Breakaway Books

Authored by Liu Cixin; Published 2006; Science Fiction

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️

The Three Body Problem has become much more than a trilogy of books, expanding into the world of Netflix and abundant fan fiction. (For the record, I am a purist. I won’t be watching the TV series until I read all three.) I did not expect to be enthralled with this trilogy: truth be told, it was a compromise with my husband on an audio book we would both be willing to listen to on a long road trip. Now, however, I am sold. 

I am not generally a lover of hard science fiction, and this trilogy does not feel like many of the other novels I have loved. The characters are not the type that would normally be appealing to me; there’s no real thread of romance that I can ship. What it is, is innovative and fascinating. Part of it, I’m sure, is that I hadn’t considered many of the intellectual principles involved in the study of extraterrestrial life before starting the series, so it stretched my brain in new ways. But, even those old hands of alien dramas will find something to love here. 

I don’t want to spoil too much of the plot, because I enjoyed discovering it with little initial exposure. Suffice it to say, it is a first contact story of a sort, but it is so much more.

It is truly an epic tale, and not just because it is long. After reading the first book, I felt like I had ingested three novels all condensed into one. Books this long can feel drawn out, overly wordy, difficult to follow. This novel did not feel that way. It felt like it reached an immensely satisfying conclusion with all the plot lines woven together over thousands of pages. Puzzles, finally completed. 

Like all great science fiction and fantasy series, there’s something fundamental about humanity that is conveyed in this first novel. It’s not necessarily always positive, but I came away feeling like I’d seen humans from a different angle and I understood us better for it. That’s not a particularly novel thing to say about science fiction, but it is all too rare in the novels that I read. 

For me, the only downside was a few passages that stand out to me as just a little too detailed. Too many pages spent on a battle described in intricate detail, too many words on a physics concept that was at best tangentially relevant to the plot. For as long as the book is, these passages were extremely few and far in between. 

Overall, regardless of how much exposure you have to science fiction, you should give these books a shot. They’re an example of the best of their genre.