Wrapped up the first book after much struggle. Am I crazy for finding it extremely poorly written? Writing aside, the characters suck, the motivations suck, and the scenario building feels like it was tossed together by a 12 year old. I don’t get the hype. Everything is paper thin. The fictional science aspect is the most compelling part but as a cohesive whole it fails to land.
Three Body Problem is what I call “big ideas” sci-fi. Large-scale problems, global crisis, often detailed world-building, sometimes decent plot, but boring characters, who often act simply as reader’s eyes / observers.
Many of Alastair Reynolds’ novels are like that, so was Red Mars, and even Blindsight and Rosewater.
Not everyone’s cup of tea, and I completely understand why.
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Not crazy at all imo. I’ve only read the first book and I don’t plan on reading the rest. I found it interesting for the mainland Chinese societal influences that were sometimes explicit, but often just peeking through. It’s obvious that the writer is from a different background as scifi authors that grew up in a western country. But the character writing and scifi aspects, were only kinda meh imo.
I had also read someone recommending the books as hard scifi and I can’t agree with that either. The three body star system is a very interesting premise, but the godlike single proton that can envelop a planet is pure fantasy. Too much deus ex machina for good world building.
I read all three. I thought they excelled at creating new plot devices. Sentient particles, Thought as light, dimensional weapons. Its really hard to come up with new sci fi tropes! And Liu casually comes up with a dozen new ones. I thought the characters and plot were… unsatisfying. But I believe that is mostly intended as a portrayal of people’s failings. I’d say it’s a worth it read for real sci fi junkies though. Definitely disagree that it is “Not good”, but taste is subjective. They seemed longer than they needed to be… I dunno.
It is easy to come up with nonsense. I much more respect works that explore the consequences of one fantastical thing.
Its really hard to come up with new sci fi tropes! And Liu casually comes up with a dozen new ones.
Unfortunately, then he shoves them all into the same book. He needs to be the show runner of a sci-fi TV series.
You are correct. And it’s not a translation problem, I’ve heard native speakers that read the original say it’s precisely as awkward there.
It’s the most over-rated trash I’ve ever encountered, it’s like it’s written by someone that discovered the genre but never read a single SF book and just assumed everyone that reads it is a teenager. There’s more handwaving going on than a David Blaine performance.
And the later books show plotholes you could throw a truck through, when you get to the deus-ex-machina plot device that invalidates the whole marianne. And the character development never improves, it’s just, I have to use the word again, awkward.
I wanted my money back.
Whoa whoa whoa, hang on there a second. David Blane would never use enough energy to wave a hand. David Copperfield maybe.
My bad. You’re right Copperfield is way more of a flashy showman.
I just pulled the first magician I could think of out of my ass. Like a rabbit. Now how the hell did that get up there?
Dude, if I had a nickel for every rabb… Know what? This should go to a different thread.
From your fiery post, seems you had a wild hare up your arse.
Not to mention the entire premise is invalidated by a cursory review of the Alpha Centauri system.
Thank you. It was so annoying reading that constantly thinking “that’s not how the three-body problem works, and even if it was, that sure as hell doesn’t describe Alpha Centauri.”
And that’s just the beginning. People calling this shit hard sci-fi is crazy.
I mean, the first part of the book is kinda exactly how it works. Well 4 body, anyways.
Tap for spoiler
They’re trying to find an equation to know when their planet will pass out of the habitable zone. Every equation fails to describe the orbits. So they try to simulate it, and it seems effective, but eventually the errors accumulate and the simulation fails to describe the orbits.
But yeah, we have been able to tell for a long time the Alpha Centauri isn’t like that.
No, they’re not just trying to find an equation, which may not be possible. They say it’s impossible to predict where the objects will be in the near term, which is nonsense.
The three-body problem doesn’t say it’s unpredictable, just that there is no universal equation to describe it. You can still determine where things will be with a high degree of probability with iteration. The earth, sun, and moon are a three-body problem but we know where they will be tomorrow, next year, next century, next millennium, etc. The error bars increase with time but the moon isn’t suddenly going to be ejected beyond the orbit of Pluto in an unpredictable way due to some bullshit from the chaos of the three-body problem. The entire solar system is a (very large number)-body problem, but we know where every major body is going to be with a large degree of certainty for a long time.
