Books

The sequels went on forever, to the point that I figured out what the Dark Forest theory was early on and had to finish that book just to find out I was right. Characterisation is pretty non-existent, it’s true.

I read all three. I thought they excelled at creating new plot devices. Sentient particles, Thought as light, dimensional weapons. Its really hard to come up with new sci fi tropes! And Liu casually comes up with a dozen new ones. I thought the characters and plot were... unsatisfying. But I believe that is mostly intended as a portrayal of people's failings. I'd say it's a worth it read for real sci fi junkies though. Definitely disagree that it is "Not good", but taste is subjective. They seemed longer than they needed to be... I dunno.

I also did not love it. The premise is fascinating and is relatively unique as far as 'first contact' stories go. At the end of the day, though, the first book is much more about Chinese history than aliens, and the 'science' part of the science fiction is so garbage that I had a hard time getting through it. I recommend "Blindsight" by Peter Watts if you're looking for a really cool first-contact story.

I was very happy to stumble upon this post. I’ve been struggling through The Dark Forest for what feels like forever. I’m usually a pretty voracious reader, but this series is like quicksand to me. It’s really really boring. I just keep hoping it will get interesting. It threatens to…and then starts sucking again. I never DNF books, but I’m so SO tempted here. Glad there are others out there!

The three body problem is the ONLY SciFi series to repeatedly blow my mind. I read a lot of scifi, it's always the same stuff.

That's because it's great!

OK maybe it's not like objectively great, like in a literary sense, but me and my friends really enjoyed it for its unique voice and fun mystery.

It also spawned so many great conversations between the other programmers I know.

Not to mention the entire premise is invalidated by a cursory review of the Alpha Centauri system.

Now that you mention it, yes. The characters are quite 2 dimensional and unlikeable (not all, but definitely important to mention).

That being said I thoroughly enjoyed the books and didn't stop too much on the characters. Under unlikeable, flat, awkward characters there was an interesting premise and good thinking to be had: living in a society that has no private thoughts; dark forest theory, life in a society after the end.
So what I did was take a big sip of suspension of disbelief and enjoyed the ride. The interest to see the conclusion of the story was enough to coast through all three of the books.

Also, I read those just before the hype. I first heard of the first book a few years before from an Adam Savage podcast and the premise stuck to me. So after reading the Witcher I wanted something sci-fi'ish and this hit the spot.

This is a failure of the reader, not the literature. It's science fiction space opera written from the cultural perspective completely alien to most western sci-fi literature. It's absolutely nothing like H.G. Wells, Asimov, Clarke, Vinge, Herbert, Heinlein, or Niven. The Three Body Problem is almost the antithesis of all of those manifest destiny individual heroes. All of those authors have much more alike amongst themselves than they do with the narrative history we read through The Three Body Problem. Of course a lot of western readers don't like it, it wasn't written for their perspective. I don't even think I could really get into it enough to REALLY enjoy it as much as my "comfort food" sci-fi. But, I could tell their was something there, and it was my own limitation of understanding, not a failure of the literature or the translation.

Yeah I thought it sucked ass too. Supposedly the second and third books are better.

Love the books but completely agree. I devoured the trilogy but all of the charcters felt like cardboard cut outs. I liked the concept and the story, but hated all of the charcters and the writing in general.

I’m glad you said it. I read so many great reviews for it. It was recommended to me. I tried to read it. Couldn’t get past the first few chapters.

I’m an avid sci-fi reader. I’ve read hundreds of sci-fi books of all sorts; from goofy pulp to sci-fi-smut to high stakes epic novels. But I simply could not get into Three Body Problem.

I thought maybe it was that something was lost in translation.

In the middle of reading it now. Its a dual effect. One is that its natively written in chinese so a lot of its cultural stuff like the beginning will go over english readers heads not knowing that the chinese people literally had an violent orwellian book burning period of their history against academia. I imagine it was an attempt to pull readers in emotionally but Its hard to be emotionally invested in a cultural history you have no knowledge of and its paced badly.

