Reviews with content warning for Police brutality - The Three-Body Problem

I've heard repeatedly that this book is amazing from lots of men whose opinions I respect.
This is a very dense, hard sci fi book. I found it a little tedious from a pacing perspective, and I found the main character an irritating emptiness. He is often an excuse for other characters to contemplate upper level physics.
The descriptions of the physics, and the extremely human reaction to the ideas ka fascinating. This book presents a lot of ideas that were interesting to think about. This might not be on any of my "all time best" lists but I absolutely want to hear the author expand on the ideas he has set up.

Also it's so refreshing to get a very un-American/non-Western voice for sci Fi. Another reason to look forward to the next book

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bettysbookishworld's review against another edition

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dark mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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wispy_reviews's review against another edition

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challenging hopeful informative inspiring mysterious reflective tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

I described Cixin Liu’s writing style to my friends as the complete opposite of Lovecraft: good ol’ Howie boy is known for popularizing the idea of “fear of the unknown,” and anyone who knows anything about the father of contemporary Horror knows that he knew very little. The world was unknown to him, thus everything was terrifying.
In contrast, Liu’s background in science and engineering allows him to create a new wave of existential, cosmic dread: fear derived from actually knowing. Understanding how nature and the universe work opens the door for truly cosmic horror.
The writing, though dense with theory, is accessible to the layman and does a great job conveying the immensity of the plot.
This book made me hungry for more, and after I read the next two in the series I’ll be exploring even more contemporary Science Fiction

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uranaishi's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

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andra_mihaela_s's review against another edition

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challenging tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

I'm very glad I finally bit the bullet and read this book! ^_^
This Hugo Award Winner is truly unique(for me, as a sporadic Sci-Fi reader >..>) and beautifully written!

We follow Wang Miao -an nanomaterial engineer- as he tries to figure out why scientist and physicists alike die under mysterious circumstances. He gets wrapped up in the strange game named The Three-Body Problem;he tries and mostly fails to work with an insufferable cop named Shi Qiang and visits Mrs. Ye Wenjie to find confort from her daughter's inexplicable passing. >..>

Content Warning: suicide off-page; suicidal thoughts; murder of an individual in moderate detail; harmful political agendas and actions on page; examples of re-education on page!; sensitive content regarding religion and belief (for those of you sensitive to atheism and )

This novel is complex blend of genre: obviously we have science fiction, but elements of historical fiction and thriller get the spotlight regularly here! ^^

I really enjoyed how Liu Cixin started this novel. I feel we needed to understand Ye Wenjie and the other scientist who went through the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1950's and 60's, in order to see why The Three-Body Problem(the game referred in the book) became what it is today AND to get an idea why China's elite is so behind in specific research areas.

Wang Miao was a good protagonist...not great, not bad...good. He was a vessel for us to interact with this alternate reality; and I must confess...I didn't care why he was soooo moved by Ye Wenjie daughter's passing...after all his life is separate from them up until he is requested to join the investigation. On the other hand...his banter with Da Shi was GREAT!!!!!>..< I thought I will HATE Da Shi after 50 pages...but Oh boy was I wrong...in the end I think my favorite interaction of this novel are between Miao and Shi Qiang :)
In order to address some words to the women in this book..I don't know if the author preferred to write them in this way specifically to avoid a bad representation, or if he had a greater scope...but ALL WOMEN are depicted as unfeeling...robotic and incapable of surpassing their childhood trauma.(they have an engraved rage onto their soul, a hunger for ultimate justice 0_0) Maybe this is why I gave only 4 stars to the book...I get why some characters needed their anger at the world and complete lack of sympathy for the human condition in general in order to take the actions they did..but characters like Shen Yufei don't have a reason to be so detached.

Speaking of Yufei...her husband Wei Cheng was intriguing to say the least...and his role in the story!!!0_0..hope to see him in future books!!! >..>

Another great part: Trisolaris...the chapter dedicated to it....amazing! I especially loved how the author choose to mirror an earlier section. That time one soul pressed with trembling fingers a button of doom, while this time...an alien went against his very nature!^_^ Hope to see listener from station 1379 again!!!

