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The Three Body Problem should be retitled. Here are some ideas: - Nothin' But Plot Holes - Attack of the Flat, Interchangable Characters - the Four Body Prob

The Three Body Problem should be retitled. Here are some ideas: - Nothin' But Plot Holes - Attack of the Flat, Interchangable Characters - the Four Body Problem (since the trilsolarans don't actually live in a 3-body system I'm convinced that the only way to like that book is to have never read real SF before. It's so hackneyed and tropey. People call it hard sf, but it's the opposite.

typon 5y ago
I wouldn't call TBP "hard sf", its more like hard fantasy sf. It delivers on that pretty well - better than anything other series I have read. As for hackneyed and tropey, I can't think of another sf series that has this many original ideas presented in a way that's this compelling.
jmull 5y ago
Don't get too hung up on the "hard sf" label. It effectively just means, "The science presented seemed plausible enough to me that it didn't distract or annoy me." It's entirely personal since we all have different levels of fluency in science, and different levels of tolerance for the dissonance we feel when we read something we know is wrong.
dobladov 5y ago
Can you recommend real sci-fi books?
- lazyweb 5y ago
  Not OP, but Greg Egan is mentioned somewhat often around here. Having read some of is books (Schild's Ladder, Permutation City, Diaspora) I can firmly recommend them, and would assign them the "hard sci-fi" tag. You can also never go wrong with Arthur C. Clarke. Another favourite of mine, "Tomorrow and Tomorrow" by Charles Sheffield.
  - dnautics 5y ago
    Greg Egan's diaspora is fantastic. I can't stop thinking about that book.
  - esarbe 5y ago
    Greg Egan is so good. The last few books didn't quite click with me, but Diaspora is a book I return every few years. If you are reading this, Greg: I want to have your book!
  - goatlover 5y ago
    Permutation City is hard sci-fi? That has mind uploading and the dust theory of consciousness. Both of which are very speculative.
- schwartzworld 5y ago
  Hold on, I didn't say it wasn't real sci-fi. I said it wasn't really "hard sf". As somebody else said, the definition of the genre is a little fuzzy. But in my experience the best hard SF doesn't handwave away inconsistencies, and uses our current understanding of science as a basis for the science in the story. Sophons are about as believable as dragons. Stephen Baxter does a great job with hard sf, and much of Kim Stanley Robinson's work fits the bill. Edit: Oops I guess I did say that people who liked it hadn't read real SF. What I meant by that was that they were an exposed to a lot of the genre, because the "original" ideas in TBP I keep hearing people praise felt very familiar and tropey to me.
  - slothtrop 5y ago
    From the Baxter wiki segment on Xeelee Sequence: "The central narrative is that of humanity rising and evolving to become the second most powerful race in the universe, next to the god-like Xeelee. Character development tends to be secondary to the depiction of advanced theories and ideas, such as the true nature of the Great Attractor, naked singularities and the great battle between baryonic and dark matter lifeforms." Is this what you think is harder sci-fi than TBP, with better character development?
    - rsynnott 5y ago
      I would guess that they were thinking more about things like Voyage (which is an alternate history, but very hard sci-fi).
  - atlasunshrugged 5y ago
    Not hard sci fi but I loved John Brunners work, especially Jagged Orbit... seeing what he was talking about 40-50 years ago is incredible. As soon as I finished it I grabbed 3 more of his books, they weren't as good but all interesting, on par with the Culture series which is another one of my favorites
  - atlasunshrugged 5y ago
    I really wanted to like Ministry for the Future but I felt like it was 200 pages longer than it needed to be. But interesting premises.
- garmaine 5y ago
  Besides those authors others have mentioned in sibling comments, give Alastair Reynolds a try. All of his work is hard sci-fi and very good.
  - M_bara 5y ago
    Peter f Hamilton. The commonwealth series is incredible. I’ve read every single book of his and can’t find anything to complain about. IMHO, he’s up there with Alastair Reynolds, Greg Egan, Ian m. Banks…
- esarbe 5y ago
  Peter Watts; Blindsight, Echopraxia. Be prepared for a wild ride.
lazyweb 5y ago
People have different opinions. I think the label "hard sc-fi" is too fuzzy with everyone having their own expectations. Personally I found the books to be immensely entertaining. There's a number of very intriguing thought experiments. What happens when a ship is sliced in half by an almost infinitely strong piece of string? What if people were able to enter and move around in 4-dimensional space, or if 3D space suddenly collapsed to 2D? What could happen if the speed of light dropped to 16km/s?
- schwartzworld 5y ago
