even repentance for humanity's self-serving destruction, so when she is presented with a chance to change humanity's existence, she takes it.
To me, this is what can happen when horrible acts are turned a blind eye - history is doomed to repeat itself. The stifling of progress and science in 1966 China scars her, and in turn, she enables a power that can stifle modern scientific progress that will last generations after her, sending humanity to extinction.
Overall review:
This book had me thinking about it days after I reading because of the existential questions and in-depth concepts introduced. I really enjoyed unravelling the story’s mysteries alongside the protagonists, but blundered through the hard science parts. It’s hard to know if my amazement is just being overwhelmed from lack of understanding coupled with the fact this won a Hugo, but I can’t deny I felt engaged after finishing this story.
Thoughts on other people's reviews:
I AGREE characters seem to exist only to serve the plot. The scale the book is going for is huge so it makes sense personal development is nothing in comparison and could be a waste of time - however the lack of nuance is too drastic for me. For example, women in this story have single-minded goals that they coldly pursue, and save for appearing motherly, show no emotional sensitivity, which is odd given women are typically socialized to do so.
I DISAGREE that colluding with aliens for human intervention is unrealistic. Imagine being a 20-something year old losing your dad in a murder your mother enabled to save herself, being forced to partake in deforestation and experiencing the apathy for it firsthand, and seeing systems of power moving on from the pain that they inflicted on you. After being betrayed over and over from an individual to global scale, how could you still have faith in humanity?
I can fully acknowledge and appreciate that there is a good--perhaps even excellent--book in here. However, it was a little too dense and frankly a bit too smart for me to follow at times, and that did detract from my enjoyment of it. When reviewing this, I felt like the book itself was quite good but also like I did not enjoy reading it particularly much. Don't get me wrong, there were concepts I really dug and parts that really pulled me in, but overall reading this did feel a bit muddy and like my mind often wandered FAR off from it. Would I continue reading this series? Frankly, to my disappointment, the ending really grabbed me and made me want to continue reading the series but I did know that it would probably be the same experience. Maybe I'll go dive back in, but this is a book where I needed some incredibly soft, sweet candy to chew on immediately after putting it down.
Found myself enjoying the mystery much more than the explanations, but certainly left me with enough curiosity to want to finish the trilogy.
Clearly written by an Engineer, I love the details Cixin puts into his work. The book is very clever. The undertone of the book made me visualize a rather bleak situation from cover to cover. It is in no way an uplifting book, but it is very intriguing.
Right of the bat, I want to give big praise to the translator of this book, Bojan Tarabić. I read it in my native language (Serbian) and the choice of words had me reaching for the dictionary quite a few times. I don't know if it was an artistic choice of the translator or a stylistic imitation of the original to use such unorthodox phrasing and wording but it strongly elevated my reading experience.
That being said, this was a awful book. I could understand the one-dimensional characters, pasing issues and the messy narrative structure if the ideas were at least presented in a meaningful way. But they are not. They are dry exposition dumps that are no more exciting than reading a physics textbook. And they are delivered in a very non-organic way where the whole story is interrupted just so the author can take a few pages to explain a concept. They concepts are not organically woven into the story.
I had no idea what to expect when I started reading. The opening had me hooked. Science community during the Chinese cultural revolution. Sounds exciting. Certainly novel to me. But then it goes to a present day murder mystery. Which turns into a sci-fi mystery with the countdown (which gets completely abandoned) Then there is the video game which helps introduce the alien race. And after the video game is finished it's just meanders from one info dump and character back-story to another with eye-rolling plot conveniences, interruptered only once for that boat-cutting "action" scene. Even though digestable, interesting sci-fi concepts does not a good story make.
This whole book is just clumsy introduction with fascinating concepts and one interesting character (the cop). Someone else wrote this, but I could read a book just about the adventures of Da Shi. I am very hesitant about continuing with this series. And I've grown tired of people telling me to endure the first book because everything improves with later installments. If the author wanted me to continue, they should've written a more compelling first novel. Nowadays we get these thousand+ page monstrocities that are divided into three parts and we are asked to blindly trust that things will get better as the story progresses. I'm not sold.
was not a huge fan of the giant lore dump at the end but besides that I thought it set up things pretty nicely
Well hmm. I dislike the author, I dislike the sexism and the scientific explanation were too detailed and boring to but I it was hard to put the book down and I kept thinking about and comparing the world of it to the real one. The writing style/ translation is good and besides the philosophical and dystopian topics I just love this one ex-marine cop character that actually is the most clever (and funny) one out of all those scientists. I considered not continuing the series but I give the second book a go bc I want to see what happens to Da Shi :)
Gave this a 7.5 on my 10 point scale...probably a 3.5 stars here.
Good read but had some issues. Did not like how the alien race magically knew so much about Earth and humans. Didnt carer for the human computer part and the fact that it seemed they didnt know about computers but then created human version of all the main components. But a good interesting read overall.
Great setup and great ending, but it lost me in the second third of the novel.
I found the initial setup with all the unknowns of the situation very interesting. I was reading in order to find out what was actually happening. I gave me the vibe of a science murder mystery.
But once the this mystery was unveiled it devolved into a pseudo science fiction, which is okay in its own, but the start was so strong and “scientifically based” that the contrast was annoying. But when I made the switch into reading a more fantastical approach to science fiction I enjoyed. It was just the initial shock.
I believe that first contact stories are very interesting and fun to theorize. But I believe the first contact part was treated a bit poorly... How should the aliens decipher a human language from a short message? They're supper computers translated it, but in order to translate a language you require knowledge of that language and that is impossible with a short text and no further context. But who know, maybe is human language not so complicated as we thought.
The science of the Trisolarian civilization is what pulled me out, because it entered the speculative and borderline pseudo science territory. But as mentioned above once I made the mental switch I actually enjoined the speculation part, but the proton super computer is still a bit too much. I don't know what the author was smoking when he came up with that idea.
Even though it is a pessimistic approach to the first contact story it hasn't fallen into the trap of having a pessimistic ending.
I believe the chapter Bugs does a great job to lift you spirit up after the Trisolarian “proton super computer” bs. Once you accept a foreign civilization has those That level of knowledge it becomes a bit depressing the possibility of contact.
Nonetheless I left the book with High spirits.
Fun read if you don't overthink it to much as I did.
This book is for anyone who loves science fiction! Look no further, just go ahead and read it.
This book has such an interesting concept, and a completely different take on what might happen if humans met an alien civilization.
Minor complaint: I which there were some better character development throughout this book. I also had a harder time at first with the names, but this was originally a Chinese based book, so that is expected.
As has been pointed out elsewhere the character development leaves a little to be desired, but loved the plot and the hard science of it just ramps up as the books goes on.
The first few chapters and the last few chapters were very interesting and it will definitely make me continue the series but most of this book bored me to tears and I had almost no idea what was going on and why most of it was relevant