Liu Cixin

The Three-Body Problem

After a spate of apparent suicides among elite scientists, nanotech engineer Wang Miao is asked to infiltrate a secretive cabal. During his investigation, Wang is inducted into a mysterious online game that is the key to humanity's place in the cosmos and the key to the extinction-level threat it now faces.

Sven Schmidt

Civilization can only develop in the mild climate of Stable Eras. Most of the time, humankind must collectively dehydrate and be stored. When a long Stable Era arrives, they collectively revive through rehydration. Then they proceed to build and produce.

Read the award-winning, critically acclaimed, multi-million-copy-selling science-fiction phenomenon - soon to be a Netflix Original Series from the creators of Game of Thrones. 1967: Ye Wenjie witnesses Red Guards beat her father to death during China's Cultural Revolution. This singular event will shape not only the rest of her life but also the future of mankind.

Four decades later, Beijing police ask nanotech engineer Wang Miao to infiltrate a secretive cabal of scientists after a spate of inexplicable suicides. Wang's investigation will lead him to a mysterious online game and immerse him in a virtual world ruled by the intractable and unpredictable interaction of its three suns.

This is the Three-Body Problem and it is the key to everything: the key to the scientists' deaths, the key to a conspiracy that spans light-years and the key to the extinction-level threat humanity now faces.

Edward Steel

Ken Liu

Set against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, a secret military project's signal is received by an alien civilization on the brink of destruction, which plans to invade Earth; meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion.

I agree, we actually have seen it with the Cosmological constant set by Einstein and some of Stephen Hawking's work.

Amira BEN

"Theory is the foundation of application. Isn't discovering fundamental laws the biggest contribution to our time ?"

Yang hesitated and finally revealed his real concern: "It's easy to make ideological mistakes in theory" 

It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair. To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race

"Should philosophy guide experiments, or should experiments guide philosophy?

Vincent Weisz

"...We're bugs! Bugs that are about to go extinct! Haha ..."

"Wildly imaginative, really interesting." —President Barack Obama on The Three-Body Problem trilogy The Three-Body Problem is the first chance for English-speaking readers to experience the Hugo Award-winning phenomenon from China's most beloved science fiction author, Liu Cixin. Set against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion. The result is a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision. The Remembrance of Earth's Past Trilogy The Three-Body Problem The Dark Forest Death's End Other Books Ball Lightning (forthcoming) At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Truman M Halladay

For the first two-thirds of this book I was absolutely hooked, delighted by the weirdness and busily cooking up a lot of theories in between reading sessions - always a sign of a fantastic book. I also really enjoyed the style - very different from Western writing and refreshing to read. Some fascinating world building too. Sadly the author could not land the ending. The last third of the book spiralled off into dull physics lectures (a depressing contrast with the fascinating physics at the beginning), a strange detour into an operation to destroy a military target, and an abrupt ending that left me wondering why I’d bothered starting reading this, if the book was basically only the first quarter of the story. I don’t mind sequels, but a book needs to tell a complete story on its own. The motivations of some of the characters were also very hard to believe, and there was some strange pacing. And yet I’m about to pick up the second book in the series, because come on, you can’t leave me hanging like that. I’m hoping the author leans into the weirdness and leaves the lectures behind, in the sequel.

Naomi J.

The Three-Body Problem is the first chance for English-speaking readers to experience this multiple award winning phenomenon from China's most beloved science fiction author, Liu Cixin.Set against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion. The result is a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision.

Gavin

Dense, clever, and it conveys a pleasant worldview; but also rushed and clumsy. In fact the prose is awful - full of flat descriptions of people's reactions, people's full names inserted into the dialogue - and the characters are completely interchangeable ciphers (apart from the one who is a stock renegade cop, and the one who is the Ultimate Eco-Terrorist). 

  Can the fundamental nature of matter really be lawlessness? Can the stability and order of the world be but a temporary dynamic equilibrium achieved in a corner of the universe, a short-lived eddy in a chaotic current?


There's almost no 'showing' in the entire book.
For most people, perhaps time would have gradually healed these wounds. After all, during the Cultural Revolution, many people suffered fates similar to hers, and compared to many of them, Ye was relatively fortunate. But Ye had the mental habits of a scientist, and she refused to forget. Rather, she looked with a rational gaze on the madness and hatred that had harmed her. Ye’s rational consideration of humanity’s evil side began the day she read Silent Spring.

Have you heard of the Monte Carlo method? Ah, it’s a computer algorithm often used for calculating the area of irregular shapes. Specifically, the software puts the figure of interest in a figure of known area, such as a circle, and randomly strikes it with many tiny balls, never targeting the same spot twice. After a large number of balls, the proportion of balls that fall within the irregular shape compared to the total number of balls used to hit the circle will yield the area of the shape.