  Sure. Just like harry potter explores what happens if you have a cloak of deception or time turner. What would happen if Dementors invaded Hogwarts? Forgive me, I haven't actually read the whole series. I've never heard a definition of hard SF that didn't require some effort to make the science part sound plausible. It's one thing to not hold up to the scrutiny of experts, but there were a number of times I looked up from TBP and thought "that sounds wrong". If TBP is hard scifi than so is How To Train Your Dragon.
  - chaps 5y ago
    You definitely wouldn't like ball lightning. It makes some... stretches.
    - Breza 5y ago
      Agreed, though it was a bit easier to follow since it's shorter. The ending could be interpreted as a prequel to TBP.
      - chaps 5y ago
        Oh yeah, in TBP, the translation notes noted some references to Ball Lightning, so they're definitely within the same universe.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Perhaps we need a Mohs scale for sci-fi hardness then. TBP and the rest of the trilogy aren't hard in terms of fully valid science, or even in terms of Atomic Rocket's[0] rule of "one scientifically implausible item per story". But they aren't soft either, not like (say) Star Trek. It's something in between. -- [0] - http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/sealofapproval.php http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/sealofapproval....
slothtrop 5y ago
This wasn't a terribly character-focused book, personally I find that to be a plus (since it's not usually the case in fiction). It remained interesting throughout. Having read plenty of sci-fi, you won't find anything that isn't tropey in some fashion. It's genre-fiction for a reason. Rationalizations for liking/disliking a book are for the birds, you either like it or you don't.
cmrdporcupine 5y ago
I enjoyed the first book, it was quite compelling. But the second and third really wandered off into a swamp. I wouldn't call it hard SF, but I don't really care about the designation, either. I thought the characters in the first were well written. I lost track of who was who in the later ones.
- psychometry 5y ago
  The only character in the first book who exhibited any kind of personality was the gruff cop who swears, doesn't care if he's not allowed to smoke inside, and takes no shit from anyone. It's almost laughable how bad the author is at characterization.
  - Hoasi 5y ago
    > It's almost laughable how bad the author is at characterization. Isn't that part of the charm of the book, though? The characters are not as strong individually as they could be, but that fits the society they find themselves in.
    - psychometry 5y ago
      No, I don't think there's an excuse for anyone writing this badly.
      - Hoasi 5y ago
        Fair enough. There is still the possibility that something got lost in translation.
Hoasi 5y ago
Criticism is easy, art is difficult. > I'm convinced that the only way to like that book is to have never read real SF before. It's your opinion against thousands who read and like SF and loved Liu Cixin's books. It's true that there you must accept a set of axioms that create a suspension of disbelief in most of those books.
- michaelcampbell 5y ago
  Opinions aren't "against" anything, they're just different. I thought what portion of the book I could stomach, sucked. Other people liked it. Both are fine.
pjc50 5y ago
For me, the interesting thing about TBP (I only read the first in the trilogy) was that it was attempting high-concept SF from a very different background: the Cultural Revolution. High-concept is not the same as hard SF, it means that the novel is driven by the ideas it's trying to articulate rather than anything else. Hence the fragile plot and characters. But the central question - is it possible the universe is lying to you on a fundamental level? Are your views of reality being systematically manipulated to prevent you reaching certain conclusions and elevating yourself? Those are more interesting, especially coming from a writer under the CCP.
- jabedude 5y ago
  > is it possible the universe is lying to you on a fundamental level? This was what was most interesting to me while reading the trilogy. The thought experiment of the 2-D society living on a paper target that is trying to predict where bullets will appear in their universe still sticks with me. I'd love to read anything else that explores the idea of the limits of science
- k__ 5y ago
  "attempting high-concept SF from a very different background: the Cultural Revolution" I liked Terra Ignota in that regard. I didn't get through the first two chapters of the TBP, but I loved all TI books.
- abecedarius 5y ago
  Thanks, this is the first description of TBP to say something specific and interesting that makes me want to read it. (The excerpts, general praise, and "dark forest theory" did not do it for me.)
- addingnumbers 5y ago
  I couldn't bring myself to swallow his explanation for throttling scientific advancement. The trisolarans use a device that meddles with the results of particle experiments, to make the results super unexpected, so the scientists will commit suicide out of desperation. Make their experimental results so curious and interesting that the observers don't want to live anymore. To me that doesn't jibe with human nature one bit. I also never really understood what the motivation was for projecting a countdown timer into that guy's optic nerve, other than a hackneyed Dan-Brown-level suspense device. I wish I'd read this on paperback instead of e-book so I could flip back to some more of the "wait. what?"s and "?!"s I would have scribbled in the margins.