Whether or not they could have found a way to preserve their civilisation thorough the periods inimical to life is also beside the point. They claim they couldn’t predict the occurrences, which is bullshit. You don’t need a computer for that, even a biological computer (which I admit was actually kind of a cool concept), you just need paper and pen.
You can’t have pretentions to hard sci-fi and just talk nonsense. Either be hand-wavy soft sci-fi or make your explanations conform to our best current understanding. You can’t try to explain shit and also get the most basic concepts wrong.
Predicting the orbits of the sun-earth-moon system is easy to do accurately because of the relative sizes and proximity of the bodies.
You don’t even need to treat it like a 3-body problem, because the size of the earth/moon have an inconsequential impact on the sun, the size of the moon had an inconsequential impact on the earth, and the proximity of the moon means the sun has an inconsequential impact on it too. So you use a traditional “sphere of influence” 2 body problems, and get very accurate results.But when the bodies are all large enough to significantly affect eachother’s orbits, like a trinary star system, then doing simulation (iterative calculations) quickly builds up errors, especially as the steps are far apart (which they must be with their biological computer, given how slow it is). I haven’t run the exact calculations, but I’ve done interactive simulation in the past and it can pretty quickly fall apart
Edit:
You’re gonna look at me and you’re gonna tell me that I’m wrong? Am I wrong? She wore a crown and came down in a bubble, Doug. Grow up bro, grow up.
Now i just think you’re being disingenuous.
Are you really trying to say you think the author understands the three-body problem?
Are you saying the errors from iterative calculations of three stars and a planet build up so fast, and that they move so fast, that they can go to sleep one night with everything fine and completely without warning wake up the next morning with a sun filling the entire sky or all three suns looking as far away as Sol from Neptune?
When in the book do you think that happens in a single night?
Do you mean in the video game invented by the aliens as a puzzle game, presenting a dramatized retelling of their society’s history to keep the humans engaged in the puzzle, that clearly played it super lose with the passage of time?I assume the Trisolarins were taking a little poetic licence there. I was being hyperbolic. I don’t remember the author being specific about the timeline but I had the impression the cataclysms came on pretty quickly (much too quickly to be explained by errors building up, I would think they would constantly update their calculations with their observed track so significant errors should always remain well into the future), and they were just trying to get several months, maybe a year, of warning so they could cache some things that would give them a headstart next time around. Why they didn’t just have that all the time, i don’t recall that being explained. I guess short-sighted politicians are universal.
Are you just going to keep moving the goalposts and nitpicking my characterizations, or answer the question? Do you think the author understands the basic concept of the three-body problem?
I assume you have an opinion on it because you stuck your nose in here. Or did you just want to throw out an “um ackchyually”?
I also did not love it. The premise is fascinating and is relatively unique as far as ‘first contact’ stories go. At the end of the day, though, the first book is much more about Chinese history than aliens, and the ‘science’ part of the science fiction is so garbage that I had a hard time getting through it. I recommend “Blindsight” by Peter Watts if you’re looking for a really cool first-contact story.
This is the correct answer. The sequel was excellent as well, but nothing has ever touched Blindsight for me in terms of sheer alienness
To each their own!
I didn’t super care about the characters but the sci fi problems, solutions and ideas of the whole series were a blast.
That being said, I grew up reading a lot of classic/“hard” sci fi so I’m pretty used to characters taking a back seat to fun/cool ideas.
Yeah, I felt it was largely a throwback to 1940s and 1950s western SF. Liu feels a lot like Asimov or early Heinlein. I was thinking it was like the kind of thing that a rapidly industrializing society would write as part of the cultural zeitgeist.
Damn, that’s a neat take. Hadn’t thought of that, but yeah, the sheer, weird “what would happen if” premise is what kept me reading, so all of the exposition was yummy rather than annoying
Liu’s short stories are all like that, if you get the chance. What if the world had to be moved out of solar orbit? What if a small class of Chinese schoolchildren were chosen to be representative of all humanity? He has these bold, brash concepts that feel like they were written in a USA that felt that the moon was a stepping stone to the stars. Like Heinlein writing about a kid boshing up a spaceship in the yard.
