The Three-Body Problem: Now a major Netflix series: 1 Paperback – 3 Dec. 2015

This book surprised me. I struggled to get started with this book, but after a few false starts, it dragged me in. There is a long build-up to this book, a background story that introduces one of the main characters and her past before there's anything even remotely to do with aliens. In the end this is a good thing and you feel a real interest in her and her life but this is what made me struggle initially as it felt the book wasn't getting anywhere. If you have some patience and bear with it though, the story unfolds really well and cleverly.The book deals in some heavy-duty science too, and Cixin Liu has done some serious research to make this book what it is. You could almost believe he is a qualified astronomer, which he may well be. This is one of the things that may have people struggling with this book, as it does have a lot of technical language and there is a lot of theory about the "three-body problem" that I cannot even start to properly understand. The kindle version does have a glossary to explain some of the Chinese cultural phrases and some of the scientific jargon too, but there is so much detail here it would take another book altogether to cover the sheer amount of science involved.Don't let this put you off though. I can't claim to have understood everything Cixin Liu wrote in this book, but despite this, the story itself is engaging and feels very realistic. In the end I struggled to put the book down, reading for hours at a time until I finished it in two days. Anyone with a passing interest in astronomy and the idea of contacting alien civilizations in other solar systems will likely love this book.The only warning I will give however is that this book doesn't particularly conclude and does require reading The Dark Forest, book two in the trilogy, which I am reading now. If you don't mind a trilogy then I can highly recommend The Three-Body Trilogy and look forwards to more of Cixin Liu's works being translated into English.

Truly, the story is original and captivating and I will be buying the second novel on that basis.The writing style is "sub-optimal", being rather simplistic and (nearly, sort of) reminiscent of a child's adventure story. Is this the writer or the translation; does it really matter? There are a lot of suddenly this and suddenly that type of expressions and some of the sub-plot tropes feel false or rather farcical. The stereotypical manner in which, seemingly all, female characters are portrayed is disappointing in modern fiction. But the idea seems new and original and makes the book into a page turner.With all that in mind, it rates a (reluctant) 7 out of 10; the originality really does beef up the ratings!

Love this trilogy, bought it after watching the netflix series 1, so glad I got the books as these are so much better! the first book takes a while to get used to the writing style (if you're reading the English translation), as how it's been translated from the Chinese can feel a bit clunky for the English language (I think, i'm not a language professor or anything, but got this for my dad too and discussed it) - but I think its so interesting how language can represent culture, norms, everything.I'd reccomend getting the physical book copy if you aren't used to reading translated copies, as I got the Chinese names muddled up quite often (I also didn't realise until about halfway through the second book that Firstnames and Surnames are the other way round in Chinese too!) and forgot who was who, but at the start of the book there's a name guide to remind you who is who, but I wasn't aware of this in the kindle version!.The first book can be a bit tough going, but once you get used to the language and the names, it is absouetly fantastic, i would say it's the best sci-fi series I have read, ever!!! it has also translator's notes which add in more depth to the Chinese culture and facts a Westerner may not know, which was really interesting and so helpful.

It was interesting to read a postscript from the translator of this novel in which he discusses the problem of how to give the English version a Chinese flavour! Especially interesting as I had been thinking that the novel felt distinctly Chinese - so congratulations to the translator for achieving his goal.But if you were to ask me how it felt Chinese, I would struggle to be specific. There are a few sections where I felt the sentence structure felt rather clumsy - for example, in Chapter 18, (discussing the psychological impact of the virtual reality game that plays a major role in the story) 'All the players, including Wang himself, couldn't bring it up easily'. The meaning is clear, but a more natural way of putting it would be 'None of the players, Wang himself included, could bring it up easily' - or so it seemed to me, at least. I stand ready to be corrected, but in any case these issues were few and far between, and so can't be considered a cause of the 'Chinese flavour'. It's more subtle than that, perhaps something not in the words but in the world view behind them.The important question though, is did it add or detract from the story? And unfortunately, for me, it detracted. I had no issue with the plot, which was complex but well developed. I found the science fascinating and the glimpses of Chinese life and history intriguing. The characters were variable, some more distinctly portrayed than others, but none in a way that distracted from the story. Yet, overall, the writing had a ponderous feel to it. It was interesting, but never got exciting, and the pace didn't seem to vary.Is that because this is the Chinese style? Is it the author's personal style? Or is it something I've read into it myself? I have no way of being sure. But the truest test will be, do I want to go on and read the rest of the trilogy? Well, I would like to know what happens and how the world responds to the Trisolarian threat. But I'm certainly not ready to plunge back into it immediately. I'll need to take a break from the writing style for a while. Then, I'll think about it.

Buen libro

It’s an amazing book, difficult to describe though. To really appreciate the book a reader has to commit an undivided attention to it. It feels like immersing into a slow moving powerful river with all the tributary joining it and giving us more clues.We finally see the big picture and it’s awesome and terrifying at the same time- because it really can happen!I’m in awe of the author imagination and erudition. I also admire a fantastic job of the translator- Ken Liu ( any relation to the author?). I think the quality of his translation contributes to the book success.I’m moving now to start reading the part two of the trilogy. Can’t wait!

Uma estória surpreendente, única e rica, uma ótima surpresa.

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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