rsynnott 5y ago
> Attack of the Flat, Interchangable Characters I mean, in fairness, this is basically traditional in sci-fi; characterisation that wasn't terrible was a bit of a novelty until quite recently.
cloud9193 5y ago
I'm going to vehemently agree here, the books were incredibly over rated and presented as some sort of ascendant Chinese modern POV about a potential future. The entire book feels like a cobbling of Cixin's fanciful "what if?", vaguely scifi moments (like the oft-cited wire cutting ship) hastily glued together with the most unrelatable and frankly forgettable characters I've ever read. Go grab some Neal Stephenson, Dan Simmons, or Philip Dick.
throwawaymanbot 5y ago
ok, now do LOTR, Harry Potter, and the Bible!
eric_b 5y ago
I could not agree more. I don't mind hand wavy "technological breakthroughs" as long as the main point of the story is "when confronted with new crazy thing X, here's how humanity deals with it" and there's some clever thought put in. Maybe some interesting insights from the author. But the Three Body Problem.... ugh. So bad. - As you say, the plot is terrible. Kerouac had a more coherent narrative. What story there was strained believability even for pulp sci fi. - The characters are utterly devoid of humanity. I don't even know who's who half the time, and there is no continuity throughout the series. - There are no clever "ah ha" moments where the author has thought of something "profound" in relation to the scenario they've crafted. It's tropes and painful lurches from one thing to another. I don't get it. I finished it and I couldn't believe all the people telling me how great it was.
turbinerneiter 5y ago
> I'm convinced that the only way to like that book is to have never read real SF before. I liked the books so I guess my vast collection of classical and modern SF is not real scotsman.
booleandilemma 5y ago
I can’t even remember the characters’ names yet I still liked the books (the first two anyway). Not sure flat characters mattered for the story, it was still cool.
jaqalopes 5y ago
What scifi are you reading that doesn't have plot holes? Also, I don't think anything could be less flat than Liu's Chinese characters—especially the women like Ye Wenjie and Cheng Xin. I suppose you might not have spent a lot of time with Chinese people, but you should know that due to their culture they live somewhat different emotional lives than Westerners, with much less emphasis placed on direct individual expression and much more focus on private or hidden (from family, society, etc.) actions. Personally, I come to science fiction because I'm interested in seeing how human beings respond to the extreme situations in which imagined futures place them. In that regard, Remembrance of Earth's Past is one of the most engaging and successful scifi series I have ever read.
- esarbe 5y ago
  As I mentioned before; I didn't really like TBP and it's siblings. I can however recommend Diaspora by Greg Egan. Or Blindsight and Echopraxia by Peter Watts. "Human" beings in "extreme situations", indeed.
- dnautics 5y ago
  to be fair: "having plot holes" is not the same thing as "nothing but plot holes"
cjohnson318 5y ago
> I'm convinced that the only way to like that book is to have never read real SF before. What do you consider real SF?
telchar 5y ago
Hard sci-fi is No Real Scotsman: The Genre. The hardest sci-fi is just called fiction, because there is no room in hard sci-fi for speculation about science. At best you could call it fiction where technology figures heavily, like The Martian, which while great is hardly sci-fi at all in my opinion. Any testable scientific theory is generally either so esoteric as to be impossible to work into a story in a significant way or so likely to be false that it gets labeled soft sci-fi. Theories that can’t be tested are just metaphysics or magic. So the more Fi, the less Sci. Criticizing something for not being hard sci-fi is easy, but I would say largely meaningless unless the piece plays so loose with the science that it could have achieved the same effect with harder science, but I certainly don’t think you could say that of TBP.
- rendall 5y ago
  > "The hardest sci-fi is just called fiction, because there is no room in hard sci-fi for speculation about science." That's a really good insight, and I largely agree. I think of successful hard sci-fi as "reasonably extrapolates what we currently know about science and technology into the future", but, as you pointed out, that leads to an unlikely, or worse, boring future. > "...but I would say largely meaningless unless the piece plays so loose with the science that it could have achieved the same effect with harder science, but I certainly don’t think you could say that of TBP." I strongly disagree. The alien powers were so unlikely and all-powerful that they may well have been called instead "Witch Demons from The Horror Dimension!"
