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The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1)

Liu Cixin,

Ken Liu (Translator)

Start date: November 25, 2014

Finish date: January 6, 2015

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May 18, 2018 Andreas rated it liked it · review of another edition

The Three-Body Problem takes place in the People's Republic of China, mainly in the present day. However, the story is rooted in events that took place during the Cultural Revolution. In that troubled time, a young physics student named Ye sees her father, a professor of physics, killed by revolutionaries as a result of a struggle session. She is then sent to the country to work as a logger, before eventually ending up at a mysterious radio facility known as "Red Coast".

In the present, a Nanote The Three-Body Problem takes place in the People's Republic of China, mainly in the present day. However, the story is rooted in events that took place during the Cultural Revolution. In that troubled time, a young physics student named Ye sees her father, a professor of physics, killed by revolutionaries as a result of a struggle session. She is then sent to the country to work as a logger, before eventually ending up at a mysterious radio facility known as "Red Coast".

In the present, a Nanotechnology expert called Wang is drawn into a web of intrigue surrounding a mysterious group called Frontiers of Science, made up of scientists with an initially unclear goal. He also starts playing a virtual reality game called "Three-Body Problem", which deals with a planet where the sun has an irregular and unpredictable cycle, leading to great difficulties for the civilizations that rise and fall on it, as they have to deal with eras of extreme heat and extreme cold with no forewarning.

The story is somewhat interesting as long as the mystery is unveiling, but once things are laid out it is rather predictable. Having the protagonist, Wang, fumbling in the dark makes for a decent mystery, but once the much higher real stakes are revealed, his methodical discovery feels tedious.

The prose is filled with long infodumps. Every now and then some backstory must perforce be presented, but even the more interesting infodumps are intrusive on the pacing, and slow things down overmuch.

There is a tendency for Mr. Liu to take a somewhat condescending tone, presenting fictional constructs as facts with explanatory statements including words like "obviously". If such "facts" came from a character, things would feel different, but this way it makes for a heavy-handed omniscient narration, which doesn't fit well with Wang's cluelessness. Eventually finding out that Ye has been "in the know" from the beginning does not make things better. (Granted, some of this feeling may be due to the clearly different literary style found in Chinese tradition.)

Rather disappointingly, I felt as if the novel took an inventive and very clever premise and then squandered it on a rather boring plot with an unspectacular outcome.

Note: I read the excellent English translation from Mandarin Chinese.

http://www.books.rosboch.net/2018/05/... ...more

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Jul 21, 2016 Christopher Brennan rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: kindle, hugo-award-winners

Misses badly.
I got over the slow start, the first 3 chapters don't seem to go anywhere or even add much to the rest of the book. Then it takes off like a rocket! Full of ideas, conspiracy, strange happenings, anything you'd want from PKD, Stephenson, Heinlein, I get all those comparisons.
But then... then! It wraps up with 6 chapters of exposition and info-dump! What just happened to the story? Instead if cuts over to a different point of view and backfill an answer to every question raised all i ...more

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Sep 29, 2015 Nemo rated it really liked it

This is a good SF book, however having read The Goblin Emperor, which was inched for the Hugo this year by The Three-Body Problem, I can't agree. While it has some excellent SF elements, and is set in an amazing backdrop of China, it breaks the suspension of disbelief for me a few more times than I can digest in a book.

I liked reading it, and I probably would do a re-read before the sequels and understand it better, but this isn't as good as The Goblin Emperor, which I adored. ...more

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Jan 22, 2017 Jonathan Cassie rated it it was amazing

Epic sort of doesn't even capture what this book's ambitions are. Not only does the book tell stories of Cultural Revolution topics from it's science fictional perspective, it offers a vision of a world so radically different from Earth as to be singular. I don't know of any author who's imagination is so prodigious and so alien. Perhaps it's because the author is Chinese or perhaps it's a function of the scope of his authorial ambition. Totally worth reading. Mind blowing at times. Perplexing a ...more

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