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A review by goblinhearted
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
2.0
My disclaimer is that I haven’t read a ton of traditional science fiction and I have a very strong inkling that my issues with this book are not entirely limited specifically to this book, but symptoms of larger problems in the sci-fi genre in general.
The writing style was not my cup of tea at all. I’ve seen it mentioned that the book was originally written in Chinese, and then translated into English. Many wonder if perhaps it’s a poor translation effort - which I think would be fair - but after reading more of it and looking into this issue more deeply, I’ve found confirmation from native-Chinese speakers that it’s not a translation problem. But I was determined to look past this. I try not to be a “reading-snob”.
A frighteningly large portion of this novel consists of what I call “science-dumping”: long paragraphs - pages, even, explaining complicated scientific phenomena that one assumes is meant to flesh out the concepts being explored in the story. In this book, these parts to me seem gratuitous and unnecessary and do little more than act as a flex for the author to show off their highly advanced scientific knowledge. It’s funny because right before this, I read The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, and the protagonist of that book was also a physicist and there were moderate pockets of science-dumping there, but I didn’t get the same impression from it. Also years ago I read The Martian by Andy Weir and I distinctly remember the sense of getting dumped-on with science and I enjoyed it a ton. I can’t completely articulate what fell short about the execution of it in this story, perhaps other than the fact that it was non-stop and difficult to follow.
The dialogue, in some places more than others, read like a poorly-written low-budget action movie. Reading these parts completely pulled me out of the flow of the story and made me think “... really?”
There’s also a lot of overexplaining. A character does an action, and then the narrative explains why that action is not suspicious/weird/out-of-character. This happened quite a lot, and I felt like it detracted overall from the reading experience.
At critical moments, when two characters would argue back and forth about their ideology, the combination of the lack of dialogue tags and the sense that both characters would speak with the exact same tone and voice would make it extremely difficult to follow who was saying what.
Overall, the experience reading it was very frustrating. I mostly just wanted it to end. I really wanted to like this!
The writing style was not my cup of tea at all. I’ve seen it mentioned that the book was originally written in Chinese, and then translated into English. Many wonder if perhaps it’s a poor translation effort - which I think would be fair - but after reading more of it and looking into this issue more deeply, I’ve found confirmation from native-Chinese speakers that it’s not a translation problem. But I was determined to look past this. I try not to be a “reading-snob”.
A frighteningly large portion of this novel consists of what I call “science-dumping”: long paragraphs - pages, even, explaining complicated scientific phenomena that one assumes is meant to flesh out the concepts being explored in the story. In this book, these parts to me seem gratuitous and unnecessary and do little more than act as a flex for the author to show off their highly advanced scientific knowledge. It’s funny because right before this, I read The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, and the protagonist of that book was also a physicist and there were moderate pockets of science-dumping there, but I didn’t get the same impression from it. Also years ago I read The Martian by Andy Weir and I distinctly remember the sense of getting dumped-on with science and I enjoyed it a ton. I can’t completely articulate what fell short about the execution of it in this story, perhaps other than the fact that it was non-stop and difficult to follow.
The dialogue, in some places more than others, read like a poorly-written low-budget action movie. Reading these parts completely pulled me out of the flow of the story and made me think “... really?”
There’s also a lot of overexplaining. A character does an action, and then the narrative explains why that action is not suspicious/weird/out-of-character. This happened quite a lot, and I felt like it detracted overall from the reading experience.
At critical moments, when two characters would argue back and forth about their ideology, the combination of the lack of dialogue tags and the sense that both characters would speak with the exact same tone and voice would make it extremely difficult to follow who was saying what.
Overall, the experience reading it was very frustrating. I mostly just wanted it to end. I really wanted to like this!