Regarding plot: I feel this was a great start for what it tried to be...the mathematical problem of the Three-Bodies is greatly explored here not only with action and suspense, but with hard and cold physics (we get through a clever plot device multiple tries to solve this well-known dilemma in the world of mathematics! ^^ I truly loved the civilisations and the minds the game used, so that our protagonist is guided in the direction they needed him to go ). All these are mixed in with the investigation, Miao's slow descent into madness and Ye Wenjie's story. I cannot wait to read the next book! ^^

Overall, the atmosphere is more of a thriller (Miao is tormented to find out the truth while also bizarrely attracted to the unique game he accidentally discovered) with elements of hard sci-fi mixed with subtle anti-propaganda messages.^^
You'll definitely want to find out what happens; who's behind all the murders and suicides and how all these connect with this random characters >..>; all the while waiting with baited breath for the moment the aliens make first contact! 0_0

In my opinion, this book also has un underling message regarding the Chinese communism and the harmful actions it had on the scientific community over time, but don't take my word on it. After all, I'm just an outsider reading a sci-fi :)

In the end, I highly recommend you give this a try if you enjoy hard sci-fi with thriller elements!!! >..>

Enjoy

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beebidon's review against another edition

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challenging informative sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.25

I very nearly marked this book DNF many times. In truth, it took me most of 2022 to trudge through it.

I want to call it interesting, but in truth only parts of it were. It had the potential to be interesting. It had interesting sections. The concept is certainly interesting.

I’ve seen people say their complaint was that the characters were too static or bland, and people who adored the book rebutting those complaints with “that’s just the translation” or “that’s just the culture of how they tell stories” and perhaps that’s true. I don’t think the characters were the issue with the story, however. They just certainly didn’t add to it or try to save the experience.

My main complaint is with pacing; the exciting stuff was crammed into the last 100 pages or so, and not in an exciting denouement way so much as “great, we got through 250 pages of backstory, now I guess the actual story happens.” I found myself frustrated even as I was engrossed at that point, because I could see the small sliver of pages remaining, stressing me out as if I needed to tell the author “yes, yes, that’s nice and all but HURRY, we are running out of time!”

In the end, we didn’t even get answers to all the questions, and not in a fun cliffhanger or philosophical statement deliberate sort of way. There WAS a cliffhanger of sorts, but I do not feel like my lingering questions were intentional there. I more fell like the author had a really cool concept he wanted to pitch and didn’t know what to do with it so he fluffed hundreds of pages of history and scientific geeking out, dropped a novella or even short story’s worth of plot, then closed the book.

Finally, I’llsay before my spoiler talk that there are different levels of sci-fi you can find, from low/soft to high/hard, where high/hard is heavily based in science, or heavily based in fantastical, “out there” concepts. 3BP drags you through DENSE quantum, theoretical, astro, micro, macro, and every other kind of -physics, but in a way that walking away I’m not sure how much I can say “well, at least I learned a lot from it” because I’m not sure how much was true or embellished to lay the groundwork for the plot points. I don’t think Cixin (or Ken as translator) did a bad job of breaking down the concepts to understand (aided by the scientists often explaining the concepts to non-scientists, or at least scientists not in that specific field). But I did struggle a lot with dense passages where I couldn’t be sure if this was a concept I would need to know later or if it was a character waxing on for their own interest. I was often torn between “do I skip this passage or do I just put the book down for now” as my eyes glazed over. And every time I put the book down, I felt no obligation to pick it back up besides a faint curiosity and a sunken cost fallacy of “well, I’m already this far, maybe eventually it will get better.”

There were some cool concepts that Cixin was trying to get at that I feel were left half-presented or dropped n on the table with an “is this anything?” look, like if we wanted to feel some way about the content, that was up to us to go through the mental work on. Was it ethical to keep “less educated” people in the dark? Did Cixin mean to present a view that was so anti-religion? (Was he trying to say anything about religion at all?)

I feel the strongest points made (and the reason I gave the book as relatively high a rating as I did) were the parallels drawn between Trisolaran and Earth views about who deserves to thrive, the struggle for survival and at what point is it ethical (or not) to give up your own survival for another society that may “deserve” it more. This is the question I think I’ll ponder on into this new year, and Cixin’s strongest win.

I was also saddened by how such a cool concept as this alien society was still so clearly limited by the author’s very traditional views on things. A planet as advanced as this, with such unique bodies and minds, but there’s only 2 genders/sexes, and they’re heterosexual and monogamous? With every important person in the world (three body game version or “real” At the end) a man? Someone will roll their eyes at me on this for being “too woke” but I’m just not sure a cishet patriarchy needs to be reflected in the aliens too. Alas.

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