Review: The Three-Body Problem

The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The best science fiction usually asks a question: "What if the world was like this...?" The Three-Body Problem asks the question "What if evangelical Christians were right?" What if there was an all-powerful being/group who is messing with us, and none of science is really rules of nature just guidelines used for trolling scientists. And the answer is of course "Well absolutely anything could be true then." Which is just not very interesting.

The science in this book is mostly obviously nonsense. Which is not necessarily a problem; the science in most sci-fi is nonsense. The problem here is that it's not even vaguely-plausible nonsense. Stars moving so fast and so close to a planet as to reverse the direction of the dawn, and yet the tidal forces not ripping the planet to char-broiled shreds. A planet being flung from orbiting one star in a trinary to another continuously for millenia without ever being flung far into the frozen darkness or plunged into a sun. A civilization built entirely around dealing with the unpredictable heat and cold of their planet, invents a technology which can completely control all radiation in or out of a planet. And then _doesn't_ use it around their own planet, to solve their own problem, but promptly ships it light years away to help invade Earth.

But look, science fiction is full of nonsense science. It tells a good story not because humans can safely travel faster-than-light, but because it explores the question of what people and society would be like if we could. And that's where Three Body Problem truly falls short. There are no fully-formed characters in this book. They do not evolve or change over it's course. There is no coherent plot that gives us any insight into society or even just amuses us with a pleasant arc. The best we get is a few vignettes about the Chinese Cultural Revolution which are quite interesting, but then leave us hanging while all the scientists commit suicide because playing a computer game made them realize that science wasn't real (which I also didn't believe.) It trudges in a circle and ends up back where it started, and neither the journey nor the destination held much interest.

Gave it a second star for those intriguing stories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. That I would read more of.

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