you pull me out of the dark and now it's light

Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin
Remembrance of Earth's Past #1

I really need to get into gear with posting my book reviews - I read this in April/May and wrote it up, too, but forgot to post it.

I read this book in German, since I have to read a translation of it anyway, and the German one is supposed to be very good.

If anyone doesn't know the general gist of the novel yet:

Astrophysicist Ye Wenjie, in political exile in a secret military base and disilluisioned with mankind after the atrocities she witnessed during the cultural revolution and the destruction of natural beauty all around her, secretly broadcasts a message into space to invite aliens to Earth to settle its problems.

Years later, nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao is forced to confront an apparent alien conspiracy that has caused many scientists to commit suicide, and his own life seems to be on a (very short) countdown towards death, too.


I loved all the cultural revolution parts. It's not every day that a Chinese author honestly describes how terrible it was for the people involved. That was by far my favorite part of the book.

Everything "science"-related just drove me up the wall, though, so I had a very hard time finishing it, and basically just skipped the last third just to get it over with. I will not read the remaining books in the series. This is a pity, because I'd been looking forward to watching the addaptations. Maybe I'll still do that sometime...

spoilery (and ranty) thoughts

* Oh god the science, where do I start?

* Wang Miao sees a countdown superimposed over everything, even pictures he takes with his camera. When his wife takes pictures with the same camera, there is no countdown. This is not how science works. (It's like vampires having no reflection. That's not how light works.)

* The aliens prove their existence to Wang Miao by causing a change in background radiation, which should be completely impossible. (Duh, it is. There is no scientific explanation for this. I waited for one, but it did not come. Except for the "sophons", see below. I did not buy it.)

* One of the rounds in the three body problem computer game has a planet and a sun come so close to each other that people start to float from one to the other. Wtf this is not how gravity works!

* That Ye Wenjie is so disillusioned with humanity that she would want aliens to either save or destroy Earth is something I can accept. That the majority of human/Chinese scientists would commit suicide out of despair over an alien invasion is something I cannot. The whole drama aspect of Wang Miao's first few chapters just did not work for me at all.

*The Trisolarans develop "sophons" (minuscule supercomputers embedded in single protons) in order to arrest Earth's technological development by interfering with its scientific experiments. Ostensibly, them being light particles, they can travel at light speed, but they still contain information somehow and can expand into computers... um... no. Nope. That's not how astrophysics works. He tried to explain the multidimensional aspect of it, but it didn't sound believable to me.

* Let alone the assumption that the Trisolarans would know exactly how to stifle our development from ... a few communications a few decades back? Not bloody likely.

* The Trisolarans (in the computer game) also develop a computer made out of people. This might work in Minecraft, but not on a scale like this, with every person being a logic gate by lifting flags they have in their hands. This is so utterly ridiculous. People aren't reliable like that. The accumulated errors would throw off every calculation. Although if you want to look at it as a "the Chinese army is so reliable" metaphor, that's another story.

* There are several comments on society, stating that most of the users of the three body computer game are older people, educated Chinese, for example. I'm not sure if that was intended as a political dig, or whatever. It wasn't consistent enough to make sense to me, anyway. There were several throwaway generalizing statements like this in the book instead of having them evolve organically from the narrative.

* So. Metaphorically, I can see what Liu Cixin did, and there might be some merit in it, especially in looking at the mindsets of the characters involved, and getting more thoughts on how people live(d) in China. But I've talked to people who have read the remaining two books, and I've been told that it's just more scifi and less personal/societal consequences. I can accept a scifi premise as the means of analyzing human behavior, or throwing light on specific societal constructs, that's absolutely a reason I read scifi/fantasy, but there has to be at least a minimally logical basis for everything to rest on, and this book just doesn't have that for me. I was just ranting at the scientific impossibility of it the whole time.

* As I said, I really like how he described the cultural revolution, how different people dealt with it, and how extreme the wounds left in everyone's psyche were. It was worth reading the book for that, but the "science" parts just made me angry, and subjecting myself to more of that is absolutely not worth it.

1 star - Interesting and harrowing descriptions of the Chinese cultural revolution, but the rest of the book just wasn't for me.



1 - 5 stars - Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky The Final Architecture #1 [DW link]
2 - 2 stars - Miss Merkel: Mord auf dem Friedhof by David Safier Miss Merkel #2 [DW link]
3 - 4 stars - Once Broken Faith by Seanan McGuire Toby Daye #10 [DW link]
4 - 1 star - Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin [DW link]