Review: The Three-Body Problem

The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm trying hard this year to read outside straight/white/cis/male authors thanks to the challenge posed by K.T. Bradford (and because I've been trying to go outside the "usual" sci-fi I read anyway). And (with some exceptions) it's been super easy, because there's so much great stuff to read that qualifies!

I've been meaning to read The Three-Body Problem for a while. It was suspected to be nominated for a Hugo (ahahaha... whomp) and a bunch of other awards, now that it's finally translated into English.

The story starts with the Chinese Cultural Revolution, focusing on a character whose family is composed of intellectuals and sees them suffer for it. She's sent to a secret base, doing grunt work on projects that no one will explain to her.

A second plot picks up around modern day, where a bunch of famous scientists have been killing themselves for unknown reasons. A man who's been recruited to look into those deaths is also getting into a video game called 3body, where a civilization experiences sudden catastrophes and cataclysms.

There are some huge third-act spoilers - don't read on if you don't want to know!


The two storylines come together when the man, Wang Miao, meets up with the woman, Ye Wenjie, and discovers that she's actually the first person to ever converse with aliens - and that her message to them is basically "come to Earth and take over- humans have FUBAR." 3body, the game, is a history of their civilization, which was formed on a planet that's part of a three-star system. The pattern of gravity that the three stars follow is completely unpredictable and the aliens have to come to Earth (or another habitable planet - but Earth is the one yelling "come here!") if they want to survive. Ye Wenjie is now the leader of a faction of humans who all are preparing the world for the arrival of the aliens, partly by throwing all of modern science off track so we can't mount any defense by the time the aliens get here.

Spoilers end here!

Overall, this was a pretty compelling story, with a lot of original ideas and a very freakin cool video game. However, he pacing and tone felt weird - it opens the story with the Cultural Revolution and then abruptly only talks about the Cultural Revolution / most of the things that actually happen through flashbacks. It dulls the emotional impact of what's happening. It feels like this story should have been about Ye Wenjie and instead is about Wang Miao, even though he does very little except play 3body and listen to Ye Wenjie talk (very clinically and succinctly) about all the things that happened to her. I also felt like the actual prose suffered through translation, but that's typical of translation, I guess.

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