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    > I think of successful hard sci-fi as "reasonably extrapolates what we currently know about science and technology into the future", but, as you pointed out, that leads to an unlikely, or worse, boring future. Check out Blindsight and Echopraxia for where the author extrapolated a bunch of physics and neuroscience research into a vision of an interesting, and quite disturbing future. Well, there were also (in-universe explained, and quite ingeniously at that) vampires, so this part would make it soft sci-fi, but the story/universe would work without them too.
Zababa 5y ago
I liked the books. The sense of claustrophobia they conveyed was very well done, though I don't know if it was intentional. I also liked the exploration of China. I don't really agree about the characters except for the ones of the third book. The third book feels a bit like a "history lesson through the eyes of this specific person". I don't really value the "hardness" of SF though.
AndrewStephens 5y ago
I don't really disagree with your evidence but your conclusion is flawed. The Three Body Problem seems like a very weird book by the standards of the 21st century but it would feel right at home amongst the "golden age" 50s and 60s sci-fi novels. It is a real throwback to the Big Idea! stories of that era. I wrote longer reviews of all three novels [0] (to save you the click, I thought the first one was great, the second was OK, and the third actively bad!) [0] https://sheep.horse/2017/3/book_review_-_the_three-body_problem_by_liu_cixin.html https://sheep.horse/2017/3/book_review_-_the_three-body_prob...
- krispyfi 5y ago
  How curious. I thought the first one was good, the second was great, and the last was genius.
  - AndrewStephens 5y ago
    It is almost like consuming art is subjective experience.
- krispyfi 5y ago
  Reading your review, you call Xin an idiot, but I saw her as an alternative type of hero who rejects Luo Ji's effective but ultimately unsustainable and mutually-destructive masculinity. This felt very fresh to me.
  - AndrewStephens 5y ago
    I will allow that it was a bold choice from Liu Cixin to make someone like Xin the main character. I just really disliked everything about her.
rendall 5y ago
LOL, agreed. I stopped reading when the novel finally got to "entanglement" as the entire explanation of how these light-years-distant aliens can see everything that happens on Earth.
pnathan 5y ago
It breaks British and US expectations of the genre. It's largely commenting on social aspects in China, I believe.
fsloth 5y ago
"I'm convinced that the only way to like that book is to..." I must strongly disagree on your position that only people with specific histories may enjoy a specific book. I think I recognize science (MSc in physics), my fiction (enjoy everything from Chekhov and Tolstoy to Banks, Clarke) and found the books as damn entertaining read. It's fiction! If I want "real science" I will do a refresher on my quantum mechanics, CS algos or peruse the latest Economist. Silly stories have their place, and some of us enjoy an entertaining yarn (if a yarn is 'entertaining' is then again a matter of taste).
nmca 5y ago
Have you read the sequels? I've read a lot of scifi both hard (Tau Zero, Blindsight, Diaspora, ...) and soft (Dune, Cat's Cradle, A fire upon the deep, ...) and whilst three body itself is middling, the second two books are masterpieces that make the overall series an absolute favourite of mine.
- bkanber 5y ago
  I read the TBP trilogy a few years back, and I can't stop thinking about The Dark Forest. That's one of the marks of a great book, IMO. I can't get it out of my head.
- schwartzworld 5y ago
  > Have you read the sequels? No, I hated the first one.
_zamorano_ 5y ago
There's no way to tackle such an array of crazy concepts without being highly speculative and incurring in inconsistencies. I guess you like better smaller plots, the author can make more consistent and believable. To me, the way Liu links one after another crazy physics stuff into the book story is masterful. I've read most SF classics and there's nothing like that. That in itself is an accolade. Heck, several times I had to browse Wikipedia to see whether the next mad stuff had any scientific background, to find most had.
michaelcampbell 5y ago
I wanted to like it, but I couldn't get through it. 50% of the way in, and almost no Sci, and no Fi, and god if I heard "dehydratory" one more time I was going to lose it. The "game" as described in the book was utterly absurd. It could be because of a cultural mismatch between me (American) and the author, but there was a certain something that I just couldn't get past.
avaldes 5y ago
If I want hard sci-fi I can read Lorentzian Wormholes from Matt Visser or something like that. You can't explore such crazy ideas from TBP without going off the rails with speculation. > - Attack of the Flat, Interchangable Characters Yeah, I agree with you, but I don't know yet if this is a cultural thing with Chinese literature that can't be translated to English or simply that Liu can't write good characters.

