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Title: The Three Body Problem
Author: Liu Cixin
Genre: Near-future science fiction
Thingummies: 3.5
Synopsis: Once, a refugee from China's Cultural Revolution found safe haven at a research installation that turned out to have a secret mission. Now, scientists around the world have started killing themselves in despair.
Thoughts: I found this book to be both deeply fascinating and wildly uneven. I'm not entirely sure whether the problem is that I'm not that familiar with the Chinese writing style, or if the translator didn't quite manage to convey everything gracefully, or if it's just that this is kind of uneven. But the ideas are sufficiently cool that it's still worth a look.
I don't want to completely spoil the premise, since the first half of the book is devoted to slowly revealing what's really going on. Most of the problems for me come in the back stretch, where we very abruptly change viewpoints. It feels as if the author abandons his story frame for awhile so that he can play thought experiments with physics. They're really interesting thought experiments, but it saps a lot of the momentum of the book.
I really liked large swaths of this, but I also found it really frustrating. What I'm not sure of is whether the problem is with the author or me.
Author: Liu Cixin
Genre: Near-future science fiction
Thingummies: 3.5
Synopsis: Once, a refugee from China's Cultural Revolution found safe haven at a research installation that turned out to have a secret mission. Now, scientists around the world have started killing themselves in despair.
Thoughts: I found this book to be both deeply fascinating and wildly uneven. I'm not entirely sure whether the problem is that I'm not that familiar with the Chinese writing style, or if the translator didn't quite manage to convey everything gracefully, or if it's just that this is kind of uneven. But the ideas are sufficiently cool that it's still worth a look.
I don't want to completely spoil the premise, since the first half of the book is devoted to slowly revealing what's really going on. Most of the problems for me come in the back stretch, where we very abruptly change viewpoints. It feels as if the author abandons his story frame for awhile so that he can play thought experiments with physics. They're really interesting thought experiments, but it saps a lot of the momentum of the book.
I really liked large swaths of this, but I also found it really frustrating. What I'm not sure of is whether the problem is with the author or me.
