Cixin Liu is clearly a real smart guy. The "Three Body Problem" is an interesting book which is a bit of a difficult read because of the characters' names (e.g. Yang, Ye, Ye, Ye, Wei, Ding, Lei and Chang, etc.) and because of the science. Keeping track of the characters was a chore for me especially if I laid the book down for 3 or 4 days and then went back to it. It is a translation so it does not rally flow like, say, an Arthur C. Clarke or an Isaac Asimov book, but, still, it has a fascinating premise - contact with an other-world civilization. It is remarkable how well informed the author is about Western science and Western heroes (Bach, Aristotle, da Vinci, Leibniz, Madame Curie, Copernicus, Euler and Kepler, and many others are noted). It is not an exciting book, its characters do not draw you to them, but it is an intellectual feat based upon what appears to be a sound science education. More human interaction and less 400-course level science would have made for a more compelling book. Nonetheless, the premise and the science are very interesting and the existence of the book reveals the progress and depth of Chinese scientific investigation. I doubt that I will read the other two books in the trilogy. ( )

The Trisolarians live on a planet that has 3 suns, and therefore a chaotic climate. They covet earth for its stable environment.
This novel has been around since 2006, and is set in China. The first section occurs during the cultural revolution. Ye Wenjie, an astophysicist, has been sent to a Construction Corps cutting wood in the countryside, branded a counterrevolutionary, after her father, a physicist, was beaten to death by the Red Guards. She is stationed near a mysterious radio telescope base, Red Coast, and when she refuses to sign an accusatory statement, she is is rescued by an acquaintance who runs the secret instrument, and needs someone with her training to help at the base. The radio telescope is searching for aliens, and occasionally broadcasts a powerful signal to attract them, with the idea that contacting aliens first would be an advantage for the Chinese. The base receives a signal from an alien watcher, (who is disillusioned by his race) saying don't respond, but Ye Wenjie, by now bitter and disillusioned, sends a signal.
The book changes to the present. Many people in China and the world are playing the trisolarian game that had been designed by a few individuals who are aware that the trisolarian fleet has left its unsolvable problem of a planet with 3 suns, and is heading to earth for conquest. There are warring factions in the society, and eventually a murder. A wily police detective becomes involved, and eventually is the hero who motivates physicist to continue planning for the invasion.
The author is familiar with quantum physics and has convincing solutions to problems of spacetime and communication, and the plot is complicated, with some detective novel twists. It is a little slow in spots, and it is hard to keep track of the many characters with unfamiliar Chinese names. I read it in the evenings over about four days. ( )

Very clever first contact story. Plausible story of first contact and communication. Interesting physics including the unfolding and refolding of a protons dimensions. Use of a video game to present the alien world clever if not entirely original. ( )

Really rather good. As you might expect coming from such a different culture, the characterizations, the pacing, the prose are rather different, but the book is none the worse for that. The premise is intriguing and tit certainly holds your attention. A rather fine and slightly different high-science piece of Sci-Fi. I will go straight on to the next book! ( )

Now, I am as big a fan of hard sci-fi as the next b*tch, but the info-dropping in this one reached second-hand embarrassment levels. You think two characters are talking about in-world stuff that is relevant to them, and bam! - they start reciting paragraphs and chapters about world-building, as if they had just been possessed by the accursed soul of everybody's pedantic high school years' philosophy or greek teacher. At least good old Stanislaw Lem just info-dropped, elegantly, without a care in the world for what his characters were doing at the moment; but we would keep reading and ask for more, wouldn't we? Hey, why do I even cite THE Lem's name in vain, in the same review with Liu Cixin's name in it?
Awkward info-dropping wouldn't annoy me that much, however - I am a veritable sucker for information-dense sci-fi - if it were not for the constant reference to highly intelligent people as only and ever only being perfectly identifiable with upper-class people. Two fingers to you, Mr. Liu. As a champion of the People, you should know better than pissing off working class readers with a brain. We'll come for you, when the revolution is ripe. Also, characters' motivations and the general narrative side of the novel are quite risible. I don't know how much is lost in translation, but I have studied oriental languages and literatures for a while and this smells a lot like a problem at the roots, rather than cultural misunderstanding.
The science-y materials are cool, anyway, at least for humanities-confined me.
It is still to be clarified what political propaganda aim the People's Party is trying to push by inflating this visibly rhetorical modest sci-fi novel. Ok, the cultural revolution BAD, modern Chinese society GOOD (maybe that's why upper class people are the only ones in the novel with a culture: have you seen, rest of the world? we are reassuringly classist too! Nothing to hide here!). On the same tune, all that pain taken to describe a united humanity against the evil environmentalists must have been dictated straight away by someone in the Government.
Ah, I nearly forgot: there is a moment of glory. It's when a series of memos from the upper echelons of the late Sixties People's Party are undisclosed, including a proposal by some apparatchik to send a message to space asking alien listeners to join the fight against capitalism, and the Central Leadership's (a.k.a Mao Ze Dong) answer: "this is utter crap". I spluttered my coffee. Even the most boring flatliner always contains a pearl of luminous beauty. ( )