The Three-Body Problem Paperback – January 12, 2016

A key requirement of any good science fiction, in my opinion, is believability. This is tricky, however, as aiming only at such goal can make for boring predictions. Cixin has done an AMAZING job at balancing imagination with believability. This series has so many brilliant twists that I at times get so jealous of the people in the stories as their lives are so much more exciting than my mundane existence. The backdrop of the story expands dramatically as the plot unfolds, starting from the cultural revolution in the 70s' China, to the clash of two civilizations a few light years apart, to uncountably many more civilizations of various developmental stages, ultimately to the end of the universe.It's so engrossing that I finished all three books (all in Chinese) in 2 days, with minimal amount of interruption for sleep and food. Upon turning the last page of the last book, I felt I had just viewed one possible version of the how the universe will play out in a multiverse (if you buy into this recently popular physics hypothesis).This series left me awakened about how humanity or any other civilization in the universe might evolve. Having a science background, I always thought that the existence of other beings in the universe is almost surely a fact in probability, but I never pondered the Fermi paradox so deeply and considered the possibility raised in Cixin's book. I don't necessarily think the dark-forest theory presented in this series is the only possible hypothesis, but Cixin has done a superlative job describing what the universe would be like if such hypothesis was true.Con: some people say that the characters are less fleshed out than in other good fictions. I concur, especially in some conversations at times. But that doesn't detract one bit from how brilliant this series is as a masterpiece in science fiction.

I'm told there is a lot of great science fiction being produced in non-English speaking countries. Like most readers my age, I grew up on stuff that was written in the United States, and occasionally Great Britain, by white males. That's just the way it was back in those days. I'm guessing that most readers in the U.S. today still default to reading English language novels written by English speaking writers. We are typically not exposed to fiction from other countries and cultures, and even if a book is translated into English, we need to be made aware of that book before we'll pick it up and read it. I honestly can't tell you how many translated science fiction and fantasy books are sitting on bookstore shelves waiting to be purchased and read. Short of looking at every last one of them - and I'm not going to do that - I don't know how I would find out.But in 2014, a book from whom I understand is arguably China's most beloved science fiction author, Cixin Liu, received the translation treatment by Ken Liu (no relation), and was published by Tor. Before the book started getting some advance notice from folks in the field (I heard about it for the first time on The Coode Street Podcast last year), I'd never heard of Cixin Liu. I *had* heard of Ken Liu. Ken Liu is one of the most talented short fiction writers in the field today, with multiple Hugo awards already under his belt, as well as a Nebula, among others. However, I know absolutely nothing about the book translation process and how well the resulting work represents the original. Thus, I'll talk about what I do know, which is the story.And what a story it is. It's a throwback to 70s science fiction, a first encounter and alien invasion story all rolled into one (and that's not even true, since it's the first book of a trilogy, the second of which, THE DARK FOREST, hits our shores this year, translated by Joel Martinsen). It's got science - lots of science - and a bit of what looks like hand wavium going on at one point (until I started reading some articles in a magazine that were discussing something similar to what the hand waving was about - I think). It's grand in scope, has some terrific ideas, and really can make us stop and think about whether we're all alone out here.The story begins during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and uses it as a launching pad for all that goes forward. A young woman, who sees her father killed during the revolution, is assigned to a military base in a remote part of China. The more time she spends there, the more she becomes trusted, and eventually she learns the true nature of the project - to send signals into space to contact alien life. The young woman, Ye Wenjie (thank goodness for the list of characters at the beginning of the book), learns of a way to amplify the signals that are being sent. She sends a signal into deep space - and hence the trouble begins.Over the course of the book we learn about the Trisolarans, an alien race that lives in a planetary system that has three suns. Trisolaran society is dying because of those three suns. Cixin Liu comes up with the clever idea of the Three Body game, wherein players are challenged to find solutions to the Three Body Problem (hence the name of the book) by interacting with characters from history in societies that keep dying off because of the unpredictability of the cycles of the three suns. (I should note that there really is something called the Three Body Problem; from wikipedia: In its traditional sense, the three-body problem is the problem of taking an initial set of data that specifies the positions, masses and velocities of three bodies for some particular point in time and then determining the motions of the three bodies, in accordance with the laws of classical mechanics (Newton's laws of motion and of universal gravitation).). The Three Body game is more than just a game - it is a gateway into a group of people who are working together to plan for the coming of the Trisolarans.I don't want to give too many more details, as I could start getting into spoiler territory, and I think the rest needs to be discovered by the reader. What I can say, however, is that book not only chronicles how and why this group of individuals came together, but it also explores how the Trisolarans plan to come to earth to take over. Yes, it's a hostile takeover, and there are no financial personnel involved, although this is where the hand-waving comes in and, in reality, I don't mind it in the least. Whether a super-intelligent computer can be made by unfolding a proton into two dimensions is not the point. Just thinking about the possibilities of being able to do that is the point, and indeed in a larger sense has been how science fiction has gone about its business since the field began. You know, "wow, wouldn't it be neat if we could do THAT?".The other thing I enjoyed about this book is the peek it gives to the reader into Chinese civilization around the time of the Chines Cultural Revolution going forward. Granted, it is just a peek, but I'd never given much thought to political, military, and academic life as well as the social status one acquires depending on who and where one was at any given time during that period of Chinese history.With regard to the translation, as I stated earlier, there's not much I can say about it. It's hard to be able to judge how well a book is translated when you don't know the original. I *can* tell you that I've enjoyed Ken Liu's writing style when I have read his short fiction, and I think that style comes through here. I can tell it was a good, fast paced, and interesting read. I was never bored, and actually looked forward to reading the footnotes as I was reading the main text. I did NOT have same eagerness while I was reading JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR. NORELL.If foreign language science fiction is like this, I need to read more. Even if it's not, I do look forward to the remaining two books in the trilogy, andhopefully there will be more translations of Cixin Liu's work coming our way in the future.