Related to this, and tangentially connected to the topic of reading fiction, I'll take this as an opportunity to raise one of the many things that I disliked ab

Related to this, and tangentially connected to the topic of reading fiction, I'll take this as an opportunity to raise one of the many things that I disliked about Cixin Liu's “The Three-Body Problem”. I honestly don't understand why it is held in such high regard, let alone sometimes described as "hard" science fiction. Spoilers evidently follow. One of the initial plot points in the novel is that many top scientists in fields close to theoretical physics are misteriously committing suicide. Eventually it is revealed that they're doing it because an alien civilisation is surreptitiously using advanced technology to secretly interfere with human research at the subatomic level or something of the sort, to the point that the affected scientists are coming across such contradictory, counterfactual and inconsistent results that they finally commit suicide out of despair, shame, or loss of faith in science. The idea that scientists, when faced with sudden nonsensical results which they cannot explain, would feel compelled not only to keep this fact to themselves but also to take their own lives is an unbelievably ignorant take on the workings of science as a field and a community. If an evil power were to somehow alter reality to start breaking the expected rules of the Universe scientists would be absolutely excited about it, not suicidal! And even if they were to eventually despair out of the meticulously planned inconsistency caused by the evil manipulators, such that nothing could ever be predicted again, the despair would happen long after years and years of scientific conventions making the whole situation very public!