What was brilliant was Cixin Liu's evocation of the impact of the Cultural Revolution in China on academics. The character whose life threads through the book, Ye Wenjie, an astrophysicist who witnesses her father's murder by Red Guards is remarkable and I would have been happy reading a straight lab lit novel of her experiences without the aspect of alien contact that takes over the plot. When I was at school, a young history teacher got in trouble by getting all the class to obtain a copy of the Little Red Book - learning about this period in China is one of the few details I remember from school history.
I was also impressed with the way that initially Liu brings in plenty of real science. I was thinking of commenting that this wasn't just SF, it was SCIENCE fiction until reading further. And much of the book is very readable. But there were also those issues.
Firstly, long chunks of the book feature a character's experience in a weird virtual reality game, called Three Body, of which the significance is not revealed until well into the book (so I won't give it away here). I found these sections tedious in the extreme - it was far too much like listening to someone's detailed description of their dreams.
Then there was the underlying premise of alien contact and future invasion of the Earth. Of course, this has featured many times in science fiction, and Liu makes it different and interesting by factoring in the sheer length of time it's going to take the alien fleet to arrive at Earth. For that matter, the consideration of whether or not we ought to make aliens aware of our existence is always interesting. But the driving factor here of people hating humanity so much they want aliens to destroy us, or naively think, with no evidence whatsoever, that the aliens will be beneficial and sort out our problems for us, didn't work for me.
There were also some technical issues. I would overlook the history of science error of reading far more into the cosmic background radiation than would have been known in the 1960s. But I wasn't happy about employing the classic quantum entanglement fallacy of thinking that it can be used to send instantaneous messages (it can only send random values), and simply couldn't engage with the idea that two protons could be used to produce mass illusions and to give the appearance of adding randomness to the laws of physics. (Also if this randomness had happened, the physicists would surely be talking about Noether's theorem, which isn't mentioned.)
A final moan concerns the understanding three body problem itself - central to the plot. The assumption in the book seems to be that this classic gravitational interaction problem, where three or more bodies interacting become chaotic is intractable. In reality, while absolute complete solutions are impossible, we can produce very good approximate solutions - so the idea of pure chaotic unpredictability that lies at the heart of the book doesn't make sense. For example, our solar system is a far more than three body problem, yet we can predict orbits thousands of years into the future. Yes, there's some uncertainty. So, for instance, current modelling gives Mercury a 1% chance of leaving its orbit and hitting Venus in the next few billion years. But we have no problem making good predictions of what will happen in the shorter term.
I don't think I'm going to bother with the follow up books. It was an interesting read - but didn't work as well for me as it clearly has for many readers.
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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
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