The Three-Body Problem

What a trip this book is!

This is a science fiction novel that leans heavily on the science part and I quite enjoyed that.
If you're into quantum mechanics and astrophysics, as well as the deeper implications of extraterrestrial contact, this book is for you!

In addition, the story features historical events and the consequences of them on a level more personal than macro economics and politics.

I am really impressed and now have the urge to learn more about subatomic particles and the possibility of 11 dimensions. Very well written mind-bending book.

Some really novel ideas, I especially liked the explanation on how computers work. Overall, fascinating dive into science fiction.

I'd say 3.5. The idea around the book is excellent. The other type of storytelling is also refreshing. However, many things were quite weird for me. For example, the three body game - where is the game part in it? The ‘player' was only a spectator in it. It was puzzling to me that he was apparently very good in it without doing a thing ;)
In general, I think the book has really good ideas, but mediocre execution with writing. The characters are slightly too procedural and dry. Maybe that is a cultural issue, and I am just not used to it. However, it was not a slog and reading was quite enjoyable.

I think I am going to continue to have problems with the prose in translations from Chinese. I have read a few now and I find all of them to be somewhat stilted and lacking the flow that I am used to. The concepts and ideas here are certainly vast, if tied up in an overly nationalistic propaganda. Tying together ideas of first contact with complex mathematical problems (the titular three body problem as an example) presented through a strange video game medium this is certainly unlike any other hard sci-fi I have read. I just wish I could have been engaged a bit better - I just found it all quite distant and hard to relate to.

I can see where the praise for this has come from and can respect the vastness of its scope. I will continue to read the series to try and get the fullest of pictures, but it is tonally a bit flat for me so far.

I got a hard sci-fi book recommendation from Goodreads and another web online. One of my colleagues also recommended this book. At first, I found it difficult to follow. Not about the science, but the unfamiliar background that is introduced in the first few chapters (Chinese Cultural Revolution). But I am glad I continued the book. It will be relevant to one character's background in later chapters.

I love the concept of the story! It is not an action story about a character saving the world, it is really about humans realizing how f*cked up they are. The building up of the problem really intriguing, slowly but sure, the reader will piece together what is actually happening.

The physics described is logical physics (need some background to understand them), not just some purely fantasized technology as the usual “sci-fi” story described. The last few chapters are too far-fetched though, but it is still an area of the unknown for present knowledge.

Very enjoyable! Would love to continue to the next book.

DNF

I stopped when reading chapter 9 and I have no idea what happened. Even though I have no doubts this is an amazing book (hence the *** star rating) I just couldn't get through it. The hard science was too... sciency. I was buddy reading this with a friend and she was able to interpret the texts I was struggling to understand, even after reading them for about nine times. Due to the struggle to understand everything, I was unable to build a relationship with the characters and the built environment.

I prefer my communist metaphors to be a little less on the nose. Pigs and stuff.

Rating: 3.5/5

There's a grand scope to the story, one that feels cinematic and intricate in a lot of ways. On the other hand, the characterization could be more fleshed out and, for certain readers, the book leaning into dense scientific topics and jargon can be off-putting. This fits right at home in the hard sci-fi subcategory.

Three Body Problem does read like a prologue to a larger story, and in a way, that probably does more harm than good. But for what it lacks in characterization and breathing room, the book offers the opportunity to explore the first contact trope in a way that is intriguing and clever, to say the least. For those who are used to the “you have to read the next one to get the full story” angle in book reviews, this is such a book. YMMV.

All that being said, I'm curious to see how the Netflix adaptation will turn out. Like I said, this book feels cinematic, and may offer readers a fuller picture of what Liu set out to do here.

This is science fiction with huge emphasis on SCIENCE. To truly enjoy this, you should take a prerequisite course in astrophysics. Thematically & philosophically, it's quite interesting, and the first half of the book has great pacing. But towards the end it devolves into “action” scenes involving some ridiculous science that I had to read twice and still couldn't really understand. The pacing gets super wacky with a ton of rapid-fire crazy events and awkwardly forced plot descriptions (lots of telling, less showing). The dialogue is a bit wooden and generally there's a lack of beautiful writing in favor of a very practical style, but that could be more the translator than the author.

Basically, I understand why a lot of people (science fiction nerds, mind you) love and recommend this book, but I thought it was on the worse side of just okay.

