REVIEW: Cixin Liu’s THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM

Here is my normal approach to starred reviews.  I admit that this is probably more generous than many, but I’m not worried about it.  For every guy like me who hands five-star reviews out to a third of the books he reads, there will be someone else who reserves them for books that should win awards.  It balances out.

• A five-star book is not only a book that I really enjoyed, but (this is critical) a book that I will evangelize and recommend to others.
• A four-star book is one that I enjoyed, but not necessarily enough to be evangelical about it.
• A three-star book is a book that I finished.

I usually don’t review two-star or one-star books, because most of the time I didn’t finish them.  I have to hate a book to finish it if I don’t like it; generally I finish it with horrified fascination as the overriding emotion.  Sometimes I like a book on some levels but abhor it on others; sometimes I just like looking at a train wreck.

I just gave The Three-Body Problem five stars on Goodreads, despite having some reservations about it, and I want to take a minute to explain why.  The book was originally written in Chinese and translated into English by Ken Liu, who I understand is of no relation to Cixin Liu.  And therein lies the first problem: there is no way to read this and not immediately recognize that it’s a translated work.  This is no slight on Liu, who is clear in the translator’s note (there’s a translator’s note) that preserving the Chinese character of the book was a priority, and the book isn’t hard to read, but I feel like the “this was obviously not written in English” character of the text is going to turn some people off.  This is especially clear in dialogue; English speakers simply don’t talk like the characters in this novel.

(See what I mean?  Not complaints, not flaws.  Reservations.)

The plot of the book is occasionally slightly impenetrable, particularly the first 20% or so, which require some background knowledge of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in order to properly appreciate– or, at least, I assume it’s required, since I don’t have it and found the first part a big of a slog.  Once the book jumps forward into… now?  Near future? I’m not sure– it becomes much easier going.  I finished the book in about a day and a half, so it couldn’t have been that rough.

The other thing?  The science. My favorite book of last year was Andy Weir’s The Martian, which I recommended enthusiastically to everyone, with the caveat that the book would involve math and chemistry and you should be prepared for that.  Half of the characters in The Three-Body Problem are physicists.  There’s a whole bit toward the end that is all about unfolding a proton from 11-dimensional space down to 2-dimensional space so that it can be turned into a supercomputer.  They fail to do it right twice.  That happens.

I am also not quite sure that Cixin Liu has ever played a computer game.  I won’t go into that particular gripe any more than that sentence, but there’s a lot of stuff going on with a VR game and it’s… weird.

But here’s the thing: this book?  It’s inventive as hell.  There are aliens.  They’re coming for us.  And they don’t get anywhere near us during the first book, which is part one of a trilogy.  And the whole thing is just as clever as hell in a whole lot of ways and I can’t wait to read the second book even though there were parts of it I don’t like and I’m going to have to be real careful about who I recommend it to.

So I’m calling that five stars.  Your mileage may vary, I suppose, but you should check the book out anyway.