My interest probably peaked at the moments when Ye was recounting her time at Red Coast Base, either to Wang or the interrogator, because we are aware of the significance of her actions in context. The story excels when it is peeling back the mystery, layer by layer, only to reveal a new set of questions. But trying to understand the interactions among all three becomes a complicated task. The interaction of any two plots is pretty simple to delineate.
So the three plots in The Three-Body Problem come to resemble the problem itself, which has been a thorn in the sides of mathematicians and physicists for a while. Indeed, most reviews tend to note that it has three main plots-Ye Wenjie’s time at Red Coast Base, Wang Miao’s involvement in an international effort to discover why prominent scientists are committing suicide, and the story of the Trisolarans as told through the video game The Three-Body Problem. No matter how you slice it, you find that this is a novel with layers. Or maybe it’s better to call it a conspiracy thriller. Or you could think of it as being about a philosophical video game. Nevertheless, he and translator Ken Liu do an admirable job spinning an engrossing story about humanity’s responsibilities, and what might happen if we don’t start taking them seriously.Ī simple way to summarize The Three-Body Problem might be to say that it’s about an alien invasion.
As such, he brings a lot of history to the story that Western readers are probably not familiar with. Liu Cixin offers up a science fiction set (mostly) in China during both the modern day and the Cultural Revolution. Woo, non-Western science fiction! I love the opportunity to get out of my ethnocentric mindspace.
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