THE THREE BODY PROBLEM - CIXIN LIU (trans. KEN LIU

I’m a bit late on this but after finishing the 12 part Solar Cycle, I had the desire for some longer form sci-fi/speculative fiction. TT-BP comes quite highly recommended, again, I think I’m a few years late but this series of books certainly had a moment. I believe Obama himself endorsed them when they first dropped in English some years back. My copy has the coveted, “Soon to be a Netflix” series sticker on the front, so clearly the hype lives on. In some ways it’s interesting that this is the first major Chinese cultural product I can think of  that is popular in the United States (and even then, I suppose it’s not that popular, all things considered; it is still a sci-fi book that isn’t targeted at children). None of their movies or music or anything else China has to offer has broken through over here yet, despite (and perhaps because of) an ever-deepening economic relationship between our two nations and an ever-growing call for war. Hopefully we’ll get to see more Chinese stuff. This was interesting and cool, it makes me wonder what the rest of Chinese sci-fi is like and I’m intrinsically against this drumbeat to hate, fear and be perplexed by the Chinese. Anyway, the book itself is pretty fascinating if somewhat straightforward sci-fi. The basic plot (spoilers, obviously) of the novel revolves around mysterious deaths in the scientific world. Wang Miao, a nanotech guy in Beijing is tasked with trying to get to the bottom of this which eventually leads him to discover a virtual reality game called Three-Body. The game sequences take place in a world designed to look like ancient China, then ancient Europe, and characters in the game have historical names like King Wen or Newton, and depict an alien world that we eventually learn has three suns, which gives the planet itself a very unstable existence. Thus, we learn the “three-body problem” is fundamentally chaotic, will never resolve and will, eventually, lead to the planet being drug into one of the suns and consumed. The twist turns out to be that game depicts a real world, called Trisolaris, where aliens are looking for a way to escape their chaotic planet and settle somewhere more stable. They eventually settle on Earth, where a woman who has grown cynical due to the Cultural Revolution in China has essentially invited the Trisolarians to Earth in the hopes that they will destroy humanity. It turns out that several people have been working together to hasten the arrival of the aliens, who, by the end of the novel, are on their way, in ships that will take 400+ years to reach Earth. Presumably, the other two books in this series are about what mankind does in the interim. The last section of the novel tries to tell the story from the perspective of the Trisolarians themselves. I think Liu could have done more to make the Trisolarians seem alien, they come off as very human and recognizable. I liked their plan to send 11-dimensional supercomputers folded into 2 dimensions in order to be tiny, which was strange and bizarre enough to seem alien. A lot of this book seemed like place-setting of this larger story that I hope really goes crazy in these next two volumes.