This is no impediment to good hard scifi, it just means that the reference author is Asimov, not Banks or LeGuin. Liu's ideas are well worth the trip - firing at a nuke as a last-resort for disarming it (since the small ones rely on a sealed pressurised container) is about the least ambitious thought in it:

  Twenty minutes later, Three Body’s Von Neumann architecture human-formation computer had begun full operations under the Qin 1.0 operating system. “Run solar orbit computation software ‘Three Body 1.0’!” Newton screamed at the top of his lungs. “Start the master computing module! Load the differential calculus module! Load the finite element analysis module! Load the spectral method module! Enter initial condition parameters … and begin calculation!” The motherboard sparkled as the display formation flashed with indicators in every color. The human computer began the long computation.
  

  

  In the long history of scientific progress, how many protons have been smashed apart in accelerators by physicists? How many neutrons and electrons? Probably no fewer than a hundred million. Every collision was probably the end of the civilizations and intelligences in a microcosmos.
  

  

  Comrades! Revolutionary youths! Revolutionary faculty and staff! We must clearly understand the reactionary nature of Einstein’s theory of relativity. This is most apparent in general relativity: Its static model of the universe negates the dynamic nature of matter. It is anti-dialectical! It treats the universe as limited, which is absolutely a form of reactionary idealism…
  



I don't understand why this won the Hugo - except, that, being foreign, it didn't trigger canned political backlash on either side of the sad affair we have made the Hugos. Tom Clancy for real nerds.

2/5 in this translation, anyway.

Bouke van der Bijl

** spoiler alert **
           This book has some quite unique and interesting ideas, and I found the prose to be quite poetic at times, which is great for a translation. I found the different perspectives the book shows for humans and the Trisolarans to be quite insightful. Anyways if aliens are actually found we are definitely screwed.

Matthew Royal

The best unexpected part of this book is all the perspective shifts. The presentation of miracles, and their explanations were satisfying, and the historical descriptions of the Chinese Cultural Revolution were tantalizing peeks into what the original Chinese language version of the story was like in structure. 

It's a pessimistic view of what encountering extraterrestrial life would be like, without applying the same fear and dread to the emergence of strong AI, so while it's food for thought, it's not a perspective I feel I will ever share.

The only way you could ever say this was character driven is if you were saying every character is driving themself straight to hell. Weirdly, it works. Like a slow motion car wreck on a galactic scale. I can’t believe I enjoyed this book. It was a masterpiece. 

Rachel Wingler

Gillian Rose

A really solid sci-fi tale. I loved having it set in China and learning more about their culture in regard to science. Extremely well-done and I can't wait to see where the story goes.

Shiveen Pandita

I read this 4 years ago so I guess this review is delayed. I reread it again now and had the same feeling of wonder that I did last time. Also, probably one of the best foreign language translations in any of the books I have read.

Lynette Pedersen

I can see the complaints from others about the wooden characters, but I'm not sure if that's an artifact of the translation or not. Also, I'm not sure we're supposed to connect with the characters but with what's going on. The Chinese Cultural Revolution was terrifying, no bones about it. You can see those same ideologies reflected in the Trisolarians, and I think that's a pretty interesting narrative. The rest of it is pretty deep and definitely makes you think, though the most thinking is really done in the last few chapters. I think if I were more excited by hard sci-fi I would have enjoyed it even more, but the philosophical elements are definitely there in between all the math and physics.

Obada Mu

„Sometimes I thought life was precious, and everything was so important; but other times I thought humans were insignificant, and nothing was worthwhile. Anyway, my life passed day after day accompanied by this strange feeling, and before I knew it, I was old.…“

Nick Gracilla

Highly recommended by a work colleague, this is science fiction at its best, with vast timelines, world upending changes to fundamental physics, and surprising storyline twists. Set from China’s cultural revolution to modern days, it’s a study, too, of propaganda and its impact on science and thinking. Recommended.

Jay Harris

I've read this twice now and enjoyed it both times. 

I love Cixin Liu's short stories, especially his collection To Hold Up The Sky, which has some of my favorites like "The Time Migration". 

For me, The Three Body Problem sometimes feels more like a short story collection than a novel: the characters and plot mostly seem like an excuse to explore a series of big sci-fi ideas like (view spoiler)[nanotech, VR games, first-contact-as-symbol, conspiracy theories and higher-dimension computers (hide spoiler)]. The journey between those big ideas might sometimes feel contrived, but it didn't stop me from enjoying the ride.

