The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
This novel belongs to the sub-genre of science fiction that deals with big splashy ideas, a subset of hard science fiction, which is focused more on science than character or psychology. It is also Chinese science fiction which is something I have not read before, though I have read a number of Chinese novels in translation, mostly classical but a few modern. The book is evidence of what I would call idea inflation in the field of SF. There are certain writers, like Charles Stross, who push their speculations into grandiose speculative arenas, and Cixin Liu is certainly one of these writers. To some degree the book is a vehicle for the ideas and exists to serve them. This makes for rough reading if this is not the kind of book you prefer, and that’s true for me. I admire this novel and enjoyed the ending of it but never felt very touched by it, not emotionally but in terms of interest. Like many fictions of this ilk, the story feels very far fetched, even for science fiction. It would be wrong to say that the characters are flat; they are drawn with quite a lot of detail, at least in terms of the core people. But I felt as though I was viewing them from a distance. And as the book proceeds they grew more and more peripheral as the scale of the story expanded. As the ideas inflate, the characters contract, and their story becomes insignificant. This made the book easy to put down and hard to pick up again, and left me with little interest in continuing the series to its conclusion. This is the kind of story that will inevitably spin out of the writer’s control as the idea grows grander and bigger and the scale increases to the galactic and the universal. I admire the writer very much and found some of the concepts he evokes to be extraordinary, but that’s not enough to make me read, unless I’m in the mood for nonfiction. However, it’s a staggeringly successful novel so who cares what I think? Maybe that’s part of the problem for me. I don’t need a book to make me feel small, insignificant, and pessimistic. I feel that on any given Monday.