The Three-Body Problem Paperback – January 12, 2016

This book was nothing short of amazing. It's so well written, it boggles the mind how someone could be so clever. Hats off to the man who translated it to English, Mr. Ken Liu. I want to learn Mandarin just to read it in original form. The author Cixin Liu weaves a tale of the past, present, and future with such elegance and emotion...you're right there with every character. You can almost sense them come to life. I just can't say enough good things. I've read hundreds, if not thousands of books and this stands near the top with the greats of history, but with that Sci-fi touch that makes it so much more interesting. If you've watched the shows, prepare for take off because the book will blow you away. I've seen parts of the American and Chinese shows, and while the Chinese was light years better, I just couldn't watch after reading the book first. The two follow up books are 𝙜𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙩 as well, but this book? This one will go down in history besides the other masterpieces written by human hand. If you don't read this, you're absolutely cheating yourself. Enjoy!

I'm told there is a lot of great science fiction being produced in non-English speaking countries. Like most readers my age, I grew up on stuff that was written in the United States, and occasionally Great Britain, by white males. That's just the way it was back in those days. I'm guessing that most readers in the U.S. today still default to reading English language novels written by English speaking writers. We are typically not exposed to fiction from other countries and cultures, and even if a book is translated into English, we need to be made aware of that book before we'll pick it up and read it. I honestly can't tell you how many translated science fiction and fantasy books are sitting on bookstore shelves waiting to be purchased and read. Short of looking at every last one of them - and I'm not going to do that - I don't know how I would find out.But in 2014, a book from whom I understand is arguably China's most beloved science fiction author, Cixin Liu, received the translation treatment by Ken Liu (no relation), and was published by Tor. Before the book started getting some advance notice from folks in the field (I heard about it for the first time on The Coode Street Podcast last year), I'd never heard of Cixin Liu. I *had* heard of Ken Liu. Ken Liu is one of the most talented short fiction writers in the field today, with multiple Hugo awards already under his belt, as well as a Nebula, among others. However, I know absolutely nothing about the book translation process and how well the resulting work represents the original. Thus, I'll talk about what I do know, which is the story.And what a story it is. It's a throwback to 70s science fiction, a first encounter and alien invasion story all rolled into one (and that's not even true, since it's the first book of a trilogy, the second of which, THE DARK FOREST, hits our shores this year, translated by Joel Martinsen). It's got science - lots of science - and a bit of what looks like hand wavium going on at one point (until I started reading some articles in a magazine that were discussing something similar to what the hand waving was about - I think). It's grand in scope, has some terrific ideas, and really can make us stop and think about whether we're all alone out here.The story begins during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and uses it as a launching pad for all that goes forward. A young woman, who sees her father killed during the revolution, is assigned to a military base in a remote part of China. The more time she spends there, the more she becomes trusted, and eventually she learns the true nature of the project - to send signals into space to contact alien life. The young woman, Ye Wenjie (thank goodness for the list of characters at the beginning of the book), learns of a way to amplify the signals that are being sent. She sends a signal into deep space - and hence the trouble begins.Over the course of the book we learn about the Trisolarans, an alien race that lives in a planetary system that has three suns. Trisolaran society is dying because of those three suns. Cixin Liu comes up with the clever idea of the Three Body game, wherein players are challenged to find solutions to the Three Body Problem (hence the name of the book) by interacting with characters from history in societies that keep dying off because of the unpredictability of the cycles of the three suns. (I should note that there really is something called the Three Body Problem; from wikipedia: In its traditional sense, the three-body problem is the problem of taking an initial set of data that specifies the positions, masses and velocities of three bodies for some particular point in time and then determining the motions of the three bodies, in accordance with the laws of classical mechanics (Newton's laws of motion and of universal gravitation).). The Three Body game is more than just a game - it is a gateway into a group of people who are working together to plan for the coming of the Trisolarans.I don't want to give too many more details, as I could start getting into spoiler territory, and I think the rest needs to be discovered by the reader. What I can say, however, is that book not only chronicles how and why this group of individuals came together, but it also explores how the Trisolarans plan to come to earth to take over. Yes, it's a hostile takeover, and there are no financial personnel involved, although this is where the hand-waving comes in and, in reality, I don't mind it in the least. Whether a super-intelligent computer can be made by unfolding a proton into two dimensions is not the point. Just thinking about the possibilities of being able to do that is the point, and indeed in a larger sense has been how science fiction has gone about its business since the field began. You know, "wow, wouldn't it be neat if we could do THAT?".The other thing I enjoyed about this book is the peek it gives to the reader into Chinese civilization around the time of the Chines Cultural Revolution going forward. Granted, it is just a peek, but I'd never given much thought to political, military, and academic life as well as the social status one acquires depending on who and where one was at any given time during that period of Chinese history.With regard to the translation, as I stated earlier, there's not much I can say about it. It's hard to be able to judge how well a book is translated when you don't know the original. I *can* tell you that I've enjoyed Ken Liu's writing style when I have read his short fiction, and I think that style comes through here. I can tell it was a good, fast paced, and interesting read. I was never bored, and actually looked forward to reading the footnotes as I was reading the main text. I did NOT have same eagerness while I was reading JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR. NORELL.If foreign language science fiction is like this, I need to read more. Even if it's not, I do look forward to the remaining two books in the trilogy, andhopefully there will be more translations of Cixin Liu's work coming our way in the future.