typon 5y ago

I wouldn't call TBP "hard sf", its more like hard fantasy sf. It delivers on that pretty well - better than anything other series I have read. As for hackneyed and tropey, I can't think of another sf series that has this many original ideas presented in a way that's this compelling.

jmull 5y ago

Don't get too hung up on the "hard sf" label. It effectively just means, "The science presented seemed plausible enough to me that it didn't distract or annoy me." It's entirely personal since we all have different levels of fluency in science, and different levels of tolerance for the dissonance we feel when we read something we know is wrong.

dobladov 5y ago

Can you recommend real sci-fi books?

lazyweb 5y ago
Not OP, but Greg Egan is mentioned somewhat often around here. Having read some of is books (Schild's Ladder, Permutation City, Diaspora) I can firmly recommend them, and would assign them the "hard sci-fi" tag. You can also never go wrong with Arthur C. Clarke. Another favourite of mine, "Tomorrow and Tomorrow" by Charles Sheffield.
- dnautics 5y ago
  Greg Egan's diaspora is fantastic. I can't stop thinking about that book.
- esarbe 5y ago
  Greg Egan is so good. The last few books didn't quite click with me, but Diaspora is a book I return every few years. If you are reading this, Greg: I want to have your book!
- goatlover 5y ago
  Permutation City is hard sci-fi? That has mind uploading and the dust theory of consciousness. Both of which are very speculative.
schwartzworld 5y ago
Hold on, I didn't say it wasn't real sci-fi. I said it wasn't really "hard sf". As somebody else said, the definition of the genre is a little fuzzy. But in my experience the best hard SF doesn't handwave away inconsistencies, and uses our current understanding of science as a basis for the science in the story. Sophons are about as believable as dragons. Stephen Baxter does a great job with hard sf, and much of Kim Stanley Robinson's work fits the bill. Edit: Oops I guess I did say that people who liked it hadn't read real SF. What I meant by that was that they were an exposed to a lot of the genre, because the "original" ideas in TBP I keep hearing people praise felt very familiar and tropey to me.
- slothtrop 5y ago
  From the Baxter wiki segment on Xeelee Sequence: "The central narrative is that of humanity rising and evolving to become the second most powerful race in the universe, next to the god-like Xeelee. Character development tends to be secondary to the depiction of advanced theories and ideas, such as the true nature of the Great Attractor, naked singularities and the great battle between baryonic and dark matter lifeforms." Is this what you think is harder sci-fi than TBP, with better character development?
  - rsynnott 5y ago
    I would guess that they were thinking more about things like Voyage (which is an alternate history, but very hard sci-fi).
- atlasunshrugged 5y ago
  Not hard sci fi but I loved John Brunners work, especially Jagged Orbit... seeing what he was talking about 40-50 years ago is incredible. As soon as I finished it I grabbed 3 more of his books, they weren't as good but all interesting, on par with the Culture series which is another one of my favorites
- atlasunshrugged 5y ago
  I really wanted to like Ministry for the Future but I felt like it was 200 pages longer than it needed to be. But interesting premises.
garmaine 5y ago
Besides those authors others have mentioned in sibling comments, give Alastair Reynolds a try. All of his work is hard sci-fi and very good.
- M_bara 5y ago
  Peter f Hamilton. The commonwealth series is incredible. I’ve read every single book of his and can’t find anything to complain about. IMHO, he’s up there with Alastair Reynolds, Greg Egan, Ian m. Banks…
esarbe 5y ago
Peter Watts; Blindsight, Echopraxia. Be prepared for a wild ride.

lazyweb 5y ago

People have different opinions. I think the label "hard sc-fi" is too fuzzy with everyone having their own expectations. Personally I found the books to be immensely entertaining. There's a number of very intriguing thought experiments. What happens when a ship is sliced in half by an almost infinitely strong piece of string? What if people were able to enter and move around in 4-dimensional space, or if 3D space suddenly collapsed to 2D? What could happen if the speed of light dropped to 16km/s?