9/10

This is a rare occasion when I was so engrossed in any of the SF books. The characters, science is so believable and sounds very relatable but has a lot of scientific flaws. Don't dig deep there.

It's a journey in the history of science and modern cutting-edge technological advances.

I loved this first volume and looking for answers in the second and third.

Rating: 2.9 leaves out of 5
Characters: 3/5
Cover: 3/5
Story: 3/5
Writing: 2.5/5
Genre: Scifi/Fantasy
Type: Audiobook
Worth?: Meh

I am not a big SCIFI kinda gal, but it seemed interesting when I read what it was about. Was I disappointed in it? Kinda? Some of the reasons for things dumb... but that's just me. 1st chapter hits you right in the feels and kind of makes you step back for a second to think about the book... and there is another point that makes you question about certain things. Especially where mankind would be if not for certain groups going over to other groups. Other than that I don't think I will be reading the rest. After a certain point in the book things kind of make sense.

It wasn't a bad book, just not cup of tea.

Know what the three-body physics problem is before you start, or the first half of the book feels like Vague-posting.

I'm glad I read it, but it didn't hook me enough to grab the next book in the series.

As one of the most well regarded hard Science Fiction written in the last decade I was quite excited to read this. In some ways it lived up to those lofty expectations and in others it didn't. I quite enjoyed the themes of the book. Those centering around Science, religion, and human nature. The first and third being the stronger themes in my opinion.

I was invested in the book from the start, because the backdrop of the first chapters it that of the Chinese revolution. I absolutely love historical fiction so this was an unexpected bonus. In the middle of the book the author lays out a vision for the Three-Body Problem. I don't want to spoil anything, but suffice to say I found both the visual representation painted and the Science presented very compelling and at this point I was absolutely hooked...or so I thought.

In the latter chapters of the book they are almost entirely an info dump that personally I found very hard to follow. Not just because the concepts themselves are advanced, but because there's just so much information being presented in a short time. This left me with a rather sour taste in my mouth at the book ending. While it ends on hopeful note, this did little to alleviate the disinterest the handful of chapters previously had brought about. Still not enough to damper the joy I had with reading about the actual Three-Body Problem. 

The biggest issue I have with the book though isn't specific to any one part of the novel but rather it's the characterization. The characters come across as very flat and devoid of emotion for the most part. I can understand why the author chose the particular style he did in 3rd person, but for someone who is as character driven as they are story driven, it leaves something to be desired to say the least. Characters and even prose suffering in hard Science is not unusual. Often times it feels like the scientific ideas take front and center over everything else. That's something I do think this novel runs into as well.

It's definitely good enough that I'll be checking out the next book in the trilogy at least, but with as praised as it is within the Sci-Fi community, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little disappointed.

I had a hard time getting through this book (putting it aside for long periods of time while I read other material) and will probably skip the other novels in this series. There is definitely something foreign between the Communist Chinese and Western style. It's hard to put a finger on it, but it was just difficult for my Western mind to really enjoy the concepts in the book. It was just too bizarre and unsatisfying. Some think this is a very frightening story of a coming Earth invasion in which the invaders have managed to destroy the very advancement in Earth science prior to the invaders physically being able to reach Earth. But, for me, I just couldn't take the concept seriously and most of the characters seemed very two dimensional and unappealing living in their very hive-like Communist world. I wound up asking myself “Who are the real aliens here?”

Maybe Trisolarans should copy our technology and launch satellites, it would solve their issue. To write entire book without addressing such obvious solution is staggering.

The book itself was far from what I expected but it read well and dangled the carrot in front of me until the very end. But there are some holes or things that require explanation to a layman like me. (Folding dimensions was explained very well though.)

So glad to have read this gem!

I guess one of the main questions of this book is, if you can save humanity, why would you?

This book is not heavily character driven and I would say, there is not much character development either HOWEVER, that is not the point. The thing is, this book (and series) isn't a one man show as most books/movies about the same plot/problem tend to be where it's a handful of heroes who saves the day.

I think it's taken the gargantuan task of making it feel like saving the world is being done by... the world. Some people might find a problem that the series lacks a “main character” who is always somehow in the center of things. But that is the refreshing take that T3BP does. Sure, we do have one or several main character (sort of) whose POV we follow so that events make sense but technically, there is no main hero. These characters serve to represent ideas instead. Even the “villains” are not someone I completely disagree with and the book has done a great job at laying out each character's reasons for the things they do that I ended up sympathizing with their REASONS but not their actions. The human “antagonists” do not feel like caricatures who do the things they did simply because EVIL. Surprisingly even is the lack of heroics despite “saving” the world. And Liu does a splendid job of making us see that.