Liu kinda represents a China that can dream really big in the same way.
I think books 2 and 3 could easily be separated into many short stories.
Or probably the other way around, book 1 was so successful that he stuck various unfinished short stories together to make 2 & 3.
Exactly how I felt! The premise and everything was so much fun. Like, the opening “mystery” of why physics seemed broken was such a wildly cool idea and the answer was so neat but opened up more etc.
Yeah that’s the context I came at it from as well. It feels like a very Chinese perspective, which is novel compared to what I usually read.
I got a lot out of the excellent English translation, but it absolutely reads differently than a novel written from an English speaking/thinking person, or even when compared to English translated from a Romance or Germanic language.
Interesting, I really hadn’t considered much beyond the political context and hadn’t really thought about the societal ones but now that you mention it, yeah absolutely.
The sequels went on forever, to the point that I figured out what the Dark Forest theory was early on and had to finish that book just to find out I was right. Characterisation is pretty non-existent, it’s true.
I felt the same way about the characterization. I thought it might be a translation thing. I don’t know that many folks that read it in Chinese, but I’m leaning towards “no, it’s just like that.”
It’s a fun series to read a wiki about.
That’s because it’s great!
OK maybe it’s not like objectively great, like in a literary sense, but me and my friends really enjoyed it for its unique voice and fun mystery.
It also spawned so many great conversations between the other programmers I know.
Haven’t read it, but the show was interesting enough for me to watch the entire season.
Aliens live on a planet orbiting three suns. The planet regularly gets scorched by those suns. Hot enough to melt rocks. How tf these aliens keep evolving and advancing all the way to space travel?
It is utterly ridiculous.
Rant incoming
The three body problem is chaotic dynamical system. Chaotic means, between other things, that it is unpredictable: given two different starting points, even incredibly close, their behavior will diverge (become different) exponentially fast over time (and we saw during the Covid epidemic that exponentially fast is really damn fast).
So having a super smart mathematician approximating its simulation… that’s a load of bullshit, hot and steamy. That’s a master level example of how not to spend your days, because any approximation you do is going to impact your results exponentially fast.
Furthermore, the three body problem’s solutions don’t need to be bounded. What does this mean? That there is no reason for the planet to stay in orbit of the three suns. Any time it gets far, it could come back, but just as easily keep going further away and lose connection with its starting system. Any time it gets near the suns it could just as easily fall into one of them. So, most likely, during geological ages, the planet would have either gotten ejected or eaten up. If you want to go even further back, there is no way an asteroid belt would generate a planet in these conditions.
Finally, there are well-known configurations of solutions of the three body problem. Configurations are very specific situations (usually assuming two suns of equal mass and a sun that is much smaller and much further away) that can sustain periodic solutions, aka behaviors that repeat after a certain time. If a planet ever got generated in a three suns system, it would definitely need to be in one of these configurations.
The nail in the coffin: if there are three suns and a planet… it’s the four body problem. If you consider the planet to have basically zero mass with respect to the suns, you call it the restricted four body problem.
And this is why knowing way more than the author spoils the fun :( I could not enjoy the science part at all… even when i tried to suspend my disbelief.
Exactly what keeps me from writing anything, which is silly, but I hate the idea of somebody reading something I wrote and thinking, “what an idiot” 😔
Oh, I am sorry… but you can see this thread: even if there are quite some inaccuracy on the math and physics side of things, many people still really enjoyed this book (my partner included, even after hearing my rant many time). You should not censor yourself! (But accept criticism and improve from it). You go gender-neutral-guy!
Haha, thank you, I appreciate the sentiment! I recognize that this is a Me Problem, but in classic fashion I think I can overcome this, too, with just a little bit of self-improvement in a slightly new area of expertise. I mean really, how hard could it be?
I read/watch popular but stupid stuff to remind myself things don’t need to be accurate to be entertaining.
Easy. DEHYDRATE!
Here’s how I understand it to work.
They have random periods of activity in which they advance as a species so they make large leaps in scientific progress when they are awake as opposed to a slow and steady build up of knowledge. Their large leaps in advancements becomes a disadvantage at times but more so their way of thinking in general.
