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Three Body Problem is what I call "big ideas" sci-fi. Large-scale problems, global crisis, often detailed world-building, sometimes decent plot, but boring characters, who often act simply as reader's eyes / observers.
Many of Alastair Reynolds' novels are like that, so was Red Mars, and even Blindsight and Rosewater.
Not everyone's cup of tea, and I completely understand why.
Not crazy at all imo. I've only read the first book and I don't plan on reading the rest. I found it interesting for the mainland Chinese societal influences that were sometimes explicit, but often just peeking through. It's obvious that the writer is from a different background as scifi authors that grew up in a western country. But the character writing and scifi aspects, were only kinda meh imo.
I had also read someone recommending the books as hard scifi and I can't agree with that either. The three body star system is a very interesting premise, but the godlike single proton that can envelop a planet is pure fantasy. Too much deus ex machina for good world building.
I read all three. I thought they excelled at creating new plot devices. Sentient particles, Thought as light, dimensional weapons. Its really hard to come up with new sci fi tropes! And Liu casually comes up with a dozen new ones. I thought the characters and plot were... unsatisfying. But I believe that is mostly intended as a portrayal of people's failings. I'd say it's a worth it read for real sci fi junkies though. Definitely disagree that it is "Not good", but taste is subjective. They seemed longer than they needed to be... I dunno.
It is easy to come up with nonsense. I much more respect works that explore the consequences of one fantastical thing.
You are correct. And it's not a translation problem, I've heard native speakers that read the original say it's precisely as awkward there.
It's the most over-rated trash I've ever encountered, it's like it's written by someone that discovered the genre but never read a single SF book and just assumed everyone that reads it is a teenager. There's more handwaving going on than a David Blaine performance.
And the later books show plotholes you could throw a truck through, when you get to the deus-ex-machina plot device that invalidates the whole marianne. And the character development never improves, it's just, I have to use the word again, awkward.
I wanted my money back.
Whoa whoa whoa, hang on there a second. David Blane would never use enough energy to wave a hand. David Copperfield maybe.
My bad. You're right Copperfield is way more of a flashy showman.
I just pulled the first magician I could think of out of my ass. Like a rabbit. Now how the hell did that get up there?
Not to mention the entire premise is invalidated by a cursory review of the Alpha Centauri system.
Thank you. It was so annoying reading that constantly thinking "that's not how the three-body problem works, and even if it was, that sure as hell doesn't describe Alpha Centauri."
And that's just the beginning. People calling this shit hard sci-fi is crazy.
To each their own!
I didn't super care about the characters but the sci fi problems, solutions and ideas of the whole series were a blast.
That being said, I grew up reading a lot of classic/"hard" sci fi so I'm pretty used to characters taking a back seat to fun/cool ideas.
Yeah, I felt it was largely a throwback to 1940s and 1950s western SF. Liu feels a lot like Asimov or early Heinlein. I was thinking it was like the kind of thing that a rapidly industrializing society would write as part of the cultural zeitgeist.
I also did not love it. The premise is fascinating and is relatively unique as far as 'first contact' stories go. At the end of the day, though, the first book is much more about Chinese history than aliens, and the 'science' part of the science fiction is so garbage that I had a hard time getting through it. I recommend "Blindsight" by Peter Watts if you're looking for a really cool first-contact story.
Aliens live on a planet orbiting three suns. The planet regularly gets scorched by those suns. Hot enough to melt rocks. How tf these aliens keep evolving and advancing all the way to space travel?
It is utterly ridiculous.
Rant incoming
The three body problem is chaotic dynamical system. Chaotic means, between other things, that it is unpredictable: given two different starting points, even incredibly close, their behavior will diverge (become different) exponentially fast over time (and we saw during the Covid epidemic that exponentially fast is really damn fast).
So having a super smart mathematician approximating its simulation… that’s a load of bullshit, hot and steamy. That’s a master level example of how not to spend your days, because any approximation you do is going to impact your results exponentially fast.
Furthermore, the three body problem’s solutions don’t need to be bounded. What does this mean? That there is no reason for the planet to stay in orbit of the three suns. Any time it gets far, it could come back, but just as easily keep going further away and lose connection with its starting system. Any time it gets near the suns it could just as easily fall into one of them. So, most likely, during geological ages, the planet would have either gotten ejected or eaten up. If you want to go even further back, there is no way an asteroid belt would generate a planet in these conditions.
Finally, there are well-known configurations of solutions of the three body problem. Configurations are very specific situations (usually assuming two suns of equal mass and a sun that is much smaller and much further away) that can sustain periodic solutions, aka behaviors that repeat after a certain time. If a planet ever got generated in a three suns system, it would definitely need to be in one of these configurations.
The nail in the coffin: if there are three suns and a planet… it’s the four body problem. If you consider the planet to have basically zero mass with respect to the suns, you call it the restricted four body problem.