Award winning Chinese science fiction author Cixin Liu has said, “Science fiction is a literature that belongs to all humankind. It portrays events of interest to all humanity, and thus science fiction should be the literary genre most accessible to readers of different nations.” I think this is true, or at least it can be. For science fiction to appeal to everyone on the planet it is necessary that its stories portray situations that are relevant to everyone, that they are written about in a way that doesn’t exclude those whose cultural or societal beliefs fall into one political camp or another, and, most of all, it requires a literate world in which everyone has enough of their basic needs met that they have time for leisure reading.We are a long way from the ideal state described above, but some books are a movement toward it. Cixin Liu’s “The Three-Body Problem “represents a step in that direction. Liu lives in the People’s Republic of China. When I think of science fiction audiences, China doesn’t come immediately to mind, but that is because of my ignorance, not reality. “The Three-Body Problem” not only won the Hugo Award after its translation into English in 2014, but it also won China’s Galaxy Award for best science fiction in 2006, the year of its publication in China. Cixin Liu has won the Galaxy Award, which I didn’t even know existed, 9 times.“The Three-Body Problem “is hard science fiction, meaning that it is literally filled with science, some of it real, much of it speculative with kernels of real science leading to wildly fantastic consequences. One of its themes is the overturning of the basic principles of modern physics, or at least the apparent overturning of them, since another theme is the deliberate undermining of belief in those principles. The underlying plot of the novel is the mutual discovery of another race in our galaxy, mutual in the sense that we discover them at the same time that they discover us.The ideas contained in this novel are mind-boggling. What appears fanciful becomes less and less so, as more science behind it is revealed, although the science too, get stretched until everything seems fanciful, but I as a reader, was never sure if it was based on realistic science or not. That’s part of the entertaining quality of the book. The extraordinary discoveries come one after another, gradually unfolding the true plot that is determining the characters’ actions.There are political criticisms in “The Three-Body Problem,” almost entirely of China’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960’s and 70’s. As such, they are a criticism of constraining science because of political or philosophical reasons. The author himself has made some political statements, almost entirely in favor of Chinese government policies, which have earned him enough suspicion in the U.S. that several Republican Congressmen objected when they heard that Netflix was creating a film version of his work. But modern Chinese politics are not an issue in the novel. Liu’s comments at the end of the English translation of the book make it clear that he hopes science fiction such as his can bring the world together.A word about character development in “The Three-Body Problem.” The early portions of the book cover several years and skip from one character to another, many of them who die. Finally, the story settles down to a small set of regular characters. Some Western critics have complained that the characters are “shallow,” which may be valid when comparing the novel to many Western ones. I suspect that this reflects a difference between Western and Eastern cultures, as well as difference between science fiction as a genre (at least old-style science fiction) and other fiction genres. Our Western mindset is to attribute the causes of a person’s behavior to elements of their personality. They are adventurous, courageous, lazy, lackadaisical, psychopathic, etc. Sociological research has suggested that many Eastern cultures tend to see the causes of behavior as due to events and circumstance or even luck, rather than to ongoing personality characteristics (it is a more vs less difference, rather than an either-or difference). Liu’s novel takes the latter approach, giving a detailed description of the circumstances leading characters to do what they do in the novel. It is not a lack of depth of characters so much as it represents a different approach to character motivation that is reflective of the overall culture of the writer. In the case of “The Three-Body Problem,” this results in the novel gradually providing the basis for different characters’ otherwise puzzling behavior by providing after-the-fact stories of what happened in their lives to cause them to behave as they do.I found this book to be absolutely intriguing and impossible to put down until I got to its end. I am eager to read the two novels that are its sequels. It is science fiction at its very best

Ok I LOVED this book and i can't believe it was published in 2006 and I'm just now finding out about it in 2025!!!!It's so original and I've been LOVING sci-fi! I loved the different perspectives of the characters and it was so cool how the video game 3 Body tied into the story. Shh no spoilers. Reading the title i was like.... What kind of name is The 3 Body Problem, but it makes perfect sense. Can't wait to watch the Netflix show. I hope they don't change anything bc it's already perfect!Some of the science stuff throughout gets boring like 'good god!!' But I'm glad I pushed through