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

by Cixin Liu

With the scope of Dune and the commercial action of Independence Day, this near-future trilogy is the first chance for English-speaking readers to experience this multiple-award-winning phenomenon from China's most beloved science fiction author. Set against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, 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.

• ISBN10: 0765377063
• ISBN13: 9780765377067
• Publish Date: 11 November 2014 (first published 1 January 2008)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Tor Books
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 336
• Language: English

Reviews

[inlibrisveritas]

Finally done...shout to my boyfriend who had to listen to no less than 3 rants in a 4 hour period.

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So I have a lot of thoughts and not a lot of mental energy to put them here without it devolving into another rant, so I'll boil this down the best I can.

1. This book is extraordinarily long-winded in every way. The characters can literally fill pages with explanations to things that can be summed up in easier to digest ways. The metaphors are piled on top of each other as if to ease the digestion of info but only served to make the explanation that much longer.
2. Some of the science just seemed...off? I'm not physicist, the extent of my scientific knowledge is only slightly higher than casual, so I could just be underthinking it but some of this just didn't make sense.
3. As a human cynic, who often shrugs at the idea of humans being wiped out by their own stupidity, the cynicism in this was still rooted in optimism and I kind of had to laugh at that. If I'm jaded to the concept of humanity being about to fix the problems it's caused, then the idea of another life form fixing those problems for me is just as unlikely...because they also live and I'm assuming have some sort of ingrained bias (like their survival) that will probably screw it all up.
4. That video game was at best a visual novel, and not a good one. I get the point of it, but if you are going to force me to read chapter after chapter of this game make it more interesting than having the character just sort of sit there and witness it. He does speak up occasionally, but that's just to finally advance the plot.
5. None of the characters have any sort of depth to them except Ye Wenjie, and even she falls victim to just being an important that plot point at times. The story barely takes time to acknowledge it's own characters but is by its nature about the character of people...which makes the whole thing massively frustrating to read.
6. Most of the plot is shoved in the last third of the book. The first third is set up, the second third is essentially a series of long-winded hints, and the third actually tells you what's going on. As a result it's a slow slog through most of it.
7. This book could have easily been condensed down, which is frightening considering it's not actually that long to begin with.

[lisacee]

Such fantastic world building and hard sciences. I can't decide if I want to read the rest of the series or just keep using my imagination.

[nannah]

Wow, okay.
I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but a lot of people have said, “Where’s the science in all the science fiction nowadays?”. Well … if that’s you, then read this book. I felt like I needed a degree in astrophysics to truly understand it.

content warnings
Sexism
Mention of suicide

Physics … isn’t real?
Back in China during the Cultural Revolution (mid 1960s), scientist Ye Wenjie is supposed to be sent to a labour camp to be re-educated, but instead she goes to a highly-classified government site created to find alien life.

Then, in the present, we have Wang Miao (nanotech scientist), who also manages to get wrapped up in a similar government project. Or -- literally, kidnapped by cops to be introduced to it. But instead of seeking alien life, they’re exploring the fact that certain scientists keep committing suicide, and they think there’s something out there devoted to destroying mankind.

Wang Miao’s got a lot on his hands, and it only gets worse when he discovers a strange video game called The Three-Body Problem, clearly made for academics. In it, players must solve the puzzle of the game’s world: it has three suns, and the creatures on the planet keep dying when the suns create Chaotic Eras that destroy civilizations.

I may have described this incorrectly, but it’s because I had a difficult time understanding things. It’s written like an academic paper, and I had to read each page twice to understand where things were going. Maybe I’m stupid? Or maybe this book is catered to certain people. Could be both.

While the plot was massive and sprawling, the prose was stilted and awkward. I hope it’s the translator, but I can’t really know. There were character development cop-outs, like one character saying, “I didn’t do this, because I’m quite a lazy man”; “You see why I didn’t do that, right? Because I’m so lazy”, etc. He said he was lazy to justify everything like ten times in that one scene, and I don’t know if that was supposed to be humor? But it just came off as … well, lazy.

