Just finished Cixin Liu’s excellent sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem, and while it’s undeniably good hard sci-fi, I did have some thoughts about prior expectations which might have improved my enjoyment. Spoiler free TLDR below.
Going in, I basically only knew what was advertised on the back of the book alongside some 2 sentence recommendations on Reddit: humanity makes contact with an alien race, and various factions feud on how to deal with this new presence.
And that’s true… from one angle. This book is *not* a traditional First Contact/invasion story, in that aliens arrive on earth and humanity scrambles to deal with that potential threat. It’s not Arrival, in other words. What it is, is an opportunity to explore some really heady, existential ideas, the attempt to crack seemingly unsolvable mathematical concepts, the nature of evil, of humanity in contrast to the rest of the universe, and so on. Still, clinging onto my initial impression of the book, I spent much of it like that bit in South Park with Butters and Scott Malkinson, hanging out with George R. R. Martin and waiting for the ~~dragons~~ “pizzas” that were promised hours ago. >!Except the pizza (the aliens) never do arrive. In fact, they won’t arrive for 450 years. I can’t pretend that I didn’t deflate a little after learning that piece of info.!<
Everything surrounding that was enjoyable, and the ending really hammered the central concept home, but I walked away hoping that the extraterrestrial race had a more tangible presence in the rest of the book. Nevertheless, I’d still recommend it.
**Spoiler free TL, DR** – this book is excellent, but is not “Arrival”, or other more traditional First Contact stories. Don’t go in expecting that or you’ll be disappointed. The alien presence is more like a backdrop to explore a lot of (pretty compelling) scientific and philosophical concepts. If you’re cool with that at the outset, you’ll likely have a good time.
by PunyParker826
3 Comments
When I first read 3 Body, I had no idea what it was about. I had no clue aliens were involved. It made the book so much better for me. The slow unfolding of the actual threat was so engaging. After finishing the book, I was looking up things about it online and learned that the blurb on the back of the book straight up gives away the entire mystery. I’m still irrationally upset about it whenever I think about it. My two cents is that ideally a person shouldn’t even know about the aliens when they start the book.
Spoilers below:
I actually liked that angle of contact presented in the book. The distance between Earth and the aliens is too great for the aliens to traverse without taking a few centuries, so instead they shoot the equivalent of proton-sized drones which cripple humankind’s legs in the technological race by sabotaging any type of research done in the field of physics. That concept alone is just so unique and interesting to me that it kept me reading through the second book (haven’t started the third yet).
Given constraints of the universe, the issues of lightyears of separation will remain for every neighbor in the cosmic community. Seems, at best, we’ll be able to send smoke signals but engage in no practical trade or direct interaction.