The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu – Review

The blurb:

1967: Ye Wenjie witnesses Red Guards beat her father to death during China’s Cultural Revolution. This singular event will shape not only the rest of her life but also the future of mankind.

Four decades later, Beijing police ask nanotech engineer Wang Miao to infiltrate a secretive cabal of scientists after a spate of inexplicable suicides. Wang’s investigation will lead him to a mysterious online game and immerse him in a virtual world ruled by the intractable and unpredictable interaction of its three suns.

This is the Three-Body Problem and it is the key to everything: the key to the scientists’ deaths, the key to a conspiracy that spans light-years and the key to the extinction-level threat humanity now faces.

Science fiction spectacular from China? Rave reviews? Does this have it all?

This book is incredibly popular and well received, but I have to confess to feeling left cold by it all. I’ll try to avoid spoilers, because there is a very clever plot at the heart of this novel, but the writing (or possibly the translation) led to lots of exposition dumps and long, long passages of telling, not showing.

The first half of the book is terrific. Fast paced, full of fantastic images (I’m still not sure how mas dehydration saves them all, but it sounds cool) and also slightly terrifying. One of the most effective sequences in the whole novel occurs fairly early on, where our hero keeps seeing numbers counting down wherever he looks. Counting down to what? Now that would be telling….

The second half of the book contains many flashbacks that fill in the detail of what we pretty much already know or can guess. This was where it became a chore to read and very disappointing. For me anyway, I felt the book has massive pacing issues and the second half should have been condensed and sped up. It does come back strong at the end, especially the bit with the attack on the boat (again, a cool and slightly terrifying image, but I can’t say more as that would be a spoiler!).

All this added up to a frustrating read and one I would struggle to recommend. There is a lot to like, and admire, but I found the writing cold and distant to the point where I really didn’t care. Hugely disappointing, but looking at the reviews, I’m in the minority!