And this is why knowing way more than the author spoils the fun :( I could not enjoy the science part at all… even when i tried to suspend my disbelief.
Easy. DEHYDRATE!
The sequels went on forever, to the point that I figured out what the Dark Forest theory was early on and had to finish that book just to find out I was right. Characterisation is pretty non-existent, it’s true.
I felt the same way about the characterization. I thought it might be a translation thing. I don't know that many folks that read it in Chinese, but I'm leaning towards "no, it's just like that."
It's a fun series to read a wiki about.
That's because it's great!
OK maybe it's not like objectively great, like in a literary sense, but me and my friends really enjoyed it for its unique voice and fun mystery.
It also spawned so many great conversations between the other programmers I know.
Thank you.
I read them all, hated them, and spent a good week finding negative reviews so I could fume at them in company.
I disagree with you on 3 Body, but I love reading reviews that match my opinion just so I can be like, "Exactly! Thank you!"
Haven't read it, but the show was interesting enough for me to watch the entire season.
I liked it, even if the characters weren't great. I liked book 1 in kind of a detective/mystery novel kind of way. The first book is very different from the next two, which is where I think the series really starts to address larger questions. It's still kind of flimsy and the characters might get worse, but I like some of the questions and hypotheses about the universe that it addresses. It gets into a more philosophical approach to the universe and how other species may interact with each other, mutually assured destruction, and how the human race would react to a sword of Damocles hanging over our head for 400 years. It's told from a Chinese perspective as well, so it was interesting to me to see how he thinks these might play out as opposed to my assumptions coming from a western perspective.
I think the dark forest hypothesis as an answer to Fermi is reasonable, and I like a lot of the big picture ideas.
But yea, it's not really a character driven series.
I think there's a real struggle in translating Chinese literature into English.
For what it's worth, the second book - The Dark Forest - starts off much stronger and builds from there, making the first book feel more like it was just introducing the story.
So here was my experience: finished Project Hail Mary, Google for books similar to it, was recommended 3 Body Problem. Cool. Start listening to it on audible while running errands, a LOT of stuff about the cultural revolution in China, and a very depressed smart young woman and a satellite dish that does weird stuff... a few chapters in and no humor, no science, nothing even remotely like Project Hail Mary or Andy Weir's other writing. So I dropped it.
A year or two later and Netflix adapted the novels into a TV show. Gave it a watch and got pretty bought in. Definitely some cool mystery, intrigue, done if it a bit cheesy, but raised a lot of cool challenges and questions. Also I could see that there was actually some science coming in my science fiction story. So I went back and gave the book a go.
I finished all the books and... it's a bit of a mess narratively. I felt like the author was REALLY good at coming up with creative problems that seemed insurmountable. And many of the solutions to those problem (many, not all) were equally clever and creative. He also came up with the (as far as I'm aware) completely novel concepts of alien biology, culture, and psychology and fictional technologies. But the story very often yadda yadda'd over complex narratives and geopolitical events with time jumps after making them seem like they were incredibly important before hand. He also comes up with some very cool concepts like the Wall Facers and the massive ramifications of having a handful of people that are unquestionable and work in complete secret and will have the highest levels of machinations in the works to save humanity, including one that DOES NOT WANT THE JOB. Such a good setup for so many possibilities... And then they almost immediately backpedal and undermine that with political oversight, borderline cartoon supervillain plans from some of them, and revocation of all of their statuses. There's other stuff too that's just disappointing from a narrative perspective.
But I kept going. I think because the technology was cool, the stakes were massive, the challenge was interesting, some of the mystery was really compelling, and I enjoyed the uniqueness of it all. It could have definitely been better. I think a lot of the ideas could have been explored more thoroughly and more cleanly. But, I don't regret reading it. I think it was pretty cool for the things it did well.
The three body problem is the ONLY SciFi series to repeatedly blow my mind. I read a lot of scifi, it's always the same stuff.
I read a lot of scifi, it's always the same stuff.
As someone who enjoys sci-fi this sounds like a very odd statement from someone who reads a lot of it. I wouldn't say I've read that much sci-fi but I could quite easily name some books that could hardly be any more different. Sci-fi seems incredibly diverse to me.
Love the books but completely agree. I devoured the trilogy but all of the charcters felt like cardboard cut outs. I liked the concept and the story, but hated all of the charcters and the writing in general.
I’m glad you said it. I read so many great reviews for it. It was recommended to me. I tried to read it. Couldn’t get past the first few chapters.
I’m an avid sci-fi reader. I’ve read hundreds of sci-fi books of all sorts; from goofy pulp to sci-fi-smut to high stakes epic novels. But I simply could not get into Three Body Problem.
I thought maybe it was that something was lost in translation.