Mudita

Haven't enjoyed a book the way I enjoyed this one since I was a bebe. Unputdownable, well paced, so intriguing and frightening.

Rito Ghosh

It was the perfect sci-fi book till I read 70% of it. Then it became science fantasy. To some extent.

But it is extremely well-written. The author is fantastic.

This was painful to read, I just wanted the aliens to murder all of these pretentious people that pissed the shit out of me 

Hope14 

Siya S

3 stars????? After all the hype??? Don't get me started. I-



Here's this book in a nutshell: 











Ok. Here's the deal: it's not Liu Cixin, it's me. It's my inability to comprehend basic science. My 2 brain cells are DEAD (e.g. traumatized) trying to keep up with all the astrophysics, um, stuff. Not even Neil Degrasse Tyson could save me at this point. I mean, some might enjoy reading endless pages about protons unfolding to xx dimensions. Or about microwave rays. Well, I'm-



I can't even dare to summarize this book. I took like, 12 pages of notes on my phone trying to keep up with the story. But who am I? I'm just a program officer in an environmental NGO with degrees in anthropology and politics. I can go on with social justice for days on end, but hardcore science and technicalities are my cryptonite. Why am I hyperventilating? I-



Needless to say, some parts were great - the narration and interactions between characters were good. Liu Cixin could write like a [normal] writer. I enjoyed the historical parts of the story, as well as the ones about environmental destruction as a result of mindless anthropogenic activities. And the action scenes involving Da Shi were fun. 

This was perhaps one of the most difficult reading experiences that had occurred to me. Also, the book ended like a Hollywood movie - a promise to a bloodbath sequel. Do I care to read book 2 and torture myself again for the next [god-knows-how-many] weeks on end? No.

Neil Murray

(re)read ahead of finally reading books 2 and 3. Despite having read it only 12 months or so ago, I was completely engrossed and basically swallowed it all in one gulp. I was SHOCKED to discover I only rated it 4 stars the first time around (!) and have now upped to 5 and am beginning Dark Forest immediately! 😊

This book and I had a lot of ups and downs lol

Anyway, I liked the hard science aspects to it it started in a fascinating way for me. I've just hoped that it would take a direction that it didn't take.

All the weird signs that Wang observed at the beginning were too soon put aside and I didn't really have my answers. I feel like the story just took a completely different direction at the 2nd half.

Also, this book was very political and we see that the author made reference of a lot of geopolitical matters (some I didn't agree with the way it was told). 

A way to accentuate how humanity is kind of unredeemable. There's a lot of discussion around it

 I liked his  portraying of different ways of how humanity would act in front of a potential alien invasion with the ETO, Adventists, Redemptivists and all. There's not just one homogeneous way.

Overall, the ideas were really cool and the way he used science was genius.

But I was not a fan of the author's storytelling so my level of enjoyment just decreased the farther I went into the story.

Where do I start ? 

This book and I had a lot of ups and downs lol

Anyway, I liked the hard science aspects to it it started in a fascinating way for me. I've just hoped that it would take a direction that it didn't take.

All the weird signs that Wang observed at the beginning were too soon put aside and I didn't really have my answers. I feel like the story just took a completely different direction at the 2nd half.

Also, this book was very political and we see that the author made reference of a lot of geopolitical matters (some I didn't agree with the way it was told). 

A way to accentuate how humanity is kind of unredeemable. There's a lot of discussion around it

 I liked his  portraying of different ways of how humanity would act in front of a potential alien invasion with the ETO, Adventists, Redemptivists and all. There's not just one homogeneous way.

Overall, the ideas were really cool and the way he used science was genius.

But I was not a fan of the author's storytelling so my level of enjoyment just decreased the farther I went into the story.

Ahmed Salem

خير الصدف ... هي الصدف الحلوة
و خير الكتب ..هي الصدف الحلوة 


كتاب بدأ من الثورة الثقافية ثم نظرة على الدولة البوليسية في الصين ثم تطورالى نظرة عن العلوم و البحث العلمي في الصين ثم التواصل مع حضارة أخرى عبر الكون ... ثم تنتهي نهاية لا أريد حرقها

