The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (2006)

This book has been on my list for ages, at least since it won the Hugo. Thanks to the dual prompting of the new show and some light peer pressure, I finally read it. Let’s get this out of the way up front: I liked it a lot. Great book! You should read it.

But my goodness, this is a book I wish I could have read in the original language. There’s a very distinctive style and rhythm to the language, especially the dialogue, that I can only describe as “artfully clunky”, lots of people shouting declarative statements past each other. I’d love to know what percentages of that are a) the author’s style b) an artifact of the translation c) that’s how Mandarain sounds. I suspect it’s 30:70 a and c, but I’d love to know.

For a 400+ page book, there are surprisingly few characters with major “speaking parts”.

My favorite was Shi Qiang, the grizzled police detective. Speaking of cultural and stylistic differences, that character is clearly supposed to be the hard-charging pragmatist, and as such, he felt the most in-line with the baseline of the way American technothriller/science fiction characters act. And so it kept making me laugh how constantly he would say or suggest something that seemed pretty straightforward to me, and then all the other characters would fall all over themselves about how rude and inhuman the detective was. I really enjoyed the cultural differences embedded in the fact that the other characters can barely comprehend how rude that guy is, and meanwhile I’m reading it thinking “the other guys in Miami Vice would make so much fun of this guy for being too polite”.

On the other hand, Wang Miao, the character we spend the most time with, has a certain blank “video game protagonist” quality. Mostly he’s there to be shocked at the detective, solve puzzles, and deliver exposition, in that order.

In a lesser book, the third character with the most time on page, Ye Wenjie, would be the antagonist, and while her actions are opposed to those of the first two characters, the book refuses to be that straightforward. She’s really the book’s main protagonist, as her actions are what cause the plot to start moving, in many ways she manages to have the most agency of anyone in the story, despite her not realizing it.

I really, really enjoyed how hard the author worked not to editorialize on the characters. There’s the group that in an American novel would absolutely be the “bad guys”, and here the author just describes them with a tone of “well, what do you think?” Maybe the best deployment f the “villain has a point” trope I have ever seen.

The overall structure of the book was a lot of fun. Roughly speaking, it was: 100 pages of warmup laps, making sure the reader knew who everyone was and where they were, 200 pages of post-cyberpunk techno-thriller modern-day science fiction, then 100 pages of absolute unchained insanity. A++.

It’s the sort of book where the author has had some fun ideas about how physics could work, and what that would mean, and would like to tell you about it. (The all time grand-champion for “let me tell you my ideas about physics” is Masamune Shirow’s Orion which is less of a graphic novel than it is an illustrated physics textbook for a cosmology worked outwards from “how can we power spaceships with spells?” It’s incredible, and I can’t believe they keep remaking Ghost in the Shell but still haven’t done Orion even once.)

There’s plot point that hinges on a common pop culture misunderstanding of “quantum entangling”, which isn’t a dealbreaker but does jump out if you read those kinds of ars technica articles. Which isn’t a dealbreaker by any means, but it does feel like a missed opportunity to have an exchange along the lines of a human saying “but the no messaging theorem!” and the aliens saying “haha, your puny earth science has much to unlearn!!” But this is mostly there to enable the real fun crazy ideas around computers, and higher dimensions, and particle physics, and ways civilizations can (or can’t) cope with their surroundings. One of the things I genuinely like about the book is that is spends ~300 pages being a real-world hard science fiction book, and then in the last 100 or so starts doing things that would make Star Trek blush, but since you’re bought in it all works, and the end can get away with a lot.

“Hard science fiction” in the classic mid-century sense of “square-jawed Science Men think through a math word problem for 8000 words” has fallen out of vogue, and this book isn’t a throwback so much as it is a revival. Rehabilitating the (sub)genre while keeping the post-seventies innovations of the broader science fiction literary community. From the discussions on the web, I notice this seems to be a lot of younger people’s first “hard” SF, and to be clear, I think that’s great. I’m kind of a reverse-hipster on this one; I have a strong “if you like that, buckle up, there’s a whole section of the library you are going to flip over” reaction. (Wait’ll these kids discover that Clarke book that’s essentially a set of full engineering plans for a space elevator in novel form.)

The key factor in making all that work is grounding the story in the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. Having the story take place in the shadow of the real-world horrors, and the plot spin out as a serious of consequences of that disaster give it a sense of social realism that glues together all the VR games and nanomaterials and sophons.

Finally, it doesn’t technically end on a cliffhanger, but I adore the double-punchline the book ends on. Incredible last scene.