The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is pretty fun. It sets up a mystery and a great interstellar war, solves the mystery and leaves the war hanging, so that’s good. The character development is weirdly formal and puppetish, but this is probably an artifact of English-reader expectations versus Chinese-reader expectations. There are a lot of places, for instance, where I didn’t really believe that a character felt some emotion, because even though the narrator told me they felt it, I didn’t see it affect their life or behavior at all. I guess I’m saying it’s slightly on the wrong side of the old “show don’t tell” rule. It’s cool, this is a book from a different culture than mine, you expect little discontinuities like that.

Also, it has a cool old-school sci-fi feel to it. The fun comes from discovering new technologies and places and alien species and whatnot; not necessarily from questioning the deep things of human life. Comparisons with Clarke and Asimov are not inappropriate.



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