The Three-body Problem Review

[Mica Withington]

I discovered Cixin Liu three years ago, thanks to Supernova Era, and was planning to read The Three-Body Problem one day. The book got suddenly pushed at the very top of my TBR when it was chosen for me by the staff of my awesome public library for their Winter Reading Challenge. Obviously not a challenge at all!

We quickly discover a mysterious military base, with a very large parabolic antenna. Ye Wenjie is taken there for a very special mission. Then the book jumps to 40 years later.
We meet a strange group called The Frontiers Of Science; and Wang Miao, a nanomaterials researcher.
At the time, many physicist mysteriously commit suicide. Why?
Even more mysteriously, Wang sees a strange count-down, appearing on everything he looks at. What will happen at the end of the countdown?

Beside the technical questions, we run into more social ones.
Our problems on Earth seem so numerous and complex, could we all agree to invite aliens to help us solve our problems? Would they come? Would they help?

I loved all these social questions and how they were dealt with.
And the whole geeky dimension, for instance the scene of a major computer motherboard made up of 30 million men in chapter 17.
And apparently yes, the sun can be used to amplify radio waves!

Humanity needing the intervention of an outside force. A friend of mine, Kathi Harris, already wrote that book, called Medusa, about space aliens giving humans on earth ultimatums on getting their act together.

This does sound very good. I had heard of it vaguely but your review encourages me to see about getting a copy to read. The most recent science fiction books I have read are two of the Murderbot series by Martha Wells.

I don't often do reviews, but when I do, they're not usually in my blog, but they are very opinionated. You have been warned. Okay, so it's more personal observation than actual review, but there you have it. I promise to keep it short. Ish.

I'm talking about a new (as I write this) television series, airing on Netflix, that starts with a book. Previews proudly announce that it is from the "creators of Game of Thrones" (which I never watched). If you follow any of this stuff, then you probably already know I'm talking about "3 Body Problem," based on the book by Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin, which started on Netflix a few days ago. Fun fact, the book is called, "The Three-Body Problem," and not "3 Body Problem," as Netflix has titled it.

The reason it was hard to read is that I don't think it's a particularly good book, despite the fact that it has some really cool concepts. However, the characters are mostly flat, as dessicated as the dehydrated Trisolarans during the dry chaotic seasons. The descriptions of the, ahem, science, particularly when it comes to folding that supercomputer into subatomic space, never mind the human supercomputer, stretch the imagination to the breaking point. In fact, some of the things in the book are downright ridiculous, particularly when it comes to understanding how actual humans would react.

Oh, and as a science fiction reader, I'm awesome at suspending disbelief (Transporters? Why the hell not?), but there's only so far I can go. In science fiction, and in the world of fantasy, which I appreciate and enjoy as well, there are rules, and you need, at the very least, to have some really good writing if you're going to stretch those rules to the breaking point. And again, anyway, I won't belabor the point, but the fact is, the adaptation on Netflix is actually really quite good, or at least the first episode certainly makes me feel that way. It got my attention, it held my attention, and I look forward to seeing where it goes from there.

I also like the fact that they created a composite of five characters from the one main character of the book, Professor Wang Miao. And the reason I like that, aside from the fact that it makes it much more interesting to develop a story around five people than just one, is that the one character, Miao, is part of the problem in the book. At some point, I just stopped caring about this person, and it looks like Netflix has fixed that problem.

Granted, Netflix kept one ridiculous concept, namely that scientists would, upon finding out that physics doesn't work the way they thought (I won't tell you why), commit suicide, is another Olympic level stretch. At least, with the right visuals, they make it look as though they might be going mad, more than just heartbroken that some scientific principles might have to be called into question.

Anyway, there you go, that's my mini-review, so to speak, of the first episode of Netflix's "3 Body Problem," and of course, a not-so-nice review, I suppose, of the book "The Three-Body Problem." I did, however, have to get that off my chest, and I appreciate your patience.

This is a book of ideas. Many reviewers I follow and trust have talked about the lack of character development and I can only echo those thoughts. I had several problems with this book but at the same time am really intrigued by its ideas and the story it sets up.