I would say this is one of the few science fiction books I've read where the SCIENCE is hardly fiction. And that makes it scary, so prepare yourself for some existential horror because the book makes a compelling case of being in the realm of possibility.

I found this series to be deeply philosophical and had to pause several times and take a break simply because I must ponder. 

Впечатление от книги осталось весьма неоднозначное.
С одной стороны, некоторые аспекты были весьма интересны. Особенно те, что лежали в стороне от науки. С другой, стиль повествования ну просто невыносимый. Да, переводчик на английский наверняка проделал огромную работу, транслируя историю с китайского языка на язык западного мира, но итоговый текст получился очень плохим с точки зрения стиля. Повествование весьма обрывочное, персонажи двумерные, аки упомянутый в книге протон со сниженной до двумерной размерностью. Большая часть книги это крайне неумелый выборочный пересказ основ физики. При этом даже с точки зрения науки автор, причисляющий себя к представителям hard sci-fi, допускает ошибки (нет, не думайте, что это я такая умная, просто почитала отзывы физиков на эту книгу).
Фактически, я готова была ставить книге двойку или даже единицу, пока не прочла примерно 70 % текста. Единственное, что спасло книгу в моих глазах это наличие трёх фракций внутри ETO, ну и поступки главной героини.
Внеземная цивилизация, конечно, весьма банальная для научной фантастики. Автору были даны все карты в руки, чтобы развернуть какую-то интересную живность на орбите Альфа Центавра. Вместо этого очередная углеродная бигендерная форма жизни, с мироустройством идентичным земному. Да даже свою йоба-боба частицу со встроенным ИИ они назвали словом с греческими корнями. Просто ВАТ?

P.S Почему все говорят про задачу трёх тел, если фактически в мире Трисоляриса задача о четырёх телах? Три звёзды и их планета. Нипонятна :с

Finally a book I didn't want to put down! It misses on a few realism fronts, but a good story nonetheless.

I enjoyed this quite a bit, but oftentimes I find myself struggling to place everything together and follow along, though there are certainly moments where specific things fall into place. I'm not sure if that's all by design, or if listening to it as an audiobook caused me to miss things, or if I just don't think good.

It's been awhile since I've read Foundation by Isaac Asimov, but the scale and subject of this story very much reminded me of it. I didn't really connect strongly to any characters, but there are so many fascination ideas and really cool showy moments that had me captivated.

I'm not too much of a series reader, so I'm not going to get to the sequels right away, but I'll definitely queue them up to see where things go from here.

That was a struggle. The translator did a fine job, but the linguistic style and scientific explanations were really hard to wade through at times.

I had heard a lot about this book, but I didn't know it was the first in a trilogy.

Aunque en las primeras páginas no le cogía mucho el sentido, a medida que avanzaba me iba interesando más, con un continuo “DAME MÁS, NECESITO MÁS INFORMACIÓN”. En general me ha encantado, y me ha gustado poder ver conceptos de ciencia especializada y entenderlos. Se nota que está escrito por alguien que sabe del tema. No es la primera vez que leo historias de ciencia ficción con invasiones alienígenas, pero desde luego es la que más me ha enganchado.
Altamente recomendable si te gusta la ciencia ficción, pero también las historias que invitan a profundas reflexiones, como el tratamiento de la ciencia, la ecología y la propia raza humana y su rumbo en este caso.

I'm not entirely sure what I just read. But large parts of it revolved around solving equations and scientists bickering with each other about the merits of research vs applied sciences. And that's everything I could ever hope for in a book.

“Aquel trisolariano al que se le ocurrio tildar a los humanos de insectos olvidaba un hecho: los insectos jamás han sido vencidos.”

No sé que pasaba por mi cabeza en el 2016 cuando leí este libro por primera vez y no me pareció “la gran cosa”, cuando en realidad este libro si es “la gran cosa”.

Al igual que la primera vez, hay algo con los protagonistas que no me termina de convencer. Wenjie y Miao son personajes que prometen mucho al inicio de sus historias, pero para el final no son más que relleno. Sin embargo, ahora ya no me parece una falla tan grave y he podido valorar mejor está grandiosa historia.

Una excelente relectura.