The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin

The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu is the science fiction book I had heard mentioned most over the last few years that I hadn’t read. But, I really hadn’t heard that much about what it was. I knew that it had something to do with orbits and aliens but that was it. What I did know was that it had been translated into English and so I assumed it would be significantly different from the type of science fiction I was used to reading.

The Three Body Problem isn’t as different as I had assumed. The setting isn’t the United States which makes it different from almost every science fiction book I have ever read which is set on Earth, and that does have some fairly important impacts on the plot. But outside of that it feels in many ways more like traditional science fiction than a lot of other things I have read in the last ten years.

The basic premise of The Three Body Problem is that aliens are on their way to earth and a group of people know about it and are helping them under the assumption that humans are doing such a bad job of governing themselves that the aliens would have to be preferable. Meanwhile the aliens are coming because they need to escape their own home system to avoid extinction.

The most interesting aspect of the science in this book as well as the core of the aliens personality is that of the three body problem. As I understand it if you have two bodies it’s fairly easy to understand how they will move in the future based on positions and velocity, but when you add a third it becomes almost impossible to predict. This is a problem for the people who live in a solar system with three suns because it makes living on that planet much more difficult because one day they might be in a stable orbit around one sun and the next they’re in an extremely cold or hot orbit.

Just the ways that the species had to evolve to be able to survive in such a dangerous system makes for a lot of interesting science and as they advance it becomes more interesting. It also explains why they need to escape that system and why our earth with a stable orbit is so appealing to them.

There were some negatives. I wasn’t super attached to any of the characters in the book though I found them interesting and I didn’t entirely agree with some of the assumptions that were made about the way humans would react to something like aliens, but part of the reason I like to read is to expose myself to ideas that I don’t necessarily agree with and if I’m willing to suspend my disbelief far enough to accept aliens that survive in a trinary star system I can accept that humans may attempt to use the knowledge of aliens to gain political advantage.

I enjoyed The Three Body Problem a lot, but I didn’t really love it. The ideas and sciences in it were excellent and the setting was memorable but I never felt drawn in the way that I might like. I’ll accept some of that probably because of translation both of the text and of the culture. But the translation was good and the culture aspects were interesting. So, I’m not entirely certain if I’ll continue with this series, but I’m glad I read it.

Note: This review was written before I had heard that it was being made into a series by Netflix and so also before the comments were made by the writer. I wish all people of all religious faiths in China and around the world well.