About half way through I thought that The Three-Body Problem was going to affect me the way Dune did. It fell short, but not by much.
The pace is relentless. The characters, timelines and format (first person, government documents, interviews) weave in and out. Just when you’re tired of Professor Wang’s ghostly countdown, the book pivots and he’s in a totally different, virtual, and more incoherent world than the one he left. Once you’re tired of Wang it switches to Xe and visa versa.
And there were mysteries that, revealed, I was disappointed to have not foreseen. The orbital mechanics of The Three-Body video game, the source of Wang’s countdown, and Xe being the “Commander” that first contacted the aliens.
The Three-Body virtual reality game is the book’s real highlight. It’s both disorienting and thrilling. The game’s opaque objective — to predict the sunrise and sunset — is repeatedly interrupted by annihilation. The NPCs’ efforts to predict the weather are melancholic; each scientist, in real-life, truly spent the energy of their life trying to understand nature. And the man-made universe asks both player and NPC: “What’s the point? Disaster will strike you too.”
I liked the historical backdrop, the science-worship and the humans conspiring with the Trisolaris. The international political cooperation and the infighting among the Trisolaris-sympathizers all felt plausible and will bring me back for the second book in the series.
But there were bits of conversation that nearly sank this book. See: anything spoken by the police office during a Command Center meeting. See: dozens of conversations like the ones where Wang says “but... how?” and the theoretical physicist flies into a 2-page explanation of the 7th dimension or the invariant nature of physics. I still give the book four-stars, but it’s because I’m assuming these conversations and events made more sense in the Chinese version.
Finally, I hope the second book avoids the plot-movers that it resorted to at the book’s end. The literal shooting of a nuclear bomb with a gun. The slicing of the Judgement Day ship via nanomaterial-rope (was that the climax?). Plus, why did the Trisolaris-sympathizers get a four-decades long third person overview of Trisolaris? Why would Trisolaris type that out, from that perspective... with a detailed account of The Listener?
Despite my misgivings with the end, I’m hopeful for and have already ordered the second of the trilogy. There were enough heady sections between the historical flashbacks and virtual reality to get me hooked.