The Three-Body Problem

Book review by Deane Barker tags: fiction, science-fiction 1 min read
An image of the cover of the book "The Three-Body Problem"

First, this is not a standalone novel. It’s part one of three, and it ends completely unfinished.

Second, I bought this because of Barack Obama. Seriously – I saw it on the shelf of a book and gaming store in Stockholm, and it had a praise quote from Obama on the cover. I thought, “Has a president ever endorsed a science fiction novel?” I figured that made it worth it.

It’s…slow. Again, this is just part one, but it crawls along. It was written in Chinese and then translated. It jumps around from the Cultural Revolution in the late 60s, to the present, and then across the galaxy.

It involves an invasion of Earth – or a potential invasion, I should say, because nothing happens by the end of the book – by an alien race that lives in a unstable solar system. It’s unstable because it has three orbiting bodies, which gives rise to the titular three body problem of physics where the trajectory of the bodies can’t be predicted.

These aliens get a transmission from Earth and make plans to eventually invade and claim Earth as their own. Unfortunately, it will take 450 years to get there. So to make sure it still happens, they do some interesting things:

I didn’t love it. Again, it’s slow, and it gets kind of weird toward the end. It drifts into philosophy and big cosmological meaning, and I’m not totally sure it all works.

The last page infuriated me. I mentioned that it ends unfinished, but there’s not even a good cliffhanger. It just kind of…ends. I couldn’t believe it was done. I felt really cheated.

I don’t know if I’ll read the other two installments. I’m tempted to because Netflix is making a series out of the trilogy, and I’d like to read it before that drops.

Book Info

Author
Cixin Liu
Year
Pages
400
Acquired
  • I have read this book. According to my records, I completed it on .
  • A hardcover copy of this book is currently in my home library.

Here are some notes I took on the acquisition of this book:

Bought it on Kindle for a flight back to the US from Australia. I bought the hardcover when I got home.

Links to this – Cultural Revolution April 10, 2023
This was a political movement in China in the late 1960s. Chairman Mao Zedong had lost power due to the failure of the The Great Leap Forward, and he was concerned that he was losing his grip on the Communist Party. He began the Cultural Revolution by stirring up fears that capitalists had...
Links to this – Loess Hills April 4, 2023
It’s a common noun, but it seems that a specific location is well-known that it has “captured” it as a proper noun. The term “loess” refers to a specific geological phenomenon. “Loess” is German for “loose or crumbly.” From Wikipedia : Loess is a periglacial or aeolian (windborne) sediment, defined...