The Three Body Problem - Cixin Liu

Just a mind boggling hard science fiction novel from Chinese author Cixin Liu. Originally published in China in 2008, the English translation was released in 2014 and subsequently won the Hugo Award and was nominated for the Nebula Award.

The story opens during the Cultural Revolution in 1967, as astrophysics student Ye Wenjie watches as Red Guards beat her professor father to death. Ye is then sent to what is effectively a forced labor camp in Mongolia. She is eventually selected to work at a mysterious mountaintop antenna facility. The story then jumps to the present day (actually the near future from the book’s point of view) and takes up with Wang Miao, a nano-tech researcher. There appears to be a struggle between pro and anti science forces that is going on behind the scenes. There is also a weird, immersive video game called “Three Body” which takes the player to a world in a system with three stars, whose orbits seem impossible to predict (the so-called three-body problem), resulting in catastrophic changes in worldly conditions. Roughly halfway through the book, you learn what it all is really about.

I have to say it is not an easy read. Several reviewers have mentioned echoes of Arthur C. Clarke. The author himself has admitted he was greatly influenced by Clarke. Like Clarke, events tend to matter more than characters, and the characters don’t always ring true. And the science is impressive. There is even a long section about unfolding the higher dimensionality of matter that is straight out of string theory. Mind blowing. My final verdict, though, is this. There are two more books in the series. I don’t plan to read them.