From the Bookshelf of Third Place Books: Booze & Lasers…

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

Liu Cixin,

Ken Liu (Translator)

Finish date: July 16, 2018

Why we're reading this: Selected book for July 2018.
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Sep 30, 2015 Mihwa rated it liked it

What a hard to rate book. It's incredible how boring a book with such rich ideas can be, and how long it takes for this book of a million plot points to get anywhere. I'm not sure if I enjoyed the read, but I suspect this is one that's going to stick with me for a while.

(view spoiler) What a hard to rate book. It's incredible how boring a book with such rich ideas can be, and how long it takes for this book of a million plot points to get anywhere. I'm not sure if I enjoyed the read, but I suspect this is one that's going to stick with me for a while.

(view spoiler)[From the get-go, I was intrigued about reading a familiar genre in an unfamiliar setting. The opening scene -- an intense anti-science torture session during China's Cultural Revolution -- seemed to promise big things. However, this scene is separated out from the rest of the book by several decades and serves as a backdrop for later events.

Instead, the first half of the book is a very strange, very slow whodunnit, where our protagonist scientist Wang Miao stumbles into an investigation about a spate of suicides in the scientific community. Eventually, he falls into the eponymous Three Body Problem virtual reality game, which starts to reel in the meandering of the first half. The game is a physics puzzle game, in which the player is supposed to learn the rules of a world in which human-like civilizations live and die by unpredictable days of intense, melting heat or freezing cold. Visceral scenes abound.

But clearly not all is what it seems, and as Miao digs into this bizarre world, he begins to uncover yet more layers. All of a sudden we have secret histories, alien civilizations, humanity's possible deathwish, religious zeal, impossible physics, and just about every big topic that science fiction has ever tried to tackle.

Which leads me to my big sticking point. The writing style is by turns lovely and awful. At its best, it reminds me of Einstein's Dreams. Physics and science rendered into dreamy lyricism. At worst, it's a bunch of talking heads who deposit exposition, pause to infodump some more, and then leave with a Significant Look of Importance. In his author's notes, Cixin mentions that he was inspired by classic science fiction. While I have a huge respect for that, I have lots of frowny feelings about how other reviews seem to take it as carte blanche for bad writing and poor characterization. (Because it shouldn't be. Full stop.) Even our protagonist Miao passively wanders from plot point to plot point, and people open up to him for exposition's sake. It's maddening to have such great ideas encased in such boring content. (hide spoiler)]
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Jul 16, 2017 Dustin rated it liked it

There's a meme that most of you are familiar with. It's that one with the History channel guy with the crazy hair, his hands reaching out toward some invisible beach ball, and in giant, Impact font: "ALIENS."

That about sums up my closing thoughts on the mixed-bag that is The Three-Body Problem.

I've read many sci-fi stories in my 30-something years, and I've rarely felt as conflicted about a book as this one. On one hand, there's a real chance for cultural insight into the history and mindset of ...more

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Feb 04, 2017 Katy Hill rated it it was amazing

Shelves: bookclubs

This was a great book! It was a story that had lots of science and a story that makes it almost impossible to put down. Now if only I could find someone to explain all the details of the real life science topics to me as this book made physics something that I want to know more about.

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