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A secret military project in China in the 1970s sends signals into space to make contact with aliens. When an alien civilization facing annihilation from climate disasters receives these signals, its leaders decide its best chance for survival is to make a centuries-long journey to Earth and take over.
Meanwhile, a select few people around Earth have learned about the coming invasion. Some welcome it, feeling that humans are corrupt and destroying the planet. Others are preparing to fight.
I had heard many good things about The Three-Body Problem and had had it on my to-read list for a long time. Now, with Netflix’s adaptation, I decided it was a good time to pick it up.
The book is set in China, with much of the action happening during or just after the country’s Cultural Revolution. I will admit I know very little about this history. But the author and translator do put in some footnotes and brief additions to the text to give just enough context to American audiences so they won’t be lost. This is important because the revolution informs the story and its main characters very strongly. Indeed, for a while, the book doesn’t feel like science fiction but historical fiction.
The story plays out across three books, and this book just gets it going. Very slowly. The author takes his time to set the stage, filling it with historical details and then, in the second half or even last third, scientific facts and postulations. There’s a lot going on, and it’s not for a casual reader. It’s clearly written by a brilliant mind, and there were moments I stopped to savor the science and the way Liu crafts his science fiction story around it.
I enjoyed The Three-Body Problem overall, though I found it dragged a bit for my taste. I would have been fine for it to be pruned, though diehard fans would likely disagree with me. I am not sure if I’ll read the next two books or just watch the Netflix series (this is a rare time I’d say something like this). If I do read more, it’ll be after a bit of a break as I mix up my reading genres.
Rated: High. Profanity includes 8 uses of strong language, about 10 instances of moderate profanity, and about 5 uses of mild language. There’s really no sexual content. Violence is fairly regular, and much of it involves the things that happened during China’s Cultural Revolution. People are described a number of times getting caught up in almost the mob mentality and killing revolutionaries or counter-revolutionaries. A woman kills two men to protect a decision she made. The book is quite close to being a moderate, but for a few too many f-words.
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