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:

• They sabotage particle accelerators to “break” science. Since the accelerators are now reporting chaotic results, this will prevent humans from making new physics discoveries in the meantime. Apparently it also causes a bunch of scientists to kill themselves, because they think the laws of physics are breaking down.

• They introduce a computer game which explains their situation (note: no they don’t – see below). I wasn’t totally sure of the point of this, other than a mechanism for exposition. There’s some related subplot about eco-terrorists worship the aliens as Gods and wanting them to invade because they hate what humanity has done to the Earth. I think the game played into that somehow?

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.