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. ( )

I'm sure there's some brilliant ideas going on here, unfortunately I'm not an astrophysicist so this was as exciting as reading a chemistry textbook (with apologies to all the chemists out there). I mean I just read "Astrophysics for People in a Hurry" a month or two ago and I still wasn't prepared for this onslaught of technical philosophizing.

I didn't totally hate it, but man, does this author have something to learn from Asimov. I'm really surprised that this extremely hard sci-fi book has been accepted by the masses. I'm really curious how they're going to dumb this down for the Netflix show. Which is the whole reason I decided to try this.

My wife gave up on this about 3 hours in (of 13), I really wish I would have followed her example, because there wasn't a big payoff, just endless science experiments. ( )

Series Info/Source: This is the first book in the Three-Body Problem series. I got an eGalley of this book through NetGalley to review.

Thoughts: I finished this but it was a struggle. I skimmed through the last 20% or so of the story, to see what happened. I almost put this down multiple times, but some of the VR elements introduced about 30% of the way in made me curious enough to keep going.

The writing here is stiff and the dialogue is awkward. I assume a lot has been lost in translation, but based on the other reviews of those who have read the original Chinese version maybe not. The characters are forgettable and hard to keep track of. Really the characters feel like generic placeholders that any random person could fill in.

I actually liked the beginning of this but then when we moved to present I lost interest. I did appreciate that we did get to go back to see the events that happened in the past progress. The story ends up bouncing between three different settings the present real world, the present in the VR Three Body World, and the past. There are footnotes throughout which did explain a lot of the science and Chinese historical subtleties in more detail; I liked learning about this but was frustrated that these footnotes broke up the story even more.

There are some very creative ideas here and that seems to be mainly what this book is, an idea story. I did enjoy the irony around the actions the characters took in both locations being based around how much they disliked their own species (I know this is a vague statement but I am trying to avoid spoilers).

The ideas here are cool...the plot, the characters, and the general readability here are weak. I did not enjoy this and it was not fun to read, it felt like work to read and was almost textbook like at times.

My Summary (3/5): Overall I really struggled with this book and do not plan on reading any more books by this author. Yes, this was a neat idea but the flow of the story, the characters, and the writing were all very awkward and weak. This was work to read and I didn't really enjoy it. I do appreciate the idea and creativity though. ( )

I am the only person who isn't overwhelmed by this book. Sorry. ( )

First book in a trilogy, The Three Body Problem is set in Communist China, in the present day and in flashbacks to the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s there. Ye Weijing witnesses her physicist father being killed during the height of the Cultural Revolution, and eventually ends up at a remote science station dedicated to the search for contact with alien intelligences.

In the present day, scientists are killing themselves at a startling rate, as they are puzzled that the laws of physics no longer seem to apply in their research. Wang Miao is developing a super-strong polymer, and experiences a bizarre experience in which a countdown starts appearing on film that he is using for his amateur photography. He is then brought into a government-led project that knows more than he does about what's going on. He infiltrates a shadowy group that also seems to know much more about what is happening, and starts to play an immersive video game "three body". We later learn that this game is telling the story of the development of civilization in a solar system that has three stars and a doomed planet that is passed constantly between them. That civilization is in a desperate battle to survive the "Chaotic Eras" and learn to predict when to start building, which requires a lengthy "Stable Era" when extreme heat and cold are absent.

There's a lot going on in this story! The science is very dense, character development less so. I had a tough time following the physics. But it has something interesting to say about how humans might react to news of alien civilization. It was worth sticking through the science for me, and I look forward to the rest of the series. ( )