Books

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.

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.

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.

I read it some time ago before it was hyped up as much, saw it as a fun and interesting read but yeah a little shallow and action movie esque. It is definitely worth reading for the premise if you are a science fiction fan though, that aspect is solid, and I liked how it gives some details about Chinese culture and history that I wasn't very familiar with.

The first one is a major slog, and the next two aren't significantly easier to get through. I thought the ideas were fascinating and the overall story was pretty good. But the characters are all completely flat and uninteresting. I had a tough time remembering who was who, but it really didn't affect the story at all.

Additionally the writing was not great and, especially in the second and third book, very sexist. It was worth it to read once, but I definitely won't be reading it again. My spouse keeps asking if I'll watch the show, but I'm on the fence. I heard they condensed the characters to a more streamlined cast, which would be a good start. But I still doubt I'll watch it.

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.

Thank you.

I read them all, hated them, and spent a good week finding negative reviews so I could fume at them in company.

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.

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.

Okay, to start: not every book is for everyone and everyone is entitled to opinions. My opinion is that it is okayish. I liked the second one more (Dark Forest).

That said, the book is weird. It's like going to an art gallery and staring at paintings. Each painting is a chapter. Everything is beautifully depicted but totally static. The chapters in the book are look someone describing a painting to someone in the gallery who is blind.

And the paintings (and their descriptions) are good, but they aren't mind blowing or anything.

But, if you sit an digest it for a bit afterwards -- continuing the metaphor: you're on the train home from the gallery and it hits you -- there's themes woven between them. In my opinion, it's actually better once you step back and look at the whole book as though it was an exhibit of paintings with a theme. A few days removed from the book, you'll be returning to the ideas in it, even if all the characters and plot points blend together.

Anyway, my two protons.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I read it nine years ago and it was a slog. I had heard good things, but it definitely wasn't for me. Needless to say, I did not read the rest of the trilogy.

I enjoyed it and have recommended it, but then I reread it and yea, it's not great. But it had some interesting new concepts, for which I'm still grateful I read the books, like the dark forest theory.

The fictional science of the sophons was also bad.

1. 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. ???

2. Quantum teleportation doesn't allow for FTL communication.