Title: The Three-Body Problem (originally published 2006)
Author: Liu Cixin (Translated by Ken Liu)
Finished date:
Overview
Three-Body, or 三体, is a Chinese sci-fi novel which has gained recent popularity due to the English Netflix adaptation. It's a part of a 3-book series, ominously titled "Remembrance of Earth's Past". For those familiar with the classical mechanics problem (which has now been pushed out of the spotlight by the book/netflix series on search engines), the story does indeed contain this concept as a central driver, but it is by no means a spoiler for what's to come. In fact, many technical concepts are brought into the story, some of which I got to understand and appreciate because of what I studied (certainly NOT rocket science). I'll try to keep this review spoiler-free.
A little background on how I got the book... I had wanted to read the series for a while, but I had quite the backlog of books so I couldn't convince myself to get them. My workplace had a secret santa coming up, and we were able to request for specific gifts. I asked for the series which was within the budget. In fact, it was so obvious my gifter (it was anonymous both ways) knew it was me, and I clearly knew it was him. Anyway, he got me the first two books in the series. UNFORTUNATELY, they turned out to be BOOTLEGGED copies!! It was more obvious in the second book, which was clearly an E-book PDF that got printed and bound.
Review
This was a fairly simple read. A brief search online revealed that there must have been some changes to the English version to bring more background to the Cultural Revolution in China, which parts of the story are set in. I didn't actually have much knowledge of China's modern history, but thankfully it the details weren't really necessary.
The characters serve their functions well, and through their dialogue and occupations, you can really sense their Chinese-ness even through the translation. Perhaps this calls for kudos to the translator. They do have a bit of plot armor, in the sense that other characters seem attentive to their needs and don't offer much resistance, in order to progress the plot.
A point of criticism I have for the story... it feels like the author really tried to shoehorn in concepts from throughout STEM. I felt this especially when von Neumann computer architecture was mentioned (you'll know when you're there), but I suppose it is the job of Sci-fi to bring science concepts to the masses. Three-body does a good job in that regard. For Sci-fi that isn't based in a foreign world or even different time period, but rather on Earth, it does a good job of integrating existing science and speculative possibilities into its story.
I'm also not big on their use of the video game to tell the story, but the wackiness does make it a page-turner as you try to unravel the purpose of it. As the story unravels, the happenings also get explained in a way that was unsatisfactory to me; the alien technology (no spoiler here, right? Here be aliens) being used to explain everything just felt convenient, but then again, if we had technology that powerful we'd use the same thing for every problem. Not exactly a mystery to unravel, though if you want a taste of that, you'll be in for a treat with the second book.
Anyway, I do dig the concepts explored in this book. Most poignant was when I got to the final part of the book, titled "Sunset for Humanity". That was a chilling phrase at that point in the book, and I simply had to read on.
Conclusion
Rating: 4/5
Worth a read! It's different from other popular Sci-fi titles like Dune and
Star Wars in that it is very grounded in Earth and existing science, with room
for speculation, to the point where some of the concepts that drive the story
could convincingly be real (again, not a scientist), but certainly beyond the
scope of existing theory.
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