Soon to be a Netflix Original Series!“War of the Worlds for the 21st century.” – Wall Street JournalThe Three-Body Problem is the first chance for English-speaking readers to experience the Hugo Award-winning phenomenon from China’s most beloved science fiction author, Liu Cixin.Set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to … a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion. The result is a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision.
The Three-Body Problem Series
The Three-Body Problem
The Dark Forest
Death’s End
Other Books
Ball Lightning
Supernova Era
To Hold Up The Sky (forthcoming)
At the Publisher’s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
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I greatly enjoyed reading The Three-Body Problem. Could not put it down
Smart and original sci fi, with an emphasis on of science.
After a bit of a learning curve, Three-Body Problem takes the reader on an incredible evolutionary journey to a wild future.
A bit of a learning curve with this one for me, as I was not fluent with the Chinese cultural revolution etc. but I caught on pretty quick, and was enjoying the ride from that point onward. My only real problem was with the pacing. I feel like it could have had more urgency through the middle and later parts, but the last couple of chapters were really great. Definitely continuing the trilogy based on the overall premise and those last few chapters.
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It’s a good exploration of a unique astrophysical problem, not your run of the mill sci-fi set in the future. It also addresses the issue of first contact in realistic fashion, incorporating modern day geopolitics. Great story, plot twists.
The Three-Body Problem is an engrossing and detailed sci-fi read. The story takes the premise of first alien contact (by radio) and twists it on its side, allowing the reader to wonder who to trust and throws out the idea that when facing an alien invasion that all humans would unite together to fight off the invaders. I enjoyed the book, though I started to dread the times that the main character would log into the “Three-Body Problem” computer simulation game. Those scenes just got too cumbersome and repetitive even though Liu Cixin does a good job of parsing out the plot through the game. Near the end, I did find the switch of POV from the main character to learning about the Trisolarans directly from them (via radio communications sent to Earth) also a bit off-putting. I think it was just the dramatic change in POV and I think Liu Cixin could have incorporated the story of the Trisolarans differently, keeping to the established characters, and still conveyed the same information. Despite this I really enjoyed the story and found the concept refreshing.
Very interesting, philosophical and inventive. The start of a trilogy that gets better and better with each book
this book is beautifully written, but not my cup of tea. It’s the first in a trilogy, and I chose not to read the others.
The story line was interesting enough to capture my attention through a long plot. I bought the second in the three volume series but have not read it yet. Seeing science fiction from a Chinese perspective was an eye opener. I highly recommend the book.
Takes a while to get going , but a very worthwhile read.
I like science fiction that goes back to the likes of Asimov and Clarke. This book fills all the blanks. It’s not an easy read and is best taken In small increments. Once you get the links between the characters then it gets easier but still worthwhile.
I just did not care about anything in this book. It was a waste of time. It was a Hugo winner, which used to mean that it would be a good book. Not any more, apparently.
Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem is the type of epic science-fiction novel that’s carried more by its science than its fiction. I don’t mean that uncharitably. The fiction in The Three-Body Problem is interesting—I just found it hard to get into.
The story starts during the mass madness of China’s Cultural Revolution. We see one faction of Red Guards using the young soldier of another faction for target practice, and a professor being sentenced to die because he taught “reactionary” scientific theories like the Big Bang and the “black banner of capitalism represented by the theory of relativity!” Yet there’s no clear protagonist initially. And shortly after Liu seems to settle on Ye Wenjie (the professor’s daughter) and her exile to a secret radio facility in the mountains, the narrative skips ahead forty years to another character: Wang Miao. These threads come together eventually, but when the transition first happens, it makes the opening appear inessential.
Despite Wang’s penchant for photography, I never found him compelling on his own. But the mysteries he begins to investigate are: why are his fellow scientists starting to commit suicide? Not just in China, but all around the world? And why has a ghostly countdown suddenly appeared before his eyes? Wang’s pursuit of the truth draws him into a multinational effort to understand these incidents, an inquiry revealed to the reader through a variety of mediums: redacted government documents, transcripts of interrogations, and—most notably—an immersive video game that tasks Wang with determining why an Earth-like civilization is repeatedly destroyed by extremes of heat and cold. (The latter element feels like a sophisticated form of LitRPG, a relatively new genre wherein much of the story takes place inside the pseudo-reality of a video game.)
