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babewiththepower.bsky.social · @babewiththepower.bsky.social@bridge.neodb.net

Rated The Three-Body Problem 6/10

As a Hugo winner, I decided to pick up this book, considering every one I've previously read I really enjoyed and ripped through them. This took me over 3 weeks to read. Considering the title, I thought it was going to be hard science-oriented and it would take me a long time to read for that reason. It wasn't that at all. It really wasn't a hard read after all. What took me so long to get through was because 2/3 of the book was... kind of boring? A lot of time was spent with the present-day character Wang Miao seemingly playing a video game. I've always considered the very idea of watching someone else play a game extraordinarily boring, so that didn't help. That was still the case after it became apparent it was an analogy for the existence of the aliens.<br/><br/>The English translation unfolds in flashbacks and flashforwards which isn't a problem for me to keep track of, but I just didn't find Wang Miao interesting so I'd get stuck in those chapters as they happened intermittently. To fix in my mind the main plot points, I just read the summary at the novel's Wikipedia page. There the story was laid out in chronological order instead and I've realized I would've found that way more interesting! It would've put all the Cultural Revolution events and the character I did find interesting, Ye Wenjie, up front in the first half of the novel. I would've blown through that without the start-stop of running into Wang Miao chapters.<br/><br/>The aliens themselves are creative and the method of stymying humans is pretty original. I kept thinking that it takes the ideas of Sagan's "Contact" and assumes that instead of the benevolent alien sending messages to humanity, they are malevolent and echoes Stephen Hawking's ideas that they might just destroy us. Sure, not the first time a pessimistic view of aliens has been written, but it is at least realistic in the whole physics of the vast distances to travel and communicate. I suppose that could make it less exciting, but thankfully we're not the ones having to exist through those times linearly. "Eight years later..." or "Four hundred fifty years later..." can be easily inserted into a novel after all. And thank goodness for that.<br/><br/>This being part of a series, I know this is all the setup, but I'm hesitant to pick up the next book if the same method of writing is used in that one, sprinkling boring bits all the way through. It didn't quite hook me to race to it at any rate. It's not a bad read at all, but maybe there was some excitement lost in translation.

#book

Published 2026-08-18 17:59 UTC · bridged from Atmosphere