هناك بعض الملل الذي اصابني وقت شرح النظريات العلمية المعقدة ... لكن هذا لا يمنعني من منحها 5 نجوم كاملة

linda

Frankly, I loved this book. Some of the other reviewers talked about he lack of an emotional connection or the unrealistic nature of the plot. I found the prose to be beautiful. It has a very distinctively Chinese style, but I found the comparisons not only cover, but also human and wrought with emotion. Ye Wenjie is one of the best developed characters I have read, because of the author’s vivid descriptions. From Ye witnessing the death of her father as a young girl to her subsequent loss of faith in humanity, Ye is portrayed not as a one dimensional being, but a nuanced character. Despite the gravity of her actions and her astounding hatred, the reader cannot help to want to give her a warm hug: a girl who has witnessed so much violence and pain who can no longer bear the crux of existence. In the end, I think this book won me over because for me, it was just fun to get lost in everything. Reading this book was, at times, painful. I was confronted confronted with concepts I did not understand and had to look up online. From Möbius strips to Maxwell equations, my interest was suddenly piqued in areas that I had vowed to stay away from before. The author wrote this in his epilogue: “The stories of science are far more grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional, compared to the stories told by literature. Only, these wonderful stories are locked in cold equations that most do not know how to read.” Three Body made me want to love science and science fiction, distilling both into simple truths and storytelling, and for that I will always be grateful.

Nelson Zagalo

Finalmente li "The Three-Body Problem" do chinês Liu Cixin. Quando saiu em inglês, no final de 2014 e ganhou o Hugo 2015, despertou-me uma curiosidade imensa, por vir classificado como Hard SF e de uma geografia culturalmente distante, a China. A somar a tudo isto o título fazia-me pensar constantemente no "problema mente-corpo" — à data desconhecia o "problema dos três corpos" — despertando a ideia de que estaria perante uma obra de grande fulgor filosófico. Terminada a leitura, muitas das minhas expectativas saíram goradas, criando um sabor amargo na experiência. Confesso que não ajudou ter criado tantas expectativas, mas também não ajudou tanto cliché narrativo decalcado da tradicional FC americana. Faltou-me exoticismo cultural, mas acima de tudo faltou-me elevação discursiva. Sim, muitos conceitos debatidos — a variação e constância da dinâmica — são brilhantemente expostos, ainda que de algum modo com excesso de redundância, mas quando se entra pelos mundos Nano e Pico adentro, pelas cordas e não-dimensionalidade, é tudo demasiado superficial, serve apenas a complexificação da trama que acaba por terminar numa espécie de banal romance policial.


Compreendo o entusiasmo na receção à obra, dada a geografia e o sucesso do autor no seu país. Confesso também que Cixin apesar de ter uma escrita regular, sabe gerir muito bem o suspense e despertar a curiosidade fazendo com que viremos páginas atrás de páginas. Sim, a escrita socorre-se excessivamente de exposição falhando na dramatização (o chamado tell-show), mas isso não perturba a leitura uma vez que o autor coze muito bem a informação e nos mantém sempre engajados até ao final. 

Assim, se gostei imenso do ambiente inicial assente na história da Revolução Cultural chinesa, ou ainda do videojogo RV, que Cixin usa fundamentalmente para a exposição de conceitos, desgostei imenso toda a trama muito básica de vinganças, ataques, invasões e insectos, etc. Desgostei, como não poderia deixar de ser, seguir atrás de personagens que olham para o desconhecido com o único desejo de se vingarem naqueles que os maltrataram. De personagens, que se colocam no extremismo oposto à Revolução, e se assumem acima do comum humano por via do mero intelecto, algo que pode talvez fazer sentido na rebeldia dos 16/17 anos. Mais, considero que Cixin passou a linha vermelha ao colocar a protagonista no lugar de assassina, ignorando totalmente a moralidade da conduta.

Estrelas: 3.5

Publicado no VI: https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...

Zoey Mikalatos

Excellent integration of science throughout the book. A bit difficult to get into in some sections, but the rest was good.

"And yet, compared to others, she was fortunate. At least she died in the throes of passionately sacrificing herself for an ideal."

Allison

Ugh, struggled through this one. Nearly abandoned it 200+ pages in, but I powered through. Likely won’t read the other two in the trilogy, but I’m interested to see how the Netflix series turns out. 

Not sure if I’m not one for science fiction or if it was just this book.

Ri Liu

There was some moral complexity in the book which I appreciated, no easy heroes and villains, apart from a bias towards scientism. Some of the writing was more deeply felt and vivid than from most hyper-rational myopic sf works. However, in it I sensed a genuine fear of a lack of order (the historical context there being very relevant), which misses the generative, playful aspects of chaos, a loosening of order and its possibility for a better version of society.

Stephanie Ridiculous

I'm not sure why all the hype around this book. I was constantly both confused about how what was happening related to the central story and felt condescended to with obvious implications being laboriously laid out for me like I couldn't connect the dots on my own. It's possible something was lost on me due to listening instead of reading, but I typically have no issues tracking complicated plots while listening so I'm hesitant to write it off just for that. I wonder how much was lost in translation. There are some cool concepts/world building here for sure, but I won't be seeking out further books.

The Three-Body Problem

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