There was also some laugh-out-loud sexism, showing this was clearly written by a stereotypical man. Not only were there very few women (except for one of the villains), Wang’s wife and children seemed to disappear halfway through the book. They were never mentioned again. Then there were three female officers who killed Ye’s father back during the Cultural Revolution. They’re now thirty, right? And when they came back, Ye described them as “very, very old, now thirty, one with a stooped back”, etc. This is where I laughed. Literally laughed. I’m now twenty-nine. I guess I’m “very old” as well. When this protag is probably the same age, and he’s fine, but when you’re a woman and thirty, you’re very old and have a stooped back because you’re thirty, etc. Hilarious.

Anyway, when the aliens actually “showed up” they weren’t exactly as menacing as I thought they’d be. The stakes didn’t rise, and the threat seemed very far away. The climax felt the same. Don’t get me wrong, everything was interesting but not very dramatic. I think for me, all the science got in the way. This may be spoilers, but a big part of what was supposed to bring the suspense was the unfolding of a proton. For me, that means absolutely nothing. Maybe someone who actually knows something about science would feel differently, haha!

So I just have to say I felt very lukewarm about everything. I think this book is one of those science fiction novels written for academics to enjoy.

[ross91]

Love, love, love it!
I’m not a hard-science lover, I usually prefer space operas when I read sci-fi... you know, intergalactic wars, space feuds and spaceships... but this one kept me on the edge of my seat from start to finish!
Some passages felt obscure ‘cause they were maths and physics gibberish, but anyway I pretty much understood everything and now I just wanna read the next one in the series!
The italian transition was well done, so glad I read it!

[Michael @ Knowledge Lost]

In the People’s Republic of China 1967, it was a time where the Cultural Revolution was purging the country of all capitalist ideals. A group of scientists, part of a secret military project, send signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien race on the brink of destruction known as the Trisolarans capture the signal and now plan to invade earth. A deeply philosophical game The Three-Body Problem occupies the mind of many scientist which features a world with three suns, causing chaos and unpredictability; trying to understand the order is what motives these people. The Three-Body Problem is a first contact novel often referred to as a cross between Dune and Independence Day.

The Cultural Revolution makes for an interesting backdrop for this novel and I feel an understanding is essential to the story. The Cultural Revolution was a social-political movement that was set in motion by Chairman Mao to transform The People’s Republic of China into the true Communist ideal. This was a cultural purging to remove all remnants of capitalism and to some extent even getting rid of some of China’s traditional elements. The movement ran from 1966 to 1976, although Chairman Mao did declare it over in 1969, but the Red Guard were still very active in their mission all the way till the death of their military leader Lin Biao.

This was also during the height of the space race, Sputnik was the first artificial satellite to be launched into space in 1957, giving the Soviet Union an early lead. The China National Space Administration (CNSA) is believed to have begun in the late 1950s, although their research into rockets were more focused on a ballistic missile program to help defend the country against the Americans and Soviets during the cold war. However China was still interested in space exploration and their first spacecraft to hold human occupancy, Shuguang-1, was designed in 1968.

Now, a three-body problem in physics, is a scientific process where you take initial data sets (position, masses, velocities, etc.) and determine the motion of the three bodies with the help of the laws of classical mechanics, such as Newton’s laws of motion. Historically the three specific bodies being studied were the Moon, the Earth and the Sun. This ties the title of the novel back to the space race and also predicting the world found in the game The Three-Body Problem. However this is only the beginning of trying to understand the workings of this novel and I have not even touched on the philosophical or social criticism aspects of The Three-Body Problem.

The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin won the Hugo award recently for ‘Best Novel’ and I found it to be an intriguing plot idea. I knew I had to read this, and I went in expecting something similar to Russian science fiction, where there was a lot of social commentary of what was happening within Communist China. This novel did not disappoint, I would compare this to the Russian first contact novel Roadside Picnic in the way it explored social and scientific ideals but then the philosophical elements remind me of the old sci-fi novels from the 1960s.

