I’m torn about this book — the premise is interesting, the world is novel, and the book is well written. The book has a strong environmental theme, with a focus on the environmental impact of Chinese economic development during Mao’s cultural revolution.
However, despite all that the book didn’t “grab” me. I think perhaps its because there is a lot of effort spent describing things which ultimately don’t really matter — like weather or not the desktop PC being used by one of the characters is the current model or not. Or perhaps its because I didn’t actually like any of the characters — none of them is what I would call a nice person. Or perhaps this is an artifact of the book having been translated from Chinese, and perhaps different stylisting expectations or some such?
Either way, I don’t think I’ll finish this trilogy.
December 3, 2015
416
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 unpredicatable 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.