Because they kinda portray themselves as humanoid that’s how you’re lead to think about them, like approximately human sized smart mamal-ish creatures, when really they are between ant to beetle sized hive mind creatures. This is why the more of them that they are able to have active between the harsh sun cycles the faster they advance. Also makes the whole dehydration thing easier to swallow.
And how do Trisolarians manage to transfer knowledge from one stable era to the next? The surface of the planet literally burns during the chaotic era. Which begs another question, how do they rehydrate? With what water?
They just gather their dragon balls, obviously!
Thank you.
I read them all, hated them, and spent a good week finding negative reviews so I could fume at them in company.
I disagree with you on 3 Body, but I love reading reviews that match my opinion just so I can be like, “Exactly! Thank you!”
I liked it, even if the characters weren’t great. I liked book 1 in kind of a detective/mystery novel kind of way. The first book is very different from the next two, which is where I think the series really starts to address larger questions. It’s still kind of flimsy and the characters might get worse, but I like some of the questions and hypotheses about the universe that it addresses. It gets into a more philosophical approach to the universe and how other species may interact with each other, mutually assured destruction, and how the human race would react to a sword of Damocles hanging over our head for 400 years. It’s told from a Chinese perspective as well, so it was interesting to me to see how he thinks these might play out as opposed to my assumptions coming from a western perspective.
I think the dark forest hypothesis as an answer to Fermi is reasonable, and I like a lot of the big picture ideas.
But yea, it’s not really a character driven series.
I think there’s a real struggle in translating Chinese literature into English.
For what it’s worth, the second book - The Dark Forest - starts off much stronger and builds from there, making the first book feel more like it was just introducing the story.
the Dark Forest sucks just as hard if not more so. the premise of the story
spoiler
Mutually Assured Destruction
isnt an original thought, but the author refuses to acknowledge it until the end, pretending like it wasn’t obvious the whole story. then he hand waves the problems he sets up (how do you deal with an alien technology so much more sophisticated than your own) pretending like the sophons just couldn’t deal with the threat. All this and the character doesn’t ever really develop. Things happen to him, but we don’t get any meat to his personality, just external bullshit.
I started listening to the third book because I am a gluten for punishment and I have a long commute, but it just meandered. If it was another author Id give them the benefit of the doubt, but I havnt been able to get through it.
Dark Forrest: Gump with a Gun
The premise of The Dark Forest is extremely explicitly not MAD though.
The point of the story is
spoiler
The wallfacers have to have a secret plan that they cant share because the sophons can intervene if it is known. The Sophons are so powerful because they can interfere with any technology, only the human mind is beyond their reach. So he creates a technology to do exactly what he tested out that would achieve mutually assured destruction and the sophons cant do anything about it because… reasons.
It was obvious the entire time what he was planning and the result of that plan was MAD. If you come to destroy us, we will both die. He couldnt say it outloud because the premise was he was a wallfacer and there is no good reason this particular plan would suceed.
Ah, I see what you mean, I thought you meant the Dark Forest theory itself.
and the third book is even better.
But I agree with OP that the writing is bad, I just enjoy the intrigue and sci-fi enough to read the books, esp. at that particular part of the second book (the first book and first part of the second book were admittedly less compelling to me than the rest of the second book and the third book).
The three body problem is the ONLY SciFi series to repeatedly blow my mind. I read a lot of scifi, it’s always the same stuff.
I read a lot of scifi, it’s always the same stuff.
As someone who enjoys sci-fi this sounds like a very odd statement from someone who reads a lot of it. I wouldn’t say I’ve read that much sci-fi but I could quite easily name some books that could hardly be any more different. Sci-fi seems incredibly diverse to me.
Same for me! But it’s also the first proper sci-fi series I read so it’s a bit skewed haha. However, I did truly enjoy it for the most part. Wasn’t a fan of how the ending turned out as one of the events just felt… cheap. Not to mention the lead character in the third book made me want to scream in frustration…
I’ve tried other sci-fi since and I’ve yet to find something that captures me. I started the Bobiverse which is a fun take, but it’s a completely different theme. So if any sci-fi vets have any recommendations I’m all ears!