Again, this was all interesting. But at times the dialogue sounds forced. (Although to be fair, it’s hard to tell how much of this was a result of Liu’s original prose being translated; The Three-Body Problem still has some beautiful sentences. One of my favorites: “The line’s color became red, like a snake awakening after hibernation, wriggling as its skin refilled with blood.”) More significantly, the main characters often lack agency. In flashback, we see Ye make a choice with enormous consequences for humanity, and Wang exerts some influence over the Three Body video game. But for the most part, he’s just reacting to strange circumstances. And when the mystery is finally solved for him (by Liu, essentially; the final insights are more given by the author than earned by the protagonist), there’s no opportunity for him to apply that knowledge against the newly revealed antagonists—Book One ends without any real resolution other than setting up Book Two. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it did strike me as unsatisfying.
The science, though! The Three-Body Problem is chock full of imaginative technological exploits. One of the characters uses the sun to broadcast radio waves to the universe. An army of men work together to create a human motherboard by waving flags to mimic circuits. Nanofilaments form a deadly, invisible web. Two protons are coded on a global scale.
Could any of this really happen? Maybe, maybe not. But Liu makes it all seem possible. And the prospect of seeing more of these imaginative, intelligent spectacles is why I’ll be continuing on with the series.
Note: Since the translation uses the English versions of the author’s names and his characters’, I did the same in this review.
(For more reviews like this one, see http://www.nickwisseman.com)
As good as it gets. Must be read. All 3 books.
Unusual big picture sci fi about humanity’s first contact with an alien race (hint: it doesn’t go well). The first book of a trilogy that spans thousands of years. Mind bending and original.
Fascinating concepts.
One of the best hard science fiction books I’ve ever read, first of the trilogy.
A very interesting approach to the “alien encounter” story.
I slogged through this. I kept waiting to get it. Never figured it out. It was very strange. I’m sure that most of my confusion is on me. This has gotten acclaim from authors that I respect.
Despite a teenage obsession with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, I’ve never been particularly drawn to hard science fiction. As such, I approached the Three-Body Problem without much in the way of expectations.
The story concerns scientists in the People’s Republic of China over the last fifty years, as they grapple with the discovery of alien life. The aliens, dubbed Trisolarans, live a harsh and precarious existence due to their planet’s incomprehensible orbit around three suns (a peculiarity from which their name is derived). They discover Earth thanks to the efforts of Ye Wenjie, a disillusions astrophysicist who sees in alien life a means to curb the excesses of humanity, which she believes cannot be trusted to govern itself. She partners with an idealist billionaire named Mike Evans, with whom she forms the Earth-Trisolaris Organization (ETO), a body with the traitorous objective of ensuring Earth falls under Trisolaris’ control.
Much of Trisolaris’ history is explained through a cryptic video game called Three Body, which was designed to recruit new members to the ETO. Through it, we learn biological quirks of the Trisolarans, and gain a crash course on the titular three body problem, which involves efforts to calculate the interplay of three different objects through orbital mechanics.
As a genre, hard science fiction is traditionally more concerned with ideas than characters, and the Three-Body Problem follows this template while providing just enough personality to keep the protagonists engaging enough to follow. The dialogue can come across as clunky, though I hesitate to criticize this since it may be an effort to capture the rhythms of Chinese in translation. There is also a lot of blatant exposition in the dialogue, a common trope of hard sci-fi that I find a little irritating. However, it was neither frequent nor egregious enough to pull me out of the story, and much of the science is handled deftly enough for novices to absorb through the text without descent into clunky footnotes.
In contrast to the sometimes stiff dialogue, the prose is slinky and lyrical, yet understated, its crisp, clear sentences filigreed with illuminating images. Liu peppers the text with similes where other writers would likely employ metaphors, a decision that I wondered might come from the story’s Chinese origins—this is merely speculation, since I speak no Chinese, but the smattering of Asian poetry I’ve encountered in translation is similarly filled with such devices.
The Three Body Problem is book one of a trilogy, and very much feels incomplete on its own. However, it drew me in enough that I will be sure to seek out the sequels in the near future.
It posits a very interesting idea, but it is not at all easy to read; in fact it was a bit of a slog. It has kept me thinking though.