You are absolutely correct OP. They are genuinely terrible books. And no, it's not - as some people like to claim - that book 1 is bad but the series gets better. Out of sheer morbid fascination I have made it to book 3, and it absolutely, categorically, does not get better. Dark Forest is actually worse than Three Body, considerably so. At least all the cultural revolution backstory in book 1 is kind of interesting and well executed. Dark Forest is a steaming pile of bullshit; utterly unlikable characters, one of the weakest versions of a scifi future ever committed to page, endless chapters worth of dumb Death Note style "Aha, but I knew that you knew that I knew that you knew that I knew that you knew that..." bullshit, and the signature premise of the entire book is a theory about the universe grounded in some absolutely atrocious game theory that can be disproved in five minutes. And ten chapters into Death's End... Yeah, it's still awful. Even more unlikable or just outrageously unbelievable characters - the author writes like he's never actually interacted with another human being - and dull plotting with no sense of pacing or urgency.
Cixin Liu has some strengths as a writer; at times he shows himself adept at building anticipation, he's good at knowing how to lay out his ideas towards a conclusion without suddenly dumping everything on you at the last second (something a lot of writers struggle with) and he really is very good at big crazy scifi ideas that make you go "Wow, that's so cool." But he's a bad writer. I compare him a lot to Asimov, in that he's strong on ideas and weak on everything else. But Asimov was primarily known for his short stories, where those strengths could shine and the weaknesses could be hidden (which is exactly why the Foundation novels get worse as they move away from being collections of novellas and towards being full length novels). Liu on the other hand writes interminably long books that absolutely expose those weaknesses. When it shines, it's really cool. There's one particular sequence in Dark Forest that really does stand out as being an incredibly inventive idea, executed very competently. But the standout moments just aren't worth the dross you have to wade through to get there.
After much struggle I got some geeky friends of mine to start a book club. I suggested this as the first book based on the hype. Almost no one finished it. When we got together to drink and talk, only two others bothered to dial in (It was during COVID and we are scattered), no one else finished it.
I dislike this book in so many different ways. It has some interesting Ideas and some surprising insights into the modern Chinese view of the revolution, but as an actual story? Ive read better fan fic.
In the middle of reading it now. Its a dual effect. One is that its natively written in chinese so a lot of its cultural stuff like the beginning will go over english readers heads not knowing that the chinese people literally had an violent orwellian book burning period of their history against academia. I imagine it was an attempt to pull readers in emotionally but Its hard to be emotionally invested in a cultural history you have no knowledge of and its paced badly.
The second is that the sci-fi genre is unfortunately nearly universally populated by nerds with good ideas pretending to be writers. This results in very interesting ideas and thought provoking settings being brought low by eye wateringly boring characters, piss poor narrative through lines, souless or confusing writing style, ect. Go ahead and try to read an Asimov book or Dune and you'll realize This was always the case for decades at least.
In fairness to the authors its hard to tell a civilization spanning futuristic world ending drama while also keeping it grounded.
As an enjoyer of sci-fi you kind of just have to power through the slog of some dead writing to get to the interesting concepts. I've never had the pleasure of reading a harcore sci-fi novel that was also an excellently written character drama. The only soft sci-fi book that pulled off the balance and stuck the landing was The Martian.
I'm not sure why The Cultural Revolution is supposed to be an alien concept to English readers that goes over their heads but otherwise I tend to agree.
Chinese people presumably know what the cultural revolution was about and the subtext is ingrained in social memory. To an English reader with no knowledge of what the cultural revolution was about the books opening has zero context. It begins with a revolutionary girl getting killed and some people lining up to denounce math and science like a public humiliation court but more violent. Theres no subtext as to why these things are happening or what its about. A quick Wikipedia article fixes that context up of it being about the current regime believing academic knowledge would undermine political power and economic worker capability, but thats never explained in the book its expected implicit knowledge your expected to know going in.
Western atrocities and cultural revolutions usually aren't over literal knowledge. For English speakering countries all revolutions and dictatorship genocides are usually about persecution of nationality, race, or religion. Take the american civil war and the Holocaust to example. revolution and state sanctioned violence aren't usually directly over nerd shit like knowledge, theyre fought over ideaology, race, resources. Instead of directly spilling blood and literally burning libraries governments prefer to play the long game of defunding public education and quietly banning controversial books to make the populace stupid and submissive, not literally book burning. 1984 is supposed to be metaphorical extremist dystopian satire warning us about PRISM, five eyes and the survailance state, not a literal instruction manual.
The idea of a book burning society with extreme censorship in such an in-your-face way is presented as fictional because the concept is so ridiculous. No half-stable government in their right mind would be so violently audacious over something so trivial, not even the run of the mill dictatorships. Asian culture is just very different.
The fictional science of the sophons was also bad.
The book author thought that protons were fundamental particles. Protons are made up of quarks. So the idea of unfolding a proton when it's made up of 3 quarks doesn't make sense. Put 3 marbles next to each other. Label the 3 marbles a proton. Unfold it. ???
Quantum teleportation doesn't allow for FTL communication.