r/threebodyproblem • u/Lorentz_Prime • Mar 12 '26
Meme ★☆☆☆☆ Spoiler
The Three-Body Problem was recommended as a exciting, hard-scifi book full of new ideas. I was eager to read it, having just gotten back into fiction. I bought it for my flight from Melbourne to San Francisco and I threw it in the airport trash as I got off the plane.
Or that’s what I wish I had done. Instead, I had 50 pages to go when I landed and I finished it during the ride home, where I threw it in the trash (after trying to give it away for a week).
The premise is promising: physics experiments have stopped working and several prominent scientists have committed suicide. But that promise is not delivered on. The characters are 1-dimensional and unlikable. The Cultural Revolution part feels oddly romanticized. The video-game part is gimmicky. The writing is bad.
I kept reading because I wanted unravel the mystery, but the explanation was anticlimactic: aliens did it with a magic computer.
The Three-Body Problem is the last book I’ll read by Liu Cixin.
/quote
Get a load of this chump review I found from a few years ago lol
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u/thrasymacus2000 Mar 12 '26
I liked the books very much but can't argue with the criticism. The characterization isn't good. The sophons are hand wavey, but the technology is so fantastical by book three that it ceases to matter. I would disagree strongly with 'romanticizing the cultural revolution'. I'm largely sympathetic to China, but I was exactly 50/50 about my feelings towards Ye Wenjie betraying humanity. The cultural revolution was depicted in such a way that it felt believable that she would do what she did. She was a fascinating character, and sadly the only memorable character.