The Three-Body Problem Three-Body Problem Series #1 Hugo Award Winner by Cixin Liu
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Web ID: 4132597Not recommended
The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1) - by Liu Cixin - Translated to English by Ken Liu This is a stand-alone book and the first novel in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. The novel presents a nonlinear narrative. I'll try to present a chronological timeline of events. During the Cultural Revolution, Ye Wenjie, an astrophysics graduate from Tsinghua University, sees her father get beaten to death during a struggle session by Red Guards from Tsinghua High School. Ye is branded a traitor and is forced to join a labor brigade in Inner Mongolia, and is later sentenced to prison, where she is recruited by Yang Weining and Lei Zhicheng, two military physicists working under Red Coast, a secret Chinese initiative to use high-powered radio waves to damage spy satellites. After working with them for some time, she learns that the stated purpose is a front for Red Coast's true intention: the search for extraterrestrial life. Ye discovers the possibility of amplifying outgoing radio waves by using microwave cavities within the Sun and sends an interstellar message to test her theory, but tells no one else. Eight years later, now in a loveless marriage with Yang, Ye receives a message from a concerned alien pacifist from the planet Trisolaris in Alpha Centauri, warning her not to respond or else the inhabitants of Trisolaris will be able to deduce the Solar System's location (based on the time it takes them to receive her response to their messages) and invade Earth. In the present day, Wang Miao, a nanotechnology professor, is asked to work with Shi Qiang, a cunning detective, to investigate the mysterious suicides of several scientists, including Ye's daughter Yang Dong. The two of them notice that the world's governments are communicating closely with each other and have put aside their traditional rivalries to prepare for war. Over the next few days, Wang experiences strange hallucinations and meets with Ye. Wang sees people playing a sophisticated virtual reality video game called Three-Body (which is later revealed to have been created by the ETO as a recruitment tool) and begins to play. The game portrays a planet whose climate randomly flips between Stable and Chaotic Eras. During Chaotic Eras, the weather oscillates unpredictably between extreme cold and extreme heat, sometimes within minutes. The inhabitants (who are portrayed as having human bodies) seek a way to predict Chaotic Eras so they can better survive. Unlike humans, they have evolved the special ability to "dehydrate", turning themselves into a roll of canvas. They do this to lie dormant when the Chaotic Eras occur, saving valuable resources that otherwise would have been wasted. A second individual is required to rehydrate their body, as self-rehydration is not possible. Characters resembling historical figures, including Aristotle, Mozi, and Isaac Newton, fail to produce a model for the planet's climate, as multiple civilizations grow and are wiped out by large-scale disasters. It is Wang who ultimately happens upon the insight that explains the climate of Three-Body and wins the acclaim of the others. The planet is part of a system with three suns, whose distances from the planet and thus their appearance and disappearance in the sky are stochastic and hard to predict. When two suns are far away and Trisolaris orbits the third, the climate enters a Stable Era. When the planet is too close to two suns, the climate is disrupted, causing a Chaotic Era. If it is close to all three suns, a planet-wide firestorm occurs. If all three suns are distant, the planet enters an ice age. Eventually, at a future time impossible to predict, Trisolaris will collide with one of the suns and be consumed. The game shows the Trisolarans building and launching colony ships to invade Earth, believing that the stable orbit will allow unprecedented prosperity and let them escape the destruction of their planet. Wang is inducted into the ETO, and informs Shi of one of their meetings. This leads to a battle between the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and the society's soldiers, as well as Ye's arrest. The PLA works with the Americans, led by Colonel Stanton, to ambush Judgment Day as it passes through the Panama Canal. To prevent the crew from destroying records of their communications with the Trisolarans, the team follows Shi's suggestion to use Wang's nano-material filament in a fence, which will quickly cut the ship apart and kill everyone aboard but will not damage the computer systems beyond repair. From the Trisolaran communications, several revelations are discovered. The Trisolarans possess advanced picotechnology that allows them to create 11-dimensional supercomputers called "sophons" which, when viewed in three dimensions, occupy the volume of a proton. Two of these sophons have already been laboriously manufactured and sent to Earth. The Trisolarans do not have faster-than-light travel for spacecraft, but they can launch individual sophons at a relativistic speed toward Earth where they have the power to cause hallucinations, spy on any location, transmit the information gathered to Trisolaris using quantum entanglement, and disrupt the operation of particle accelerators. The Trisolarans fear humanity will develop technology advanced enough to fight off the invasion by the time the fleet arrives, and have decided that disrupting the accelerators to give random results will paralyze Earth's technological advancement. Once several sophons have arrived, they plan to fabricate visual miracles and other hallucinations on a massive scale to make humanity distrust its scientists. The Trisolarans detect that humanity has made these discoveries via sophons and beam to the eyes of the PLA one final message, "You're bugs!" and then cease all communications. Will Earth survive the invasion? Narrated from the third person point of view, this was a tedious read. There are several timelines to keep track of and there are many secondary characters that take away from the primary ones. Hard to identify or care for them. The plot is chaotic and hard to understand. My physics knowledge is limited and most of the concepts flew way over my head. Did not enjoy it and will not be reading any more books in the sequel.
Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
Concept over substance destroys the book
A concept driven story is one where characters, plot, good writing, and action all take a back seat to the concept of the book. "The Three-Body Problem" is an apotheosis of a concept driven narrative and shows how it can fall flat despite interesting subject matter. The problem looming over the novel, and from which pretty much every other problem springs, is the inelegant way in which the concept is handled. Yes, the core ideas of the book are complex and, yes, people with a stronger scientific background (especially in astrophysics) will have an easier time understanding them; however, the author appears to labor under the impression that the average person will need a great deal of help grasping these concepts. Fair enough. Other books have this problem and handle it well. "Three-Body" does not. As though readers are not intelligent enough to make connections themselves or recognize nuanced explanations, the author feels the need to explain everything to the nth degree. While a lot of this is downloaded via exposition dumps, some of it comes in the form of a video game which hardly qualifies as a video game. It mainly involves walking around for long periods of time and having high concept conversations with NPCs. And then dying for no reason. I understand its goal is educational and that it has a lot of ground to cover, but it would probably have worked better as an interactive novel than a video game. The issue is that because of the structure of the game, the information provided via its interface is also a lot of explaining. The worst part is when the dissemination of information is handled relatively expertly, providing the reader everything they need to know about a topic, and then the book uses the next chapter to painstakingly explain all of it again. This book does a lot of telling with precious little showing, breaking the cardinal rule of storytelling. There are also a lot of extended sequences which could be drastically shortened while losing nothing. For example, there is a scene which involves a character seeing specific things (cryptic to avoid spoilers) both with his eyes and when he takes pictures. The author spends six pages detailing how this character took pictures with different cameras, digital and film, old and new, in different locations and eventually arrives at the conclusion that the things aren’t going away. There was absolutely no need to drag this sequence on for so long. These problems destroy the pacing of the book. It is one thing if a story is a slow burn, that can be used to good effect, but this book simply drags. You could remove the repetition and shorten the story by 100 to 200 pages without losing anything of value. I do not believe it disingenuous to purport that all this book’s problems stem from repetition and an over-reliance on the concept. Because this takes up so many pages, there is no time to develop characters who are consequently flat and dull, and barely time to progress the plot. Despite these faults, I must give credit where credit is due and that is in the world created for this book. I appreciated the alien world explored in the above mentioned “video game.” It is truly unique compared with settings common in science fiction. There is also an organization in the book (the ETO) which is a lot more nuanced than secret organizations in most books. It has factions, dissenters, proponents, and hierarchical problems which give it a depth not often seen in this volume. Nevertheless, the good parts of the book are too small to save it, making this one story I recommend leaving at the bookstore.
Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
I wish I had known
I would not have purchased these books if I had known the author was on record as supporting the imprisonment of Uighur minorities in "reeducation" camps. I am aware of review policy, but defamation only counts as defamation if it's false. Check the June 2019 interview of him by the New Yorker's Jiayang Fan, which is where he says this, blatantly and without hesitation. This is relevant to those who might want to purchase this book, as I would not have financially supported someone who advocates such horrible actions if I had known ahead of time.
Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
Amazing Hard Science Fiction
This entire series was absolutely captivating to me. It's not an alien battle between good and evil, rather a look at how humans as a species might react to the news that we are not alone- and that we are no longer safe. Yes, it is about an alien species invading Earth, but in the distant future. This series is about what people do when faced with this terrifying scenario. It does contain quite a bit of hard science fiction, however I found it easy to follow along with. I highly recommend this series if you are interested in the human condition. Don't read it if you just want an alien space battle, because you won't find it here.
Recommends this product
Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
Made me smarter.
Brilliantly conceptualized novel . I think some of the negative reviews are because the western readers are more used to a "hero's journey" style of novel with some strong character to root for, where as this novel is heavy on the science and with references to Chinese history and culture that they are not familiar with. There is no villain to bash up so to speak.
Recommends this product
Customer review from barnesandnoble.com