The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The Three-Body Problem is an alien first contact conspiracy thriller and the first book in a best-selling Chinese science fiction trilogy. The book was originally written in Chinese for a Chinese audience and offers a fascinating cultural perspective that is refreshingly different from western science fiction. The novel uses the Mao’s Cultural Revolution as a backdrop to the near-future setting of the primary action. It is strongly culturally grounded, the political party dynamics of the revolution and the oppression of scientists and dissenters that ensued are an integral part of the lens that informs the actions of the characters and the questions that narrative raises.
I really enjoyed the way the narrative weaves past events from the era of the Cultural Revolution into the current-day mysteries while promising interesting conflicts into the future. It is very much an establishing work, setting up a premise and doing the heavy-lifting of worldbuilding, and it does this in a remarkable way: pacing the revelations and exposition of scientific concepts with an action-thriller sensibility that keeps you engaged. The use of the ‘Three-Body Problem’ virtual game-world in the story was particularly clever in the way that it metaphorically interpreted the history of the alien world and allowed the thoroughly alien beings to be represented and explored in a way that trickled the information to the characters and the reader while making the alien concepts relatable.
It is the science part of the novel that really shines as something different. The novel could be classified as ‘fantastic hard science fiction’. It has great attention to scientific details and moderately lengthy passages of lovingly rendered technical description on orbital and quantum mechanics, particle physics and artificial intelligence. The scientific revelations are paced well and delivered in the context of the larger sequence of mysteries and new elements of the puzzle are introduced carefully. But it then takes those known scientific principles and pushes them to the extreme into the realm of fantasy, breaking down the preconceptions of the characters in how the world works and forcing the question: how do you deal with science when it can’t give you the answer? How does humanity, both individually and collectively deal with facing an unsolvable problem?
With that said about what the novel does well, the characters were generally flat and lifeless, I’m not sure if this is in part due to the translation, different cultural expectations for fictional character representation, or just the fact that the characters were mostly theoretical physicists and bureaucrats. The most engaging character was an intuitive and irascible policeman who was not versed in science, which could indicate that it is the later.
All in all this book does a really good job of setting up the possibility for a stunning conflict in book two, I am really looking forward to seeing if it pays off.