schwartzworld 5y ago
Sure. Just like harry potter explores what happens if you have a cloak of deception or time turner. What would happen if Dementors invaded Hogwarts? Forgive me, I haven't actually read the whole series. I've never heard a definition of hard SF that didn't require some effort to make the science part sound plausible. It's one thing to not hold up to the scrutiny of experts, but there were a number of times I looked up from TBP and thought "that sounds wrong". If TBP is hard scifi than so is How To Train Your Dragon.
- chaps 5y ago
  You definitely wouldn't like ball lightning. It makes some... stretches.
  - Breza 5y ago
    Agreed, though it was a bit easier to follow since it's shorter. The ending could be interpreted as a prequel to TBP.
    - chaps 5y ago
      Oh yeah, in TBP, the translation notes noted some references to Ball Lightning, so they're definitely within the same universe.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Perhaps we need a Mohs scale for sci-fi hardness then. TBP and the rest of the trilogy aren't hard in terms of fully valid science, or even in terms of Atomic Rocket's[0] rule of "one scientifically implausible item per story". But they aren't soft either, not like (say) Star Trek. It's something in between. -- [0] - http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/sealofapproval.php http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/sealofapproval....

slothtrop 5y ago

This wasn't a terribly character-focused book, personally I find that to be a plus (since it's not usually the case in fiction). It remained interesting throughout. Having read plenty of sci-fi, you won't find anything that isn't tropey in some fashion. It's genre-fiction for a reason. Rationalizations for liking/disliking a book are for the birds, you either like it or you don't.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago

I enjoyed the first book, it was quite compelling. But the second and third really wandered off into a swamp. I wouldn't call it hard SF, but I don't really care about the designation, either. I thought the characters in the first were well written. I lost track of who was who in the later ones.

psychometry 5y ago
The only character in the first book who exhibited any kind of personality was the gruff cop who swears, doesn't care if he's not allowed to smoke inside, and takes no shit from anyone. It's almost laughable how bad the author is at characterization.
- Hoasi 5y ago
  > It's almost laughable how bad the author is at characterization. Isn't that part of the charm of the book, though? The characters are not as strong individually as they could be, but that fits the society they find themselves in.
  - psychometry 5y ago
    No, I don't think there's an excuse for anyone writing this badly.
    - Hoasi 5y ago
      Fair enough. There is still the possibility that something got lost in translation.

Hoasi 5y ago

Criticism is easy, art is difficult. > I'm convinced that the only way to like that book is to have never read real SF before. It's your opinion against thousands who read and like SF and loved Liu Cixin's books. It's true that there you must accept a set of axioms that create a suspension of disbelief in most of those books.

michaelcampbell 5y ago
Opinions aren't "against" anything, they're just different. I thought what portion of the book I could stomach, sucked. Other people liked it. Both are fine.

pjc50 5y ago

For me, the interesting thing about TBP (I only read the first in the trilogy) was that it was attempting high-concept SF from a very different background: the Cultural Revolution. High-concept is not the same as hard SF, it means that the novel is driven by the ideas it's trying to articulate rather than anything else. Hence the fragile plot and characters. But the central question - is it possible the universe is lying to you on a fundamental level? Are your views of reality being systematically manipulated to prevent you reaching certain conclusions and elevating yourself? Those are more interesting, especially coming from a writer under the CCP.

jabedude 5y ago
> is it possible the universe is lying to you on a fundamental level? This was what was most interesting to me while reading the trilogy. The thought experiment of the 2-D society living on a paper target that is trying to predict where bullets will appear in their universe still sticks with me. I'd love to read anything else that explores the idea of the limits of science
k__ 5y ago
"attempting high-concept SF from a very different background: the Cultural Revolution" I liked Terra Ignota in that regard. I didn't get through the first two chapters of the TBP, but I loved all TI books.
abecedarius 5y ago
Thanks, this is the first description of TBP to say something specific and interesting that makes me want to read it. (The excerpts, general praise, and "dark forest theory" did not do it for me.)
addingnumbers 5y ago
I couldn't bring myself to swallow his explanation for throttling scientific advancement. The trisolarans use a device that meddles with the results of particle experiments, to make the results super unexpected, so the scientists will commit suicide out of desperation. Make their experimental results so curious and interesting that the observers don't want to live anymore. To me that doesn't jibe with human nature one bit. I also never really understood what the motivation was for projecting a countdown timer into that guy's optic nerve, other than a hackneyed Dan-Brown-level suspense device. I wish I'd read this on paperback instead of e-book so I could flip back to some more of the "wait. what?"s and "?!"s I would have scribbled in the margins.