Welcome to SFF Book Reviews. I'm Dina and this is where I post my thoughts on science fiction and fantasy books. I live in Vienna, Austria and, other than reading, I enjoy movies, video games, thunderstorms, eternally bickering couples, coffee, and anything made of chocolate.

Amidst the upheavel and overthrow of the previously-admired academics during the Cultural Revolution, a young girl's family life was torn asunder. Her sister died as a revolutionary in battle, and her professor father's brutal demise was hastened by her mother, who decided to save herself and throw away her ideals. The young girl, Ye Wenjie, tainted by her familial associations, is pulled into the inner-sanctum of the Red Guard's isolated, mountain-top research station. Over years of trials and tribulations, Ye Wenjie's intelligence and work ethic gain her access to information that will shape the rest of her life and change the trajectory of humankind.

The Three-Body Problem tackles the ultimate question of the cosmos: If there is intelligent life out there existing at the same time as ours, what would proof of their existence mean for humans and what would the interaction between the two civilizations look like?

Liu takes an imaginative approach in exploring this concept and questions why many people expect that other intelligent life would be kind to humans when in fact Earth-bound humans so quickly separate themselves into to warring factions. Through a complex storyline that evolves over the post-Cultural Revolution decades, Liu introduces readers to the Trisolaran society through a fascinating computer game/virtual reality construct.

The Trisolaran people are exactly what their name entails - a people populating a planet that has three revolving suns, which is an example of the real-life three-body problem in physics upon which this series is based. With perpetual instability on their planet, the Trisolarans are in desperate need of a longer-term solution that presents itself in the form of Earth.

There is some complicated real and imagined physics and nanotechnology covered in the novel that is presented in a way that a non-scientific reader can appreciate without too much granularity, not an easy task, especially for a book translated from Chinese to English!

Readers not well-versed in Chinese names may have a slight amount of difficulty in keeping the characters straight, though I do not want to over-state this. There is a character reference at the start of the novel that lists the characters, their key role/job, and their relationships to each other as a handy guide.

I found myself completely immersed in the world brought to life in The Three-Body Problem. Just like Wang Miao, the character who kept logging back in to the virtual reality game in the novel, I kept fanning open the pages of my book to see what was going to happen next. We know our own world so well that one of the greatest features of this novel is that it allows readers to imagine another sort of world entirely and to tease out potential answers to some of life's macro questions.

The Dark Forest begins and ends with an ant, a fitting analogy for the story of humanity told in the intervening 500 pages. This second book of the trilogy picks up three years after Earth entered crisis mode and spans about two hundred years into the future as Earth awaits the drawn-out interstellar conflict.

The pace of the story contained within this trilogy is never slow, but it picks up speed even further in Death's End, the final installment. This is partially due to the length of this book, which is the longest of the three, but more strongly tied to the time hopping of the main characters, who are able to "hibernate". Toward the end of the book, time moves forward at even an infinite pace.

So the three plots in The Three-Body Problem come to resemble the problem itself, which has been a thorn in the sides of mathematicians and physicists for a while. The interaction of any two plots is pretty simple to delineate. But trying to understand the interactions among all three becomes a complicated task.

In the end, I enjoyed the novel rather more than I thought I would given some of the reviews I read from friends. The ideas here, if not sweeping, are stimulating. This is one of the types of science fiction I truly enjoy, where the ideas drive the story in new and often unexpected directions.

That's not the only way a perpendicularity works, but one surefire way to create a perpendicularity is a massive collection of Investiture in the Cognitive or mostly Physical realm. But Cognitive's weird, doesn't always work the right way. But there are ways to do it that way too.

So my suspicion is that the goal of the Ghostbloods is to control a tri-Shard scenario. They know of at least two possible cases (Roshar::Honor, Cultivation, Odium & Scadrial::Ruin, Preservation, Trell) and so have agents actively working those two cases. I think historically, it will turn out that the Ghostbloods do not achieve their goal of developing a tri-Shard Vessel. However, I predict this will as such be historically so. Once the Cosmere endgame comes into play, a different tri-Shard scenario will arise.

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