Special mention needs to be made to Ken Liu who did an excellent job of translating this book into English. I found myself looking forward to reading all his translation notes which explains historical and cultural references that Westerners like myself may not have known about. I also appreciate that he did not try to convert the narrative to a more accessible format but allowed outsiders a taste in the narrative structure found in Chinese books. I was really impressed with the first book in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy and I would like to think I would read the rest of the series, but I know what I am like when it comes to finishing a series.

This review originally appeared on my blog; http://www.knowledgelost.org/book-reviews/genre/sci-fi/the-three-body-problem-by-liu-cixin/

[Heather]

A multiple award-winning science fiction book set in China and translated from Chinese?  That sounds like a perfect book for me.

The book starts with the story of woman whose father is killed during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s.  She is sentenced to reeducation but eventually her training as a physicist is determined to be desirable for a new military project.  She is sent to live and work on a base with a large radio antenna.

In the present day, there is a wave of murders and suicides of scientists in China.  A man who is researching ways to make fabric from nanoparticles finds that whenever he takes a picture there is a clock embedded in the image.  The clock is counting down.  He doesn't know what is going to happen when the countdown ends.  He is contacted and told to stop his research and the countdown will stop.  It does.

He knew a few of the dead scientists.  When visiting the husband of one he is surprised to see a set up for a video game called Three Body.  The dead scientist didn't seem like the kind of person who would enjoy a game.  He decides to play it to see what it is like.  The game is set on a planet where day and night are not set lengths.  They can't be predicted.  In times of extreme cold or heat, civilizations on the planet collapse.  The game then restarts in a different period of time and the goal is the same.  Try to predict the movement of the sun.

People who like and are good at this game tend to be scientists and intellectuals.  Once they pass a certain level they are contacted for meetups.  There they are told that the world in the game is real and that aliens from that planet are on their way to Earth.



 

What I didn't realize when I got this book is that it is more about physics than anything else.  Most of the main characters are theoretical physicists and the book is mostly them talking to each other about their research.

I'm not good with physics.  I had to take a few classes in college and I hated it.  Here's my hangup.  When they start talking about things like, "We'll smash these particles together and if something bounces back in this direction then we'll know that there was this type of particle there."  My brain says, "No you don't.  You assume that what bounced your particle back was another particle because you are thinking in particles.  But you can't see it.  You don't know what it is.  There could be a force that you don't know about that is repelling particles.  For all you know, there could be a tiny elf with a mirror reflecting particles.  It could be anything.  You don't know!"  Yeah, I'm a biology girl.  I want to actually see what is going on.  When this book got into discussions of what would happen if you unfold a proton in 2 or 1 or 6 dimensions ... ugh.

I had to step back from the details of this book to look at the main questions.

• Has humanity become so depraved that you would welcome an alien invasion?  You don't know if they will coexist, destroy humanity, or change humanity.  Do you care?


• Can you cripple a society if you make it sufficiently afraid of scientific investigation?  This one is interesting to me because I read so much about anti-intellectualism in the United States.  (Despite my physics rant in the paragraph above, I think investigating basic sciences is extremely important because there is so much that we don't know.)

An interesting part of the translation of this novel is the fact that so much of it is based in Chinese history and philosophy. There are some footnotes to explain the mindset of the Cultural Revolution and Chinese philosophers to English-reading audiences. There is Chinese wordplay that is explained too. I appreciated that because it helped but it is also a little embarrassing that they knew we would need the help. There are parts of the game where western historical figures are brought in. I wonder if there were footnotes in the Chinese version to explain them.



 

 

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A photo posted by @dvmheather on Aug 26, 2015 at 6:28am PDT

This review was originally posted on Based On A True Story

[adamfortuna]

I'd rate this one a 1 in character development, but a 5 in some of the later sci-fi themes discussed. Almost any discussion of this book could be a spoiler, but I would say that it unravels in interesting ways I hadn't ever seen before. This one was actually translated from the Chinese version and is the first in a trilogy. I'm looking forward to the others in the series coming out to figure out where they take the story next.

[ayla_abbott]

I loved it. Four stars means I'll recommend it to everyone, 5 would mean I'll buy it, but the next two in the series will determine that.

The science was over my head at times, but it was explained so well that I enjoyed the confusion. Mostly awe for folks who see the math in the world.