The second is that the sci-fi genre is unfortunately nearly universally populated by nerds with good ideas pretending to be writers. This results in very interesting ideas and thought provoking settings being brought low by eye wateringly boring characters, piss poor narrative through lines, souless or confusing writing style, ect. Go ahead and try to read an Asimov book or Dune and you'll realize This was always the case for decades at least.

In fairness to the authors its hard to tell a civilization spanning futuristic world ending drama while also keeping it grounded.

As an enjoyer of sci-fi you kind of just have to power through the slog of some dead writing to get to the interesting concepts. I've never had the pleasure of reading a harcore sci-fi novel that was also an excellently written character drama. The only soft sci-fi book that pulled off the balance and stuck the landing was The Martian.

Three Body Problem is what I call "big ideas" sci-fi. Large-scale problems, global crisis, often detailed world-building, sometimes decent plot, but boring characters, who often act simply as reader's eyes / observers.

Many of Alastair Reynolds' novels are like that, so was Red Mars, and even Blindsight and Rosewater.

Not everyone's cup of tea, and I completely understand why.

To each their own!

I didn't super care about the characters but the sci fi problems, solutions and ideas of the whole series were a blast.

That being said, I grew up reading a lot of classic/"hard" sci fi so I'm pretty used to characters taking a back seat to fun/cool ideas.

You are correct. And it's not a translation problem, I've heard native speakers that read the original say it's precisely as awkward there.

It's the most over-rated trash I've ever encountered, it's like it's written by someone that discovered the genre but never read a single SF book and just assumed everyone that reads it is a teenager. There's more handwaving going on than a David Blaine performance.

And the later books show plotholes you could throw a truck through, when you get to the deus-ex-machina plot device that invalidates the whole marianne. And the character development never improves, it's just, I have to use the word again, awkward.

I wanted my money back.

I read it some time ago before it was hyped up as much, saw it as a fun and interesting read but yeah a little shallow and action movie esque. It is definitely worth reading for the premise if you are a science fiction fan though, that aspect is solid, and I liked how it gives some details about Chinese culture and history that I wasn't very familiar with.

Thank you.

I read them all, hated them, and spent a good week finding negative reviews so I could fume at them in company.

So here was my experience: finished Project Hail Mary, Google for books similar to it, was recommended 3 Body Problem. Cool. Start listening to it on audible while running errands, a LOT of stuff about the cultural revolution in China, and a very depressed smart young woman and a satellite dish that does weird stuff... a few chapters in and no humor, no science, nothing even remotely like Project Hail Mary or Andy Weir's other writing. So I dropped it.

A year or two later and Netflix adapted the novels into a TV show. Gave it a watch and got pretty bought in. Definitely some cool mystery, intrigue, done if it a bit cheesy, but raised a lot of cool challenges and questions. Also I could see that there was actually some science coming in my science fiction story. So I went back and gave the book a go.

I finished all the books and... it's a bit of a mess narratively. I felt like the author was REALLY good at coming up with creative problems that seemed insurmountable. And many of the solutions to those problem (many, not all) were equally clever and creative. He also came up with the (as far as I'm aware) completely novel concepts of alien biology, culture, and psychology and fictional technologies. But the story very often yadda yadda'd over complex narratives and geopolitical events with time jumps after making them seem like they were incredibly important before hand. He also comes up with some very cool concepts like the Wall Facers and the massive ramifications of having a handful of people that are unquestionable and work in complete secret and will have the highest levels of machinations in the works to save humanity, including one that DOES NOT WANT THE JOB. Such a good setup for so many possibilities... And then they almost immediately backpedal and undermine that with political oversight, borderline cartoon supervillain plans from some of them, and revocation of all of their statuses. There's other stuff too that's just disappointing from a narrative perspective.

But I kept going. I think because the technology was cool, the stakes were massive, the challenge was interesting, some of the mystery was really compelling, and I enjoyed the uniqueness of it all. It could have definitely been better. I think a lot of the ideas could have been explored more thoroughly and more cleanly. But, I don't regret reading it. I think it was pretty cool for the things it did well.