rsynnott 5y ago

> Attack of the Flat, Interchangable Characters I mean, in fairness, this is basically traditional in sci-fi; characterisation that wasn't terrible was a bit of a novelty until quite recently.

cloud9193 5y ago

I'm going to vehemently agree here, the books were incredibly over rated and presented as some sort of ascendant Chinese modern POV about a potential future. The entire book feels like a cobbling of Cixin's fanciful "what if?", vaguely scifi moments (like the oft-cited wire cutting ship) hastily glued together with the most unrelatable and frankly forgettable characters I've ever read. Go grab some Neal Stephenson, Dan Simmons, or Philip Dick.

throwawaymanbot 5y ago

ok, now do LOTR, Harry Potter, and the Bible!

eric_b 5y ago

I could not agree more. I don't mind hand wavy "technological breakthroughs" as long as the main point of the story is "when confronted with new crazy thing X, here's how humanity deals with it" and there's some clever thought put in. Maybe some interesting insights from the author. But the Three Body Problem.... ugh. So bad. - As you say, the plot is terrible. Kerouac had a more coherent narrative. What story there was strained believability even for pulp sci fi. - The characters are utterly devoid of humanity. I don't even know who's who half the time, and there is no continuity throughout the series. - There are no clever "ah ha" moments where the author has thought of something "profound" in relation to the scenario they've crafted. It's tropes and painful lurches from one thing to another. I don't get it. I finished it and I couldn't believe all the people telling me how great it was.

turbinerneiter 5y ago

> I'm convinced that the only way to like that book is to have never read real SF before. I liked the books so I guess my vast collection of classical and modern SF is not real scotsman.

booleandilemma 5y ago

I can’t even remember the characters’ names yet I still liked the books (the first two anyway). Not sure flat characters mattered for the story, it was still cool.

jaqalopes 5y ago

What scifi are you reading that doesn't have plot holes? Also, I don't think anything could be less flat than Liu's Chinese characters—especially the women like Ye Wenjie and Cheng Xin. I suppose you might not have spent a lot of time with Chinese people, but you should know that due to their culture they live somewhat different emotional lives than Westerners, with much less emphasis placed on direct individual expression and much more focus on private or hidden (from family, society, etc.) actions. Personally, I come to science fiction because I'm interested in seeing how human beings respond to the extreme situations in which imagined futures place them. In that regard, Remembrance of Earth's Past is one of the most engaging and successful scifi series I have ever read.

esarbe 5y ago
As I mentioned before; I didn't really like TBP and it's siblings. I can however recommend Diaspora by Greg Egan. Or Blindsight and Echopraxia by Peter Watts. "Human" beings in "extreme situations", indeed.
dnautics 5y ago
to be fair: "having plot holes" is not the same thing as "nothing but plot holes"

cjohnson318 5y ago

> I'm convinced that the only way to like that book is to have never read real SF before. What do you consider real SF?

telchar 5y ago

Hard sci-fi is No Real Scotsman: The Genre. The hardest sci-fi is just called fiction, because there is no room in hard sci-fi for speculation about science. At best you could call it fiction where technology figures heavily, like The Martian, which while great is hardly sci-fi at all in my opinion. Any testable scientific theory is generally either so esoteric as to be impossible to work into a story in a significant way or so likely to be false that it gets labeled soft sci-fi. Theories that can’t be tested are just metaphysics or magic. So the more Fi, the less Sci. Criticizing something for not being hard sci-fi is easy, but I would say largely meaningless unless the piece plays so loose with the science that it could have achieved the same effect with harder science, but I certainly don’t think you could say that of TBP.

rendall 5y ago
> "The hardest sci-fi is just called fiction, because there is no room in hard sci-fi for speculation about science." That's a really good insight, and I largely agree. I think of successful hard sci-fi as "reasonably extrapolates what we currently know about science and technology into the future", but, as you pointed out, that leads to an unlikely, or worse, boring future. > "...but I would say largely meaningless unless the piece plays so loose with the science that it could have achieved the same effect with harder science, but I certainly don’t think you could say that of TBP." I strongly disagree. The alien powers were so unlikely and all-powerful that they may well have been called instead "Witch Demons from The Horror Dimension!"
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > I think of successful hard sci-fi as "reasonably extrapolates what we currently know about science and technology into the future", but, as you pointed out, that leads to an unlikely, or worse, boring future. Check out Blindsight and Echopraxia for where the author extrapolated a bunch of physics and neuroscience research into a vision of an interesting, and quite disturbing future. Well, there were also (in-universe explained, and quite ingeniously at that) vampires, so this part would make it soft sci-fi, but the story/universe would work without them too.

Zababa 5y ago

I liked the books. The sense of claustrophobia they conveyed was very well done, though I don't know if it was intentional. I also liked the exploration of China. I don't really agree about the characters except for the ones of the third book. The third book feels a bit like a "history lesson through the eyes of this specific person". I don't really value the "hardness" of SF though.

AndrewStephens 5y ago

I don't really disagree with your evidence but your conclusion is flawed. The Three Body Problem seems like a very weird book by the standards of the 21st century but it would feel right at home amongst the "golden age" 50s and 60s sci-fi novels. It is a real throwback to the Big Idea! stories of that era. I wrote longer reviews of all three novels [0] (to save you the click, I thought the first one was great, the second was OK, and the third actively bad!) [0] https://sheep.horse/2017/3/book_review_-_the_three-body_problem_by_liu_cixin.html https://sheep.horse/2017/3/book_review_-_the_three-body_prob...

krispyfi 5y ago
How curious. I thought the first one was good, the second was great, and the last was genius.
- AndrewStephens 5y ago
  It is almost like consuming art is subjective experience.
krispyfi 5y ago
Reading your review, you call Xin an idiot, but I saw her as an alternative type of hero who rejects Luo Ji's effective but ultimately unsustainable and mutually-destructive masculinity. This felt very fresh to me.
- AndrewStephens 5y ago
  I will allow that it was a bold choice from Liu Cixin to make someone like Xin the main character. I just really disliked everything about her.

rendall 5y ago

LOL, agreed. I stopped reading when the novel finally got to "entanglement" as the entire explanation of how these light-years-distant aliens can see everything that happens on Earth.

pnathan 5y ago

It breaks British and US expectations of the genre. It's largely commenting on social aspects in China, I believe.

fsloth 5y ago

"I'm convinced that the only way to like that book is to..." I must strongly disagree on your position that only people with specific histories may enjoy a specific book. I think I recognize science (MSc in physics), my fiction (enjoy everything from Chekhov and Tolstoy to Banks, Clarke) and found the books as damn entertaining read. It's fiction! If I want "real science" I will do a refresher on my quantum mechanics, CS algos or peruse the latest Economist. Silly stories have their place, and some of us enjoy an entertaining yarn (if a yarn is 'entertaining' is then again a matter of taste).

nmca 5y ago

Have you read the sequels? I've read a lot of scifi both hard (Tau Zero, Blindsight, Diaspora, ...) and soft (Dune, Cat's Cradle, A fire upon the deep, ...) and whilst three body itself is middling, the second two books are masterpieces that make the overall series an absolute favourite of mine.

bkanber 5y ago
I read the TBP trilogy a few years back, and I can't stop thinking about The Dark Forest. That's one of the marks of a great book, IMO. I can't get it out of my head.
schwartzworld 5y ago
> Have you read the sequels? No, I hated the first one.

_zamorano_ 5y ago

There's no way to tackle such an array of crazy concepts without being highly speculative and incurring in inconsistencies. I guess you like better smaller plots, the author can make more consistent and believable. To me, the way Liu links one after another crazy physics stuff into the book story is masterful. I've read most SF classics and there's nothing like that. That in itself is an accolade. Heck, several times I had to browse Wikipedia to see whether the next mad stuff had any scientific background, to find most had.

michaelcampbell 5y ago

I wanted to like it, but I couldn't get through it. 50% of the way in, and almost no Sci, and no Fi, and god if I heard "dehydratory" one more time I was going to lose it. The "game" as described in the book was utterly absurd. It could be because of a cultural mismatch between me (American) and the author, but there was a certain something that I just couldn't get past.

avaldes 5y ago

If I want hard sci-fi I can read Lorentzian Wormholes from Matt Visser or something like that. You can't explore such crazy ideas from TBP without going off the rails with speculation. > - Attack of the Flat, Interchangable Characters Yeah, I agree with you, but I don't know yet if this is a cultural thing with Chinese literature that can't be translated to English or